he supervises the Civil Litigation Clinic and teaches civil rights litigation, criminal procedure... more he supervises the Civil Litigation Clinic and teaches civil rights litigation, criminal procedure, trial practice, legal problems of the poor, and restorative justice. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for both Law School and undergraduate studies. This article was inspired from his representation of protesters in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina who were charged with removing Confederate monuments. See David A. Graham, How the Activists who tore down Durham's Confederate Statute got away with it, THE ATLANTIC (Feb. 21, 2018), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/durham-confederate-monument-charges-dismissed/553808/; Tammy Grubb, 2 guilty, 2 cases dismissed in toppling of UNC's Silent Sam statue. And a knife charge, NEWS & OBSERVER (Apr. 26, 2019), https://www.newsobserver.com/news/loca1article229620599.hnl. 2. N'dea Yancey-Bragg, UNC Chancellor Carol Folt resigns, approves removal of 'Silent Sam' Confederate statue, USA TODAY (Jan. 14, 2019), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/14/carol-folt-unc-chancellor-resigns-approves-sient-sam-remva/2577206002/. 3. Hannah McLellen, In less than a month, the Board of Governors will present a plan for Silent Sam, THE DAILY TARHEEL (Apr. 25, 2019), https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2019/04ibog-silentsam-update-0425 Jane Stancill and Carli Brosseau, UNC board tells Chancellor Folt to leave her job in 2 weeksearlier than expected, NEWS & OBSERVER (Jan.
IntroductionQuantitative sensory testing (QST) is often used to understand the perceptual basis o... more IntroductionQuantitative sensory testing (QST) is often used to understand the perceptual basis of acute and chronic conditions, including pain. As the need grows for developing a mechanistic understanding of neurological pathways underlying perception in the basic and clinical sciences, there is a greater need to adapt techniques such as QST to the magnetic resonance (MR) environment. No studies have yet evaluated the impact of the MR environment on the perception of thermal stimuli. This study aimed to evaluate the differences in temperature sensitivity outside an MR environment and during an MRI scanning session. We hypothesized that there would be a difference in how participants reported their pain sensitivity between the two environments.MethodsHealthy participants underwent thermal QST outside the MR scanning environment, where they were asked to rate the temperature of a noxious stimulus at which they perceived their pain to be 7/10, using a Likert scale ranging from 0 to 10...
Physical insult from a mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) leads to changes in blood flow in the b... more Physical insult from a mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) leads to changes in blood flow in the brain and measurable changes in white matter, suggesting a physiological basis for chronic symptom presentation. Post-traumatic headache (PTH) is frequently reported by persons after an mTBI that may persist beyond the acute period (>3 months). It remains unclear whether ongoing inflammation may contribute to the clinical trajectory of PTH. We recruited a cohort of pediatric subjects with PTH who had an acute or a persistent clinical trajectory, each around the 3-month post-injury time point, as well as a group of age and sex-matched healthy controls. We collected salivary markers of mRNA expression as well as brain imaging and psychological testing. The persistent PTH group showed the highest levels of psychological burden and pain symptom reporting. Our data suggest that the acute and persistent PTH cohort had elevated levels of complement factors relative to healthy controls. The gr...
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
Post-traumatic headache (PTH) is a challenging clinical condition to identify and treat as it int... more Post-traumatic headache (PTH) is a challenging clinical condition to identify and treat as it integrates multiple subjectively defined symptoms with underlying physiological processes. The precise mechanisms underlying PTH are unclear, and it remains to be understood how to integrate the patient experience with underlying biology when attempting to classify persons with PTH, particularly in the pediatric setting where patient self-report may be highly variable. The objective of this investigation was to evaluate the use of different machine learning (ML) classifiers to differentiate pediatric and young adult subjects with PTH from healthy controls using behavioral data from self-report questionnaires that reflect concussion symptoms, mental health, pain experience of the participants, and structural brain imaging from cortical and sub-cortical locations. Behavioral data, alongside brain imaging, survived data reduction methods and both contributed toward final models. Behavioral dat...
