Liposome supported peritoneal dialysis in rat amitriptyline exposure with and without intravenous lipid emulsion.

Liposome supported peritoneal dialysis is a recently described technique which may eventually be applicable in the clinical scenario of the intoxicated patient. We evaluated the hypothesis that intravenous injection of lipid emulsion (ILE) would augment acidic pH gradient liposome supported peritoneal dialysis (LSPD). Orogastrically amitriptyline dosed rats were treated with either Sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3) intravenously and standard intraperitoneal dialysate (Group A); NaHCO3 intravenously and LSPD (Group B); or ILE and LSPD (Group C).

Emerging therapies for hemophilia: a new era of care and the role of the interdisciplinary team.

The introduction of new hemophilia management therapies, targeting extended half-lives through bioengineering, ushers in an era of potential promise and increasing complexity, more so for those with hemophilia B than hemophilia A. Questions arise for patients, caregivers, and hemophilia treatment center (HTC) staff about how to assess and incorporate novel therapies and how to determine whether new therapies offer a distinct advantage over established treatment routines. Nurses and other interdisciplinary HTC staff are well positioned to assess, educate, and support patients and families in navigating this rapidly changing landscape.

Use of speaker intent and grammatical cues in fast-mapping by adolescents with Down syndrome.

Purpose: The authors asked whether adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) could fast-map novel nouns and verbs when word learning depended on using the speaker's pragmatic or syntactic cues. Compared with typically developing (TD) comparison children, the authors predicted that syntactic cues would prove harder for the group with DS to use and that action verbs would be harder to fast-map than nouns.

Method: Twenty participants with DS, aged 12-18 years, and 19 TD participants, aged 3-6 years, were matched on syntax comprehension and engaged in 4 fast-mapping tasks.

Language learning in Down syndrome: the speech and language profile compared to adolescents with cognitive impairment of unknown origin.

Children and adolescents with Down syndrome show an emerging profile of speech and language characteristics that is typical of the syndrome (Chapman & Hesketh, 2000; Chapman, 2003; Abbeduto & Chapman, 2005) and different from typically developing children matched for nonverbal mental age, including expressive language deficits relative to comprehension that are most severe for syntax, and, in adolescence, strengths in comprehension vocabulary, improvements in expressive syntax, but losses in comprehension of syntax (Chapman, Hesketh & Kistler, 2002). Here we compare 20 adolescents with Down syndrome to 16 individuals with cognitive impairment of unknown origin, statistically matched for age and nonverbal mental age, to show that the age-related strengths in vocabulary comprehension are not limited to the Down syndrome phenotype, but are limited to a certain type of vocabulary test: for both groups, performance on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-3 is significantly greater than performance on the vocabulary subtest of the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language-3, which does not differ from the syntax comprehension subtests. Vocabulary size, but not conceptual level, is a strength for adolescents with cognitive impairment.

Sampling context affects MLU in the language of adolescents with Down syndrome.

Purpose: The authors describe the procedures used to explain an unexpected finding that adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) had a lower mean length of utterance (MLU) than typically developing (TD) children in interviews without picture support, but not in narratives supported by wordless picture books. They hypothesize that the picture support of the narrative context increased the MLU for the group with DS alone.

Method: Adolescents with DS (n = 14) and TD children (n = 14) matched for receptive syntax narrated picture storybooks and participated in interviews.

Effect of memory support and elicited production on fast mapping of new words by adolescents with Down syndrome.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether memory support and elicited production differentially benefited fast mapping of new vocabulary (comprehension, production accuracy, and speed) in adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) compared with typically developing (TD) children matched for syntax comprehension. The study also examined predictors of individual difference within groups.

Method: The ability of 19 adolescents with DS to fast map new noun vocabulary was compared with 18 TD children matched for syntax comprehension.

Sentence comprehension in adolescents with Down syndrome and typically developing children: role of sentence voice, visual context, and auditory-verbal short-term memory.

The authors evaluated the roles of auditory-verbal short-term memory, visual short-term memory, and group membership in predicting language comprehension, as measured by an experimental sentence comprehension task (SCT) and the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language--Third Edition (TACL-3; E. Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) in 38 participants: 19 with Down syndrome (DS), age 12 to 21 years, and 19 typically developing (TD) children, age 3 to 5 years, matched on syntax comprehension, as measured by TACL-3 Subtests II and III. Of the 5 dependent measures of comprehension, auditory-verbal short-term memory accounted for significant amounts of variance in 4; group membership, 1 (semantic role assignment); and visual short-term memory, 0.

Fast mapping of words and story recall by individuals with Down syndrome.

This study compared adolescents with Down syndrome to nonverbal mental-age matched controls in their ability to fast map new noun vocabulary in spoken story contexts. Context for novel words varied within subjects in the distance between mentions (close-distant) and the ease of inferring a real word for the referent (specificity). The 23 participants with Down syndrome (DS) were aged 12.

Narrative content as described by individuals with Down syndrome and typically developing children.

Narratives of the wordless picture story, Frog, Where Are You?, by 33 individuals with Down syndrome and typically developing children (33 matched for mental age, 33 for syntax comprehension, 33 for mean length of utterance) were analyzed for expression of plot line, story theme, and the protagonists' misadventures in the story. Despite their restricted expressive syntax and vocabulary, the group with Down syndrome expressed more plot line and thematic content and more of one of the protagonists' misadventures than the MLU controls; they most resembled the syntax comprehension control participants. We conclude that the group with Down syndrome had a conceptual understanding of the picture story similar to that of the TACL-R group and a strategy for expressing that understanding despite expressive lexical and syntactic limitations; this resulted in the expression of more narrative content than formal measures of expressive language would predict.

Predicting longitudinal change in language production and comprehension in individuals with Down syndrome: hierarchical linear modeling.

Longitudinal change in syntax comprehension and production skill, measured four times across a 6-year period, was modeled in 31 individuals with Down syndrome who were between the ages of 5 and 20 years at the start of the study. Hierarchical Linear Modeling was used to fit individual linear growth curves to the measures of syntax comprehension (TACL-R) and mean length of spontaneous utterances obtained in 12-min narrative tasks (MLU-S), yielding two parameters for each participant's comprehension and production: performance at study start and growth trajectory. Predictor variables were obtained by fitting linear growth curves to each individual's concurrent measures of nonverbal visual cognition (Pattern Analysis subtest of the Stanford-Binet), visual short-term memory (Bead Memory subtest), and auditory short-term memory (digit span), yielding two individual predictor parameters for each measure: performance at study start and growth trajectory.