Evaluating the Utility of Baseline Cardiac Function Screening in Early-Stage Breast Cancer Treatment.

Background: Cardiotoxicity can be a complication of anthracycline- or trastuzumab-based therapy for breast cancer patients. Screening echocardiograms (ECHOs) and radionuclide ventriculograms (RVGs) are often performed before administration of these agents to evaluate cardiac function. Limited evidence for the clinical utility of these screening tests is available.

Learning to identify crowded letters: does the learning depend on the frequency of training?

Performance for many visual tasks improves with training. The magnitude of improvement following training depends on the training task, number of trials per training session and the total amount of training. Does the magnitude of improvement also depend on the frequency of training sessions? In this study, we compared the learning effect for three groups of normally sighted observers who repeatedly practiced the task of identifying crowded letters in the periphery for six sessions (1000 trials per session), according to three different training schedules-one group received one session of training everyday, the second group received a training session once a week and the third group once every 2weeks.