Social norms and social opportunities: a qualitative study of influences on tobacco use among urban adolescent girls in Ghana.

Background: Tobacco use is a global public health threat and a leading preventable cause of death in the world. While cigarette use among youth has been decreasing in high-income countries, low- and middle-income countries have contrastingly high rates of adolescent smoking. In Ghana, smoking prevalence is lower than in other parts of the African continent and more common among men than women; however the gender gap in tobacco use among adolescents has narrowed, with shisha use among girls recently surpassing boys.

Behavioral barriers to the use of modern methods of contraception among unmarried youth and adolescents in eastern Senegal: a qualitative study.

Background: Many unmarried young people in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) want to avoid pregnancy but do not use modern methods of contraception-as a result, half of teen births in these countries are unintended. Researchers have identified numerous barriers that prevent youth from using contraception. However, much of the research in West Africa is narrowly focused on married women, and relatively little research has been done to understand the needs, preferences, barriers, and solution set for sexually active unmarried young people who would like to avoid pregnancy.

Neural Mechanisms of Swallowing Dysfunction and Apraxia of Speech in Acute Stroke.

Speech and swallowing utilize overlapping anatomy and are thus inherently related processes. We sought to identify common neural mechanisms between risk of swallowing dysfunction and apraxia of speech (AOS). This was a retrospective analysis using data from a prospectively collected cohort.

Impaired Recognition of Emotional Faces after Stroke Involving Right Amygdala or Insula.

Despite its basic and translational importance, the neural circuitry supporting the perception of emotional faces remains incompletely understood. Functional imaging studies and chronic lesion studies indicate distinct roles of the amygdala and insula in recognition of fear and disgust in facial expressions, whereas intracranial encephalography studies, which are not encumbered by variations in human anatomy, indicate a somewhat different role of these structures. In this article, we leveraged lesion-mapping techniques in individuals with right hemisphere stroke to investigate lesions associated with impaired recognition of prototypic emotional faces before significant neural reorganization can occur during recovery from stroke.

Knowledge and Attitudes About Breast Cancer in Limpopo, South Africa.

Purpose: Breast cancer survival is unacceptably low in many low-resource settings, including rural South Africa, where access to screening and treatment services is limited. To describe the context for implementing an early detection program, we assessed knowledge and attitudes toward breast cancer risk, early detection, and treatment.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional survey among 243 women presenting to Hlokomela Clinic in Hoedspruit, South Africa, during April and May 2016.

Chronic apraxia of speech and Broca's area.

Background And Purpose: Apraxia of speech (AOS) is an impairment of motor planning and programming of speech articulation and is often considered an important stroke syndrome, localizable to Broca's area. However, an influential study raised doubts on this localization and reported that AOS is attributable to lesions of the anterior insula, based on an association between chronic AOS and anterior insula lesions. We hypothesized that chronic AOS is associated with large lesions (which include the insula) or lesions to Broca's area.

Motor extinction in distinct reference frames: a double dissociation.

Objective: Test the hypothesis that right hemisphere stroke can cause extinction of left hand movements or movements of either hand held in left space, when both are used simultaneously, possibly depending on lesion site.

Methods: 93 non-hemiplegic patients with acute right hemisphere stroke were tested for motor extinction by pressing a counter rapidly for one minute with the right hand, left hand, or both simultaneously with their hands held at their sides, or crossed over midline.

Results: We identified two distinct types of motor extinction in separate patients; 20 patients extinguished left hand movements held in left or right space (left canonical body extinction); the most significantly associated voxel cluster of ischemic tissue was in the right temporal white matter.

Asyntactic comprehension, working memory, and acute ischemia in Broca's area versus angular gyrus.

We evaluated sentence comprehension of variety of sentence constructions and components of short-term memory (STM) in 53 individuals with acute ischemic stroke, to test some current hypotheses about the role of Broca's area in these tasks. We found that some patients show structure-specific, task-independent deficits in sentence comprehension, with chance level of accuracy on passive reversible sentences, more impaired comprehension of object-cleft than subject-cleft sentences, and more impaired comprehension of reversible than irreversible sentences in both sentence-picture matching and enactment tasks. In a dichotomous analysis, this pattern of "asyntactic comprehension" was associated with dysfunctional tissue in left angular gyrus, rather than dysfunctional tissue in Broca's area as previously proposed.

Reperfusion of specific cortical areas is associated with improvement in distinct forms of hemispatial neglect.

Objective: To test the hypothesis that restoring blood flow to specific right cortical regions in acute stroke results in improvement in distinct forms of hemispatial neglect distinguished by reference frame: viewer-centered versus stimulus-centered neglect.

Methods: Twenty five patients with acute right stroke were evaluated at Day 1 and Day 3-5 with a battery of neglect tests and Diffusion- and Perfusion-Weighted MR Imaging. Multivariate linear regression analysis revealed Brodmann areas (BAs) where reperfusion predicted degree of improvement in scores on each type of neglect, independently of reperfusion of other areas, total change in the volume of infarct or hypoperfusion, and age.