[Methemoglobinemia].

Methemoglobinemia (MetHb) refers to the state of oxidation of the iron ion "ferrous" (Fe to iron "ferric" (Fe) within the heme molecule that makes up hemoglobin (Hb). This state is physiological if its level remains controlled. The ferrous state of the heme molecule occurs in the event of significant oxidative stress.

Energetic and informational masking place dissociable demands on listening effort: Evidence from simultaneous electroencephalography and pupillometrya).

The task of processing speech masked by concurrent speech/noise can pose a substantial challenge to listeners. However, performance on such tasks may not directly reflect the amount of listening effort they elicit. Changes in pupil size and neural oscillatory power in the alpha range (8-12 Hz) are prominent neurophysiological signals known to reflect listening effort; however, measurements obtained through these two approaches are rarely correlated, suggesting that they may respond differently depending on the specific cognitive demands (and, by extension, the specific type of effort) elicited by specific tasks.

Strength of target source segregation cues affects the outcome of speech-on-speech masking experiments.

In speech-on-speech listening experiments, some means for designating which talker is the "target" must be provided for the listener to perform better than chance. However, the relative strength of the segregation variables designating the target could affect the results of the experiment. Here, we examine the interaction of two source segregation variables-spatial separation and talker gender differences-and demonstrate that the relative strengths of these cues may affect the interpretation of the results.

A Pilot Study Evaluating the Feasibility of Testing for an Acute Impact of Human Exposure to a Power-line Frequency Magnetic Field on Blood Cortisol and Thyroid-Stimulating Hormone.

Numerous studies have been carried out on the potential effects of an extremely low frequency (ELF-0-300 Hz) magnetic field (MF) on human health. However, there is limited data on the effect of a high exposure level to ELF MFs for a prolonged period. Therefore, the objective of this pilot work was to demonstrate the feasibility of a study evaluating the stress hormone concentrations resulting from a 10-min exposure to a 60 Hz MF of several tens of thousands of µT.

Vestibular Extremely Low-Frequency Magnetic and Electric Stimulation Effects on Human Subjective Visual Vertical Perception.

Electric fields from both extremely low-frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MF) and alternating current (AC) stimulations impact human neurophysiology. As the retinal photoreceptors, vestibular hair cells are graded potential cells and are sensitive to electric fields. Electrophosphene and magnetophosphene literature suggests different impacts of AC and ELF-MF on the vestibular hair cells.

Speech intelligibility and talker gender classification with noise-vocoded and tone-vocoded speech.

Vocoded speech provides less spectral information than natural, unprocessed speech, negatively affecting listener performance on speech intelligibility and talker gender classification tasks. In this study, young normal-hearing participants listened to noise-vocoded and tone-vocoded (i.e.

Quantitative Real-Time PCR Assays for the Detection of Pathogenic Species in Urine and Blood Samples in Canine Vaccine Clinical Studies: a Rapid Alternative to Classical Culture Methods.

Leptospirosis is a vaccine-preventable bacterial zoonotic disease caused by pathogenic Leptospira species. The efficacy of canine vaccines is assessed by challenging vaccinated and control dogs with virulent serovars of , followed by detection of in blood and urine. We assessed the consistency between results obtained for urine and blood samples from clinical studies with species-specific real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) targeting the gene and those obtained with the reference culture method.

Assessing the benefit of acoustic beamforming for listeners with aphasia using modified psychoacoustic methods.

Acoustic beamforming has been shown to improve identification of target speech in noisy listening environments for individuals with sensorineural hearing loss. This study examined whether beamforming would provide a similar benefit for individuals with aphasia (acquired neurological language impairment). The benefit of beamforming was examined for persons with aphasia (PWA) and age- and hearing-matched controls in both a speech masking condition and a speech-shaped, speech-modulated noise masking condition.

Effects of Acquired Aphasia on the Recognition of Speech Under Energetic and Informational Masking Conditions.

Persons with aphasia (PWA) often report difficulty understanding spoken language in noisy environments that require listeners to identify and selectively attend to target speech while ignoring competing background sounds or “maskers.” This study compared the performance of PWA and age-matched healthy controls (HC) on a masked speech identification task and examined the consequences of different types of masking on performance. Twelve PWA and 12 age-matched HC completed a speech identification task comprising three conditions designed to differentiate between the effects of energetic and informational masking on receptive speech processing.

A musical intervention for respiratory comfort during noninvasive ventilation in the ICU.

Discomfort associated with noninvasive ventilation (NIV) may participate in its failure. We aimed to determine the effect of a musical intervention on respiratory discomfort during NIV in patients with acute respiratory failure (ARF).An open-label, controlled trial was performed over three centres.

Impact of extremely low-frequency magnetic fields on human postural control.

Studies have found that extremely low-frequency (ELF, < 300 Hz) magnetic fields (MF) can modulate standing balance; however, the acute balance effects of high flux densities in this frequency range have not been systematically investigated yet. This study explores acute human standing balance responses of 22 participants exposed to magnetic induction at 50 and 100 mTrms (MF), and to 1.5 mA alternating currents (AC).

Between-session and within-session intra-individual variability in attention in aphasia.

Persons with aphasia (PWA) have been found in many previous studies to exhibit impaired performance on attention processing tasks, even when these tasks do not contain linguistic stimuli. There is also some evidence that as individuals, PWA may show more intra-individual variability (i.e.

Effects of A 60 Hz Magnetic Field of Up to 50 milliTesla on Human Tremor and EEG: A Pilot Study.

Humans are surrounded by sources of daily exposure to power-frequency (60 Hz in North America) magnetic fields (MFs). Such time-varying MFs induce electric fields and currents in living structures which possibly lead to biological effects. The present pilot study examined possible extremely low frequency (ELF) MF effects on human neuromotor control in general, and physiological postural tremor and electroencephalography (EEG) in particular.

