Getting a G--RRP on regulated exocytosis in the heart.

A study by Rybkin et al. (see p. 527) substantially advances our understanding of regulated exocytois by specialized secretory cells, such as atrial myocytes.

Screening for chronic hepatitis C: American College of Preventive Medicine practice policy statement.

Hepatitis C is an under-diagnosed and prevalent bloodborne illness, resulting in chronic cirrhosis in up to 25% of those infected. While the overall prevalence in the United States is 1.7%, high-risk populations may have up to 80% prevalence.

Invariance study of an adolescent survey-based smoking-related cognitions scale: examination across Hispanic and Caucasian groups.

Background: Large-scale surveys frequently assess tobacco-related cognitions, however, few studies have examined the psychometric properties and cultural invariance of such measures.

Methods: The present study examined the factor structure of a dichotomous 8-item tobacco-related beliefs scale administered as part of the state-wide California Tobacco Survey. It was expected that scale factor structure would be invariant across the non-Hispanic white (N = 1960) and English-speaking Mexican-Americans (N = 593), but would differ for Spanish-speaking Mexican-Americans (N = 455).

The Descriptor Differential Scale of Pain Intensity: an evaluation of item and scale properties.

Improved methods for pain measurement have both theoretical and clinical importance. This study evaluated the Descriptor Differential Scale (DDS) of Pain Intensity, a recent methodology designed for assessing pain reports in clinical samples. Experiment 1 evaluated the sensitivity of the measure to small changes in electrocutaneous stimulation relative to a traditional visual analogue scale (VAS) of pain intensity.

An assessment of the semantic network in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Abstract The present study employed multidimensional scaling and ADDTREE clustering analyses to derive the cognitive maps and clustering representations of normal elderly controls (NC), patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and patients with Hun-tington's disease (HD); the analyses were performed on subjects' responses in a category fluency task that involved generating animal names for 60 sec. A measure of the proximity of animal names was used as an index of associational strength; MDS and ADDTREE estimates were based on this measure. A comparison of the NC, AD, and HD subjects' cognitive maps suggests that the semantic network of AD patients is abnormal in two ways.