Henry Clay standout and United States Olympian Megan Kleine is preparing for the State Swim Meet ... more Henry Clay standout and United States Olympian Megan Kleine is preparing for the State Swim Meet to be held February 1 9-20 at the Lancaster Aquatics Center on the University of Kentucky campus. Kleine, a senior, won a gold medal on the relay team in Barcelona last summer. Photo credit to the Kleine family.
CON F E R E NC E VOLU M E | 2 015 * The authors are from the University of Western Sydney and DBM... more CON F E R E NC E VOLU M E | 2 015 * The authors are from the University of Western Sydney and DBM Consultants, respectively. The authors would like to acknowledge Brian Fine at the QOR online access panel company, Luke Aitken from the NSW Business Chamber, and Dr Russell Blamey, Dr Dieu Anh Vu and David Claridad from DBM Consultants for their contributions. Opening Aladdin’s Cave: Unpacking the Factors Impacting on Small Businesses
Acute peripheral nerve injury can lead to chronic neuropathic pain. Having a standardized, non-in... more Acute peripheral nerve injury can lead to chronic neuropathic pain. Having a standardized, non-invasive method to evaluate pathological changes in a nerve following nerve injury would help with diagnostic and therapeutic assessments or interventions. The accurate evaluation of nerve fiber integrity after injury may provide insight into the extent of pathology and a patient's level of self-reported pain. The aim of this investigation was to evaluate the extent to which peripheral nerve integrity could be evaluated in an acute ankle injury cohort and how markers of nerve fiber integrity correlate with self-reported pain levels in afferent nerves. We recruited 39 pediatric participants with clinically defined neuropathic pain within 3 months of an ankle injury and 16 healthy controls. Participants underwent peripheral nerve MRI using diffusion tensor (DTI) and magnetization transfer imaging (MTI) of their injured and non-injured ankles. The imaging window was focused on the branchi...
The evolution of peripheral and central changes following a peripheral nerve injury imply the ons... more The evolution of peripheral and central changes following a peripheral nerve injury imply the onset of afferent signals that affect the brain. Changes to inflammatory processes may contribute to peripheral and central alterations such as altered psychological state and are not well characterized in humans. We focused on four elements that change peripheral and central nervous systems following ankle injury in 24 adolescent patients and 12 age-sex matched controls. Findings include (a) Changes in tibial, fibular, and sciatic nerve divisions consistent with neurodegeneration; (b) Changes within the primary motor and somatosensory areas as well as higher order brain regions implicated in pain processing; (c) Increased expression of fear of pain and pain reporting; and (d) Significant changes in cytokine profiles relating to neuroinflammatory signaling pathways. Findings address how changes resulting from peripheral nerve injury may develop into chronic neuropathic pain through changes in the peripheral and central nervous system.
Differentiating subtypes of chronic pain still remains a challenge—both from a subjective and obj... more Differentiating subtypes of chronic pain still remains a challenge—both from a subjective and objective point of view. Personalized medicine is the current goal of modern medical care and is limited by the subjective nature of patient self-reporting of symptoms and behavioral evaluation. Physiology-focused techniques such as genome and epigenetic analyses inform the delineation of pain groups; however, except under rare circumstances, they have diluted effects that again, share a common reliance on behavioral evaluation. The application of structural neuroimaging towards distinguishing pain subtypes is a growing field and may inform pain-group classification through the analysis of brain regions showing hypertrophic and atrophic changes in the presence of pain. Analytical techniques such as machine-learning classifiers have the capacity to process large volumes of data and delineate diagnostically relevant information from neuroimaging analysis. The issue of defining a “brain type” ...
