Egocentric network characteristics of people who inject drugs in the Chicago metro area and associations with hepatitis C virus and injection risk behavior.

Background: Hepatitis C (HCV) infection has been rising in the suburban and rural USA, mainly via injection-based transmission. Injection and sexual networks are recognized as an important element in fostering and preventing risky behavior; however, the role of social support networks has received somewhat less attention.

Methods: Using baseline data from an ongoing longitudinal study, we examined the composition and structure of injection drug use (IDU), sex, and social support networks of young people who inject drugs (aged 18-30) and their injection network members.

The Relationship Between Clinical and Indocyanine Green Staging in Lymphedema.

Multiple staging systems for classifying the severity of lymphedema exist. The International Society of Lymphology (ISL) stage is considered standard for clinical reporting, but the relationship between clinical and functional/imaging stage remains poorly defined. We reviewed the prospectively collected data of all patients who underwent physiologic lymphedema surgery for a 3-year period by the senior author.

Production and Comprehension of Prosodic Markers in Sign Language Imperatives.

In signed and spoken language sentences, imperative mood and the corresponding speech acts such as for instance, command, permission or advice, can be distinguished by morphosyntactic structures, but also solely by prosodic cues, which are the focus of this paper. These cues can express paralinguistic mental states or grammatical meaning, and we show that in American Sign Language (ASL), they also exhibit the function, scope, and alignment of prosodic, linguistic elements of sign languages. The production and comprehension of prosodic facial expressions and temporal patterns therefore can shed light on how cues are grammaticalized in sign languages.