Improving precision in neuropsychological assessment: Bridging the gap between classic paper-and-pencil tests and paradigms from cognitive neuroscience.

Objective: In cognitive neuroscience, well-controlled and highly specific paradigms have been developed to measure cognitive processes over the last decades, often using computer-assisted presentation and response registration. This approach is in contrast with the traditional paper-and-pencil tests used in clinical neuropsychology, which typically assess cognitive function in a less specific manner, often even at the level of a cognitive domain. As a result, important aspects of cognitive (dys)function may be missed during a neuropsychological assessment.

Early-life mortality clustering in families: A literature review.

Research on early-life mortality in contemporary and historical populations has shown that infant and child mortality tend to cluster in a limited number of high-mortality families, a phenomenon known as 'mortality clustering'. This paper is the first to review the literature on the role of the family in early-life mortality. Contemporary results, methodological and theoretical shortfalls, recent developments, and opportunities for future research are all discussed in this review.

Individual Differences Influencing Immediate Effects of Internal and External Focus Instructions on Children's Motor Performance.

Purpose: A large pool of evidence supports the beneficial effect of an external focus of attention on motor skill performance in adults. In children, this effect has been studied less and results are inconclusive. Importantly, individual differences are often not taken into account.

Assessment of goals and priorities in patients with a chronic condition: a secondary quantitative analysis of determinants across 11 countries.

Objective: To assess the impact of patient characteristics, patient-professional engagement, communication and context on the probability that healthcare professionals will discuss goals or priorities with older patients.

Design: Secondary analysis of cross-sectional data from the 2014 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey of Older Adults.

Setting: 11 western countries.

Physical exercise prior to hematopoietic stem cell transplantation: A feasibility study.

Purpose: This study explores the feasibility and preliminary effectiveness of an exercise program in people scheduled for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT).

Methods: In this controlled clinical trial, we compare pre-transplantation exercise to no exercise in the waiting period for an allogeneic of autologous HSCT. The supervised individually tailored exercise program (4-6 weeks) consisted of aerobic endurance, muscle strength, and relaxation exercises, administered twice a week in the period prior to HSCT.

Learning New Letter-like Writing Patterns Explicitly and Implicitly in Children and Adults.

A handwriting task was used to test the assumption that explicit learning is dependent on age and working memory, while implicit learning is not. The effect of age was examined by testing both, typically developing children (5-12 years old, n = 81) and adults (n = 27) in a counterbalanced within-subjects design. Participants were asked to repeatedly write letter-like patterns on a digitizer with a non-inking pen.

Predictors of receptive and expressive vocabulary development in children with Down syndrome.

Purpose: There is a lack of longitudinal data on predictors of vocabulary development in children with Down syndrome (DS). In typically developing children, many internal and external predictors of vocabulary development have been determined before. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of these variables in the receptive and expressive vocabulary development of children with DS.

Emotion differentiation and its relation with emotional well-being in adolescents.

Emotion differentiation (ED) refers to the precision with which people can identify and distinguish their emotions and has been associated with well-being in adults. This study investigated ED and its relation with emotional well-being (i.e.

Antisense transcription of the myotonic dystrophy locus yields low-abundant RNAs with and without (CAG)n repeat.

The unstable (CTG·CAG)n trinucleotide repeat in the myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) locus is bidirectionally transcribed from genes with terminal overlap. By transcription in the sense direction, the DMPK gene produces various alternatively spliced mRNAs with a (CUG)n repeat in their 3' UTR. Expression in opposite orientation reportedly yields (CAG)n-repeat containing RNA, but both structure and biologic significance of this antisense gene (DM1-AS) are largely unknown.

Gait rehabilitation for a patient with an osseointegrated prosthesis following transfemoral amputation.

Background: In patients with a transfemoral amputation socket-related problems are associated with reduced prosthetic use, activity, and quality of life. Furthermore, gait asymmetries are present that may explain secondary complaints. Bone-anchored prostheses (BAPs) may help these patients.

Intrusions and provoked and spontaneous confabulations on memory tests in Korsakoff's syndrome.

Introduction: Intrusions on verbal memory tests have been used as an index for clinical confabulation. Severe memory impairments in combination with executive dysfunction have been suggested to be the underlying mechanism of confabulation, but to date, this relation is unclear. The aim of this study was (a) to examine the relation between (different types of) intrusions and confabulations in a large sample of confabulating patients with Korsakoff's syndrome (KS) and (b) to investigate whether different measures of executive functioning and memory performance are related to provoked and spontaneous confabulation.

