Impact of Seating and Mobility Services for Individuals With Disabilities in El Salvador.

Importance: Outcomes research on the impact of seating and mobility services delivered using a short-term medical mission (STMM) model is limited.

Objective: To evaluate the impact of seating and mobility services on the occupational performance of individuals with disabilities in El Salvador.

Design: One-group retrospective pretest-posttest.

Asexual-Identified Adults: Interactions with Health-Care Practitioners.

Historically, people with minority sexual and gender identities (e.g., gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) have been pathologized by mental and medical health practitioners.

Developing an Indigenous Measure of Overall Health and Well-being: The Wicozani Instrument.

A Native community developed the Wicozani Instrument, a 9-item self-report measure, to assess overall health and well-being from an Indigenous epistemology. The Wicozani Instrument measures mental, physical, and spiritual health and their importance to an individual's quality of life. The instrument's validity and reliability was examined through two studies.

Functional Brain Stimulation in a Chronic Stroke Survivor With Moderate Impairment.

Objective: To determine the impact of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) combined with repetitive, task-specific training (RTP) on upper-extremity (UE) impairment in a chronic stroke survivor with moderate impairment.

Method: The participant was a 54-yr-old woman with chronic, moderate UE hemiparesis after a single stroke that had occurred 10 yr before study enrollment. She participated in 45-min RTP sessions 3 days/wk for 8 wk.

Navigated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Biologically Based Assay of Lower Extremity Impairment and Gait Velocity.

. (a) To determine associations among motor evoked potential (MEP) amplitude, MEP latency, lower extremity (LE) impairment, and gait velocity and (b) determine the association between the presence of a detectable MEP signal with LE impairment and with gait velocity. .

Giving Them a Hand: Wearing a Myoelectric Elbow-Wrist-Hand Orthosis Reduces Upper Extremity Impairment in Chronic Stroke.

Objective: To determine the immediate effect of a portable, myoelectric elbow-wrist-hand orthosis on paretic upper extremity (UE) impairment in chronic, stable, moderately impaired stroke survivors.

Design: Observational cohort study.

Setting: Outpatient rehabilitation clinic.

Changing Their Minds: Enhancing Poststroke Occupational Performance Using Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation.

Stroke remains a leading cause of disability, with survivors experiencing long-term decrements in independence and quality of life. Occupational therapists (OTs) employ numerous neurorehabilitative treatment approaches to remediate impairments that are impeding performance. OTs also use physical agent modalities to facilitate increased participation and success in therapy.

Moving Forward by Stimulating the Brain: Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation in Post-Stroke Hemiparesis.

Stroke remains a leading cause of disability worldwide, with a majority of survivors experiencing long term decrements in motor function that severely undermine quality of life. While many treatment approaches and adjunctive strategies exist to remediate motor impairment, many are only efficacious or feasible for survivors with active hand and wrist function, a population who constitute only a minority of stroke survivors. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a type of non-invasive brain stimulation, has been increasingly utilized to increase motor function following stroke as it is able to be used with stroke survivors of varying impairment levels, is portable, is relatively inexpensive and has few side effects and contraindications.

Integrating Mental Practice with Task-specific Training and Behavioral Supports in Poststroke Rehabilitation: Evidence, Components, and Augmentative Opportunities.

Stroke remains a leading cause of death, with most survivors experiencing long-term deficits in motor function. Upper extremity (UE) hemiparesis constitutes one of the most common and disabling poststroke impairments. Many contemporary rehabilitative methods target reacquisition of UE motor skills.

The National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale Lacks Validity in Chronic Hemiparetic Stroke.

Background: The National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) is purported to be associated with long-term outcomes. This study determined the concurrent validity of the NIHSS with the Stroke Impact Scale (SIS), a previously validated measure of health status in chronic stroke survivors.

Methods: The NIHSS and the SIS were administered to 147 subjects before participation in a multicenter, randomized, controlled trial.

Evaluation of three influenza neuraminidase inhibition assays for use in a public health laboratory setting during the 2011-2012 influenza season.

Objectives: We evaluated the implementation of three commercially available neuraminidase inhibition assays in a public health laboratory (PHL) setting. We also described the drug susceptibility patterns of human influenza A and B circulating in Maryland during the 2011-2012 influenza season.

Methods: From January to May 2012, 169 influenza virus isolates were tested for phenotypic susceptibility to oseltamivir, zanamivir, and peramivir using NA-Fluor(TM), NA-Star®, and NA-XTD(TM) concurrently.

Clinical genetic testing for patients with autism spectrum disorders.