Does Naming Therapy Make Ordering in a Restaurant Easier? Dynamics of Co-Occurring Change in Cognitive-Linguistic and Functional Communication Skills in Aphasia.

Purpose: This study was conducted to investigate the static and dynamic relationships between impairment-level cognitive-linguistic abilities and activity-level functional communication skills in persons with aphasia (PWA).

Method: In Experiment 1, a battery of standardized assessments was administered to a group of PWA (N = 72) to examine associations between cognitive-linguistic ability and functional communication at a single time point. In Experiment 2, impairment-based treatment was administered to a subset of PWA from Experiment 1 (n = 39) in order to examine associations between change in cognitive-linguistic ability and change in function and associations at a single time point.

Evaluating Treatment and Generalization Patterns of Two Theoretically Motivated Sentence Comprehension Therapies.

Purpose: The current study examined treatment outcomes and generalization patterns following 2 sentence comprehension therapies: object manipulation (OM) and sentence-to-picture matching (SPM). Findings were interpreted within the framework of specific deficit and resource reduction accounts, which were extended in order to examine the nature of generalization following treatment of sentence comprehension deficits in aphasia.

Method: Forty-eight individuals with aphasia were enrolled in 1 of 8 potential treatment assignments that varied by task (OM, SPM), complexity of trained sentences (complex, simple), and syntactic movement (noun phrase, wh-movement).

Effect of a musical intervention on tolerance and efficacy of non-invasive ventilation in the ICU: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial (MUSique pour l'Insuffisance Respiratoire Aigue - Mus-IRA).

Background: Non-invasive ventilation (NIV) tolerance is a key factor of NIV success. Hence, numerous sedative pharmacological or non-pharmacological strategies have been assessed to improve NIV tolerance. Music therapy in various health care settings has shown beneficial effects.

The effect of a sentence comprehension treatment on discourse comprehension in aphasia.

Background: While it is well understood that individuals with aphasia have difficulty with discourse comprehension, very few studies have examined the nature of discourse comprehension deficits in aphasia and the potential for improvement in discourse comprehension after rehabilitation. To address the first goal, we previously developed the Test of Syntactic Effects on Discourse Comprehension (TSEDC), which provides a measure of the extent to which a participant's sentence comprehension ability aids in comprehending passages (Levy et al., 2012).

Between-session intra-individual variability in sustained, selective, and integrational non-linguistic attention in aphasia.

A number of studies have identified impairments in one or more types/aspects of attention processing in patients with aphasia (PWA) relative to healthy controls; person-to-person variability in performance on attention tasks within the PWA group has also been noted. Studies using non-linguistic stimuli have found evidence that attention is impaired in this population even in the absence of language processing demands. An underlying impairment in non-linguistic, or domain-general, attention processing could have implications for the ability of PWA to attend during therapy sessions, which in turn could impact long-term treatment outcomes.

Development of a theoretically based treatment for sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia.

Purpose: Two new treatments, 1 based on sentence to picture matching (SPM) and the other on object manipulation (OM), that train participants on the thematic roles of sentences using pictures or by manipulating objects were piloted.

Method: Using a single-subject multiple-baseline design, sentence comprehension was trained on the affected sentence type in 1 task-related protocol in 15 participants with aphasia. The 2 tasks were SPM and OM; the treatment stimuli were object relatives, object clefts, passives, and unaccusatives, as well as two control structures-object relatives with a complex noun phrase (NP) and active sentences with three NPs.

Postural activity and visual vigilance performance during rough seas.

Background: Motion of a ship at sea often challenges crew performance. In previous studies, the influence of rough weather on stance at sea has been evaluated in terms of the likelihood of staggers or falls. Few studies have evaluated the influence of sea state on visual performance.

Visual vigilance performance and standing posture at sea.

Background: Research on land has demonstrated interactions between visual tasks and the control of stance. Variations in visual tasks can influence postural activity; conversely, changes in stance can influence quantitative measures of visual performance. At sea, crewmembers may alter their bodily movements to compensate for ship motion while simultaneously adjusting movements to optimize visual performance.

Body sway at sea for two visual tasks and three stance widths.

Background: On land, body sway is influenced by stance width (the distance between the feet) and by visual tasks engaged in during stance. While wider stance can be used to stabilize the body against ship motion and crewmembers are obliged to carry out many visual tasks while standing, the influence of these factors on the kinematics of body sway has not been studied at sea.

Methods: Crewmembers of the RN Atlantis stood on a force plate from which we obtained data on the positional variability of the center of pressure (COP).

Interpersonal postural coordination on rigid and non-rigid surfaces.

When two standing people converse with each other there is an increase in their shared postural activity, relative to conversation with different partners. We asked pairs of participants to converse with each other or with experimental confederates while standing on rigid and nonrigid surfaces. On the rigid surface, shared postural activity was greater when participants conversed with each other than when they conversed with confederates.

Stance width and angle at sea: effects of sea state and body orientation.

Background: On land, the distance and angle between the feet in side-by-side stance tend to have characteristic values. Ship motion mandates changes in the control of stance, but there have been no direct assessments of how stance width and angle are controlled at sea. We predicted that participants would adopt a wider stance at sea.

Walking changes the dynamics of cognitive estimates of time intervals.

Cognitive performance exhibits patterns of trial-to-trial variation that can be described as 1/f or pink noise, as do repeated measures of locomotor performance. Although cognitive and locomotor performances are known to interact when performed concurrently, it is not known whether concurrent performance affects the tasks' pink noise dynamical structure. In this study, participants performed a cognitive task (repeatedly producing a temporal interval) and a motor task (walking on a treadmill) in single- and dual-task conditions.