Predicting the health-related values and preferences of geriatric patients.

Background: Those who must make health care decisions on behalf of persons who lack decision-making capacity often have too little information. The purpose of this study was to determine whether and to what degree sociodemographic factors, social support, religious involvement, and functional status served as predictors of the health-related values and preferences of geriatric patients.

Methods: A retrospective chart review involving 178 cognitively intact patients enrolled at a geriatric clinic at a university medical center was conducted.

Conjugal conflict and violence: a review and theoretical paradigm.

Conjugal violence has been described as having multiple etiologies. The variables are so numerous that intervention and research protocols are difficult to effect. This paper proposes a paradigm that establishes conjugal conflict and violence as separate entities.

Renal disease among the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

Objective: To ascertain the incidence and prevalence of ESRD in the Eastern Band of Cherokee in the IHS user population from 1978 to 1988 and to determine what proportion of ESRD and chronic renal failure is attributable to diabetes.

Research Design And Methods: Cases were identified from three IHS data sources and from death records obtained from the North Carolina Bureau of Health Statistics. Chronic renal insufficiency was defined as an individual having a serum creatinine of > or = 176.

A major gene model for the familial aggregation of plasma IgA concentration.

Plasma IgA concentration was determined on 94 individuals of an eastern Kentucky family (IGANI) with some members having clinical and biopsy-proven IgA nephropathy, and on 197 individuals of a large Louisiana family (HGAR29) with no clinical history of IgA nephropathy but on whom 30 polymorphic markers had previously been typed. Pedigree segregation analysis was used to fit a major gene model, and a moderately large lod score for linkage to the ABO locus (1.50 at 0% recombination) suggested the existence of a recessive allele for high plasma IgA concentration.