Background: Multiple lines of evidence indicate a strong genetic contribution to autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Current guidelines for clinical genetic testing recommend a G-banded karyotype to detect chromosomal abnormalities and fragile X DNA testing, but guidelines for chromosomal microarray analysis have not been established.

Patients And Methods: A cohort of 933 patients received clinical genetic testing for a diagnosis of ASD between January 2006 and December 2008.

An animal model of slot machine gambling: the effect of structural characteristics on response latency and persistence.

Despite the prevalence of problem gamblers and the ethical issues involved in studying gambling behavior with humans, few animal models of gambling have been developed. When designing an animal model it is necessary to determine if behavior in the paradigm is similar to human gambling. In human studies, response latencies following winning trials and near win trials are greater than those following clear losses.

Prediction of nasal morphology from the skull.

The objective of this study was to compose a reliable and readily reproducible method of predicting nasal morphology from the bony aperture, which restricts subjectivity whilst allowing anatomical nuance to be taken into account. Clinical head CT data from a sample of 79 North American subjects of varied ancestry was analysed for interrelationships between the bone and soft tissue of the nose in three dimensions, then pooled with 60 lateral cephalograms of subjects of European ancestry from England to augment nasal profile data. A series of simple regression equations was produced using linear distances between pairs of bony landmarks to predict nasal profile dimensions and restrict potential subjective error in Gerasimov's "Two-tangent" method.

A blind accuracy assessment of computer-modeled forensic facial reconstruction using computed tomography data from live subjects.

A computer modeling system for facial reconstruction has been developed that employs a touch-based application to create anatomically accurate facial models focusing on skeletal detail. This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the system and illustrates its accuracy and reliability with a blind study using computed tomography (CT) data of living individuals. Three-dimensional models of the skulls of two white North American adults (one male, one female) were imported into the computer system.

Dopamine agonists and antagonists can produce an attenuation of response bias in a temporal discrimination task depending on discriminability of target duration.

The current study examined the effects of the D2 agonist (quinpirole) and D2 antagonist (eticlopride) on temporal discrimination performance in a conditional discrimination task (Experiment I) and a delayed conditional discrimination task (Experiment II). In both experiments rats discriminated between a scheduled stimulus duration of 3 s versus 9 s. Consistent with previous reports, overall discrimination performance decreased in a dose-dependent manner with both drugs.

Street outreach with no streets.

A street nurse position in the rural and small-town interior of British Columbia has been addressing the needs of street-involved or otherwise marginalized client populations by bringing healthcare services to wherever those clients are, rather than waiting for the clients to seek care. The primary reason for a street outreach approach is that marginalized populations face a variety of barriers to accessing traditional healthcare services--barriers such as homelessness, mental health problems, criminal involvement, lack of transportation, lack of ability to pay for prescriptions, lack of specialized or knowledgeable providers and provider discrimination. In the rural street nurse program, the target population includes the usual street nurse populations of illegal drug users and sex trade workers, which are more hidden in small communities than in larger urban centres, creating the community denial that is a barrier to healthcare access.

Enterovirus 68 is associated with respiratory illness and shares biological features with both the enteroviruses and the rhinoviruses.

Enterovirus (EV) 68 was originally isolated in California in 1962 from four children with respiratory illness. Since that time, reports of EV68 isolation have been very uncommon. Between 1989 and 2003, 12 additional EV68 clinical isolates were identified and characterized, all of which were obtained from respiratory specimens of patients with respiratory tract illnesses.

A large-scale screen for mutagen-sensitive loci in Drosophila.

In a screen for new DNA repair mutants, we tested 6275 Drosophila strains bearing homozygous mutagenized autosomes (obtained from C. Zuker) for hypersensitivity to methyl methanesulfonate (MMS) and nitrogen mustard (HN2). Testing of 2585 second-chromosome lines resulted in the recovery of 18 mutants, 8 of which were alleles of known genes.

Choice with initial and terminal link reinforcement: an alternative self-control paradigm.

Self-control is demonstrated when a less desirable immediate outcome is chosen to ensure a substantially better future. In a novel animal analogue of this situation, primary reinforcement was delivered in both the initial and terminal links of a concurrent chain schedule. Rats made initial link choices between equal amounts of ethanol-free or ethanol-containing milk.

Determination of trace metals in drinking water using solid-phase extraction disks and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry.

A convenient method is described for monitoring Cd, Ni, Cu, and Pb at trace levels in drinking water samples. These metals are preconcentrated on a chelating solid-phase extraction disk and then determined by X-ray fluorescence spectrometry. The method tolerates a wide pH range (pH 6-14) and a large amount of alkaline and alkaline earth elements.