Reducing the use of out-of-hours primary care services: A survey among Dutch general practitioners.

Background: Out-of-hours primary care services have a high general practitioner (GP) workload with increasing costs, while half of all contacts are non-urgent.

Objectives: To identify views of GPs to influence the use of the out-of-hours GP cooperatives.

Methods: Cross-sectional survey study among a random sample of 800 GPs in the Netherlands.

Telephone triage in general practices: A written case scenario study in the Netherlands.

Objective: General practices increasingly use telephone triage to manage patient flows. During triage, the urgency of the call and required type of care are determined. This study examined the organization and adequacy of telephone triage in general practices in the Netherlands.

The impact of primary care organization on avoidable hospital admissions for diabetes in 23 countries.

Objective: Diabetes is a so-called ambulatory care sensitive condition. It is assumed that by appropriate and timely primary care, hospital admissions for complications of such conditions can be avoided. This study examines whether differences between countries in diabetes-related hospitalization rates can be attributed to differences in the organization of primary care in these countries.

Assessment of Confabulation in Patients with Alcohol-Related Cognitive Disorders: The Nijmegen-Venray Confabulation List (NVCL-20).

Objective: Even though the first awareness of confabulations is often based on observations, only questionnaires and structured interviews quantifying provoked confabulations are available. So far, no tools have been developed to measure spontaneous confabulation. This study describes and validates an observation scale for quantifying confabulation behavior, including spontaneous confabulations, in clinical practice.

A research agenda on patient safety in primary care. Recommendations by the LINNEAUS collaboration on patient safety in primary care.

Background: Healthcare can cause avoidable serious harm to patients. Primary care is not an exception, and the relative lack of research in this area lends urgency to a better understanding of patient safety, the future research agenda and the development of primary care oriented safety programmes.

Objective: To outline a research agenda for patient safety improvement in primary care in Europe and beyond.

Patient safety improvement programmes for primary care. Review of a Delphi procedure and pilot studies by the LINNEAUS collaboration on patient safety in primary care.

Background: To improve patient safety it is necessary to identify the causes of patient safety incidents, devise solutions and measure the (cost-) effectiveness of improvement efforts.

Objective: This paper provides a broad overview with practical guidance on how to improve patient safety.

Methods: We used modified online Delphi procedures to reach consensus on methods to improve patient safety and to identify important features of patient safety management in primary care.

Free energy minimization and information gain: The devil is in the details.

Contrary to Friston's previous work, this paper describes free energy minimization using categorical probability distributions over discrete states. This alternative mathematical framework exposes a fundamental, yet unnoticed challenge for the free energy principle. When considering discrete state spaces one must specify their granularity, as the amount of information gain is defined over this state space.

The colour of a football outfit affects visibility and team success.

We investigated the impact of the colour of football outfits on localising football players and on the results of football matches. Two studies were conducted: an experimental study examining the effects of outfit colour on the assessment of the positions of computer-animated football players in a video set-up (study 1) and a retrospective study on professional football clubs' performances dependent on their outfit colours (study 2). The studies were conducted with 18 human volunteers aged 15-18 years (study 1) and league results from 10 professional European football teams over 17 years (1995-2013) (study 2).

Transfer and maintenance effects of online working-memory training in normal ageing and mild cognitive impairment.

Working memory (WM) is one of the cognitive functions that is susceptible to ageing-related decline. Interventions that are able to improve WM functioning at older age are thus highly relevant. In this pilot study, we explored the transfer effects of core WM training on the WM domain and other cognitive domains in 23 healthy older adults and 18 patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

Reliability and validity of an extended clinical examination.

Introduction: An extended clinical examination (ECE) was administered to 85 final year medical students at the Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands. The aim of the study was to determine the psychometric quality and the suitability of the ECE as a measurement tool to assess the clinical proficiency of eight separate clinical skills.

Methods: Generalizability studies were conducted to determine the generalizability coefficient and the sources of variance of the ECE.

Semantic interference in picture naming during dual-task performance does not vary with reading ability.

Previous dual-task studies examining the locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming have obtained diverging results. In these studies, participants manually responded to tones and named pictures while ignoring distractor words (picture-word interference, PWI) with varying stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between tone and PWI stimulus. Whereas some studies observed no semantic interference at short SOAs, other studies observed effects of similar magnitude at short and long SOAs.