Publications by authors named "Joseph Hirsch"

Although palliative care programs are beneficial to patients and families, most of the public is unfamiliar with and underutilizes palliative services. TikTok, a fast-growing social media platform worldwide, allows users to share short live-recorded videos and could be used to educate the public about palliative care. This study characterized palliative care TikTok videos and determined characteristics associated with higher user engagement metrics (views, likes, comments, and shares).

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Background: Auditory naming tests are superior to visual confrontation naming tests in revealing word-finding difficulties in many neuropathological conditions.

Objective: To delineate characteristics of auditory naming most likely to reveal anomia in patients with dementia, and possibly improve diagnostic utility, we evaluated a large sample of patients referred with memory impairment complaints.

Methods: Patients with dementia (N = 733) or other cognitive impairments and normal individuals (N = 69) were evaluated for frequency of impairment on variables of the Auditory Naming Test (ANT) of Hamberger & Seidel versus the Boston Naming Test (BNT).

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Background: In preclinical models, benfotiamine efficiently ameliorates the clinical and biological pathologies that define Alzheimer's disease (AD) including impaired cognition, amyloid-β plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, diminished glucose metabolism, oxidative stress, increased advanced glycation end products (AGE), and inflammation.

Objective: To collect preliminary data on feasibility, safety, and efficacy in individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) or mild dementia due to AD in a placebo-controlled trial of benfotiamine.

Methods: A twelve-month treatment with benfotiamine tested whether clinical decline would be delayed in the benfotiamine group compared to the placebo group.

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There is a high prevalence of anxiety disorders including specific phobias and panic disorder in the United States and Europe. A variety of therapeutic modalities including pharmacotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, systematic desensitization, hypnosis, in vivo exposure, and virtual reality exposure therapy have been applied. No one modality has been entirely successful.

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The earliest and perhaps best example of an interaction between nutrition and dementia is related to thiamine (vitamin B1). Throughout the last century, research showed that thiamine deficiency is associated with neurological problems, including cognitive deficits and encephalopathy. Multiple similarities exist between classical thiamine deficiency and Alzheimer's disease (AD) in that both are associated with cognitive deficits and reductions in brain glucose metabolism.

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Although there have been studies of individual professional disciplines and their attitudes toward children with emotional, behavioral, or educational problems, there has been no systematic determination using a single, psychometrically sound measure that compared different professional groups. The goal was to assess the biases toward children with emotional and behavioral difficulties in samples of professionals who are most likely to have contact with them (86 teachers, 83 psychologists, 47 social workers), as well as other adults (75 undergraduate students). After development from an item pool, the provisional Biases toward Children with Psychological and Behavioral Disorders scale consisted of 21 items in one factor which experts also had assigned to a Biases category.

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Flying phobia is a problem that affects a significant portion of the population. There are a number of therapeutic approaches but no one is universally accepted as the gold standard. One therapy is hypnosis.

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Reduced glucose metabolism is an invariant feature of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and an outstanding biomarker of disease progression. Glucose metabolism may be an attractive therapeutic target, whether the decline initiates AD pathophysiology or is a critical component of a cascade. The cause of cerebral regional glucose hypometabolism remains unclear.

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Background: A nonmetabolic role for thiamine in cholinergic neurotransmission has long been suggested. The mechanism remains unclear. We sought to extend our previous research to elucidate the effect of the thiamine metabolic antagonist, oxythiamine, on the release of acetylcholine from the brain.

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