PSEUDOHYPOPHOSPHATEMIA IN A PATIENT WITH MULTIPLE MYELOMA.

Objective: To discuss the diagnosis and management of paraprotein interference in the setting of multiple myeloma (MM).

Methods: We discuss the evaluation of hypophosphatemia in a patient with MM and present a review of the relevant literature.

Results: Our patient, who had a history of MM, was found to have persistently undetectable serum phosphate which did not respond to aggressive phosphate replacement.

Use of a 90-Minute Admission Window and Front-Fill System to Reduce Work Compression on a General Medicine Inpatient Teaching Service.

Background: Duty hour limits have shortened intern shifts without concurrent reductions in workload, creating work compression. Multiple admissions during shortened shifts can result in poor training experience and patient care.

Objective: To relieve work compression, improve resident satisfaction, and improve duty hour compliance in an academic internal medicine program.

Mechanisms underlying age- and performance-related differences in working memory.

This study took advantage of the subsecond temporal resolution of ERPs to investigate mechanisms underlying age- and performance-related differences in working memory. Young and old subjects participated in a verbal n-back task with three levels of difficulty. Each group was divided into high and low performers based on accuracy under the 2-back condition.

Age-related changes in early novelty processing as measured by ERPs.

This study investigated age-related changes in the early processing of novel visual stimuli using ERPs. Well-matched old (n=30), middle-aged (n=30), and young (n=32) subjects were presented standard, target/rare, and perceptually novel visual stimuli under Attend and Ignore conditions. Our results suggest that the anterior P2 component indexes the motivational salience of a stimulus as determined by either task relevance or novelty.

ERP correlates of item recognition memory: effects of age and performance.

Decline in episodic memory is a common feature of healthy aging. Event-related potential (ERP) studies in young adults have consistently reported several modulations thought to index memory retrieval processes, but relatively limited work has explored the impact of aging on them. Further, work with functional imaging has demonstrated differential neural recruitment in elderly subjects depending on their level of cognitive performance which may reflect compensatory or, alternatively, inefficient processing.

Compensatory neural activity distinguishes different patterns of normal cognitive aging.

Most cognitive neuroscientific research exploring the nature of age-associated compensatory mechanisms has compared old adults (high vs. average performers) to young adults (not split by performance), leaving ambiguous whether findings are truly age-related or reflect differences between high and average performers throughout the life span. Here, we examined differences in neural activity (as measured by ERPs) that were generated by high vs.

To ignore or explore: top-down modulation of novelty processing.

Abstract Attending to novelty is a critical element of human behavior and learning. Novel events can serve as task-irrelevant distracters or as potential sources of engagement by interesting or important aspects of one's environment. An optimally functioning brain should have the capacity to respond differentially to novel events depending on the circumstances in which they occur.

Preserved metamemorial ability in patients with mild Alzheimer's disease: shifting response bias.

Patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) display a greater tendency to endorse unstudied items as "old" on memory tests than healthy older adults. This liberal response bias may result in mistaken beliefs about the completion of common tasks. This research attempted to determine whether it was possible to shift the response bias of mild AD patients to be more conservative on a recognition memory test through behavioral intervention.

Cognitive status impacts age-related changes in attention to novel and target events in normal adults.

In this study, the authors investigated the relationship between the cognitive status of normal adults and age-related changes in attention to novel and target events. Old, middle-age, and young subjects, divided into cognitively high and cognitively average performing groups, viewed repetitive standard stimuli, infrequent target stimuli, and unique novel visual stimuli. Subjects controlled viewing duration by a button press that led to the onset of the next stimulus.

ERP correlates of Remember/Know decisions: association with the late posterior negativity.

A number of studies have utilized the Remember/Know paradigm to determine event-related potential (ERP) correlates of recollection and familiarity. However, no prior work has been specifically directed at examining the processing involved in making the Remember/Know distinction. The following study employed a two-step recognition memory test in which participants first decided whether they recognized a word from a prior study list (Old/New decision); if they did, they then determined whether it was recognized on the basis of recollection ('Remember' responses) or familiarity ('Know' responses).

Episodic memory in Alzheimer's disease: separating response bias from discrimination.

Most studies examining episodic memory in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have focused on patients' impaired ability to remember information, leading to poor discrimination between studied and unstudied items at test. Poor discrimination, however, can also be attributable to an abnormally high rate of false alarms. One cause of a high false alarm rate is an abnormally liberal response bias; that is, responding "old" too liberally to the test items.

False recognition of emotional word lists in aging and Alzheimer disease.

Objective: To examine 3 different aspects of the emotional memory effect in aging and Alzheimer disease (AD): item-specific recollection, gist memory, and recognition response bias.

Method: Younger adults, older adults, and patients with AD performed a false recognition memory test in which participants were tested on "lure" items that were not seen at study, but were semantically related to the study items. Participants were tested on 5 emotional and 5 non-emotional lists.

Memory for choices in Alzheimer's disease.

Despite their cognitive impairment, patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) often make important life choices. When making choices, people frequently attempt to directly compare the features of different options, rather than evaluating each option separately. Not every feature has an analogous (or alignable) feature in the other option, however.