A scale for the assessment of hedonic tone the Snaith-Hamilton Pleasure Scale.

Background: Hedonic tone and its absence, anhedonia, are important in psychopathological research, but instruments for their assessment are lengthy and probably culturally biased.

Method: A new scale was constructed from the responses of a large sample of the general population to a request to list six situations which afforded pleasure. The most frequent items were reviewed and those likely to be affected by cultural setting, age, or sex were removed.

False aneurysm of the carotid artery.

Vascular injury following penetrating neck trauma may be present despite a lack of clinical signs. Management of wounds deep to platysma should include a high level of suspicion and thorough investigation to exclude these 'silent' vascular injuries. This may prevent serious late complications.

Caudal blockade in the management of aortic thrombosis following umbilical artery catheterisation.

A neonate, with a postconceptual age of 29 weeks, suffered thrombosis of the aorta as a consequence of umbilical artery catheterisation. This resulted in ischaemic lesions of the lower limbs and buttocks. Part of the management consisted of the insertion of an extradural catheter, via the caudal route, which provided good pain relief and may have improved lower limb blood flow.

Changes in capillary perfusion induced by different patterns of activity in rat skeletal muscle.

The proportion of "perfused" capillaries was evaluated in rat tibialis anterior at rest and during two different types of contraction after timed injection of thioflavine S. Capillary/fibre (C/F) ratio was estimated for "perfused" capillaries--those filled with fluorochrome--(Cp) from photomicrographs. Sections were subsequently stained for alkaline phosphatase and C/F ratio was estimated for all capillaries (Ct).

The polymerase chain reaction in the diagnosis of vertically transmitted HIV infection.

The presence of HIV-1 DNA sequences in DNA from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) was investigated in a two-stage polymerase chain reaction ('double' PCR) using four sets of nested primers. The PBMCs tested were obtained from 46 children born to HIV-seropositive mothers, seven 'control' children born to HIV-seronegative mothers and seropositive fathers, and 45 healthy adult blood donors who were HIV seronegative. Nine of the children had symptomatic HIV infection and other laboratory features characteristic of HIV infection: all nine were PCR-positive with each set of primers in each of their 22 blood samples tested.

Building and Accessing Clausal Representations: The Advantage of First Mention versus the Advantage of Clause Recency.

We investigated two seemingly contradictory phenomena: the Advantage of the First-Mentioned Participant (participants mentioned first in a sentence are more accessible than participants mentioned second) and the Advantage of the Most Recent Clause (concepts mentioned in the most recent clause are more accessible than concepts mentioned in an earlier clause). We resolved this contradiction by measuring how quickly comprehenders accessed participants mentioned in the first versus second clauses of two-clause sentences. Our data supported the following hypotheses: Comprehenders represent each clause of a two-clause sentence in its own mental substructure.

Accessing Sentence Participants: The Advantage of First Mention.

We investigate the following finding concerning the order in which participants are mentioned in sentences: In a probe recognition task, probe words are responded to considerably more rapidly when they are the names of the first- as opposed to the second-mentioned participants. Seven experiments demonstrated that this advantage is not attributable to the tendency in English for first-mentioned participants to be semantic agents; neither is it due to the fact that in many of our experiments, the first-mentioned participants were also the initial words of their stimulus sentences. Furthermore, the advantage is not attenuated when the first- and second-mentioned participants share syntactic subjecthood, or even when the first-mentioned participants are not the syntactic subjects.

Plasma xanthine levels in premature infants treated for apnoea with theophylline.

Evidence is presented that oral theophylline doses of 3 mg per kg per 24 h in premature babies produces plasma levels of theophylline and caffeine of about 5 and 1-2 mg/l respectively in most subjects.

Bacterial flora of the ear, nose and throat in aboriginal infants from brisbane and cherbourg.

A total of 1,044 nose and throat swabs and 54 ear swabs were collected from 219 Aboriginal babies in Brisbane and at Cherbourg over a two-and-a-half year period. The incidence of Staphylococcus aureus was found to be similar for both localities (approximately 20% in nasal swabs and 12% in throat swabs). Enterobacteria were found much more commonly at Cherbourg (43% in nasal swabs, 60% in throat swabs).