Conventional approaches to the study of SMEs finance tend to focus on the changing financing opti... more Conventional approaches to the study of SMEs finance tend to focus on the changing financing options and preferences as small businesses move through different stages. However, one of the limitations of such approaches is that they do not explain how small businesses make decisions that lead to their financial structures. This paper suggests that small business owners deliberately choose how they manage their firms' finance as a direct consequence of their personal objectives for owning a business. This paper summarises the findings of a qualitative study with eleven small business owners using a novel qualitative model developed by Holmes and Gupta (2015). The results uncover a series of underlying factors, such as personal perspectives, life events and future outlook, which shape small business owners' goal and perceptions, and influence their financial decision, actions and future funding options reinforcing the view that small firms are an extension of their personal objectives.
religiosity, family solidarity, and social cohesion). Data were used from the 533 participants ag... more religiosity, family solidarity, and social cohesion). Data were used from the 533 participants aged 60 and older who were part of the Asian American Quality of Life (AAQoL) survey (N = 2,614). Logistic regression models of mental distress Kessler 6 ≥ 6) were tested to examine the independent and interactive effect of perceived discrimination and sociocultural factors (ethnic identity, religiosity, family solidarity, and social cohesion). About 24.9% of the sample reported that they had experienced racial/ethnic discrimination, and 31.2% of the sample fell into the category of having mental distress. In multivariate analyses, the experience of discrimination was found to increase the odds of having mental distress by 3.56 times (95% CI = 2.08−6.09, p < .001) whereas family solidarity reduced the odds by 5% (95% CI = .91−.99, p < .05). No interaction reached statistical significance. The present study improved our understanding of mental distress in older Asian Americans by identifying its associated factors. Programs which would help reducing the incidence of discrimination and strengthening family solidarity may reduce the prevalence of mental distress in older Asian Americans.
The 'just noticeable difference' (JND) represents the minimum amount by which a stimulus must cha... more The 'just noticeable difference' (JND) represents the minimum amount by which a stimulus must change to produce a noticeable variation in one's perceptual experience and is related to initial stimulus magnitude (i.e., Weber's law). The goal of the present study was to determine whether aperture shaping for visually derived and memory-guided grasping elicit a temporally dependent or temporally independent adherence to Weber's law. Participants were instructed to grasp differently sized objects (20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 mm) in conditions wherein vision of the grasping environment was available throughout the response (i.e., closed-loop), when occluded at movement onset (i.e., open-loop), and when occluded for a brief (i.e., 0 ms) or longer (i.e., 2000 ms) delay in advance of movement onset. Within-participant standard deviations of grip aperture (i.e., the JNDs) computed at decile increments of normalized grasping time were used to determine participant's sensitivity to detecting changes in object size. Results showed that JNDs increased linearly with increasing object size from 10% to 40% of grasping time; that is, the trial-to-trial stability (i.e., visuomotor certainty) of grip aperture (i.e., the comparator) decreased with increasing object size (i.e., the initial stimulus). However, a null JND/object size scaling was observed during the middle and late stages of the response (i.e., >50% of grasping time). Most notably, the temporal relationship between JNDs and object size scaling was similar across the different visual conditions used here. Thus, our results provide evidence that aperture shaping elicits a time-dependent early, but not late, adherence to the psychophysical principles of Weber's law.
The aim of this study was to develop equations by which the costs could be compared of various mo... more The aim of this study was to develop equations by which the costs could be compared of various models of performing diagnostic blocks for spinal pain. Design. Algorithms were elaborated describing different strategies for the diagnosis of cervical or lumbar zygapophysial joint pain using placebo-controlled diagnostic blocks, comparative local anaesthetic blocks, or no control blocks, and its treatment with radiofrequency neurotomy. For each step in each algorithm cost functions were applied. Summary equations were derived that allowed the cost of the algorithms to be compared algebraically. A selection of costs were substituted for the unknown variables in the equations in order to illustrate the cost-effectiveness of different algorithms under Australian and US conditions. Results. The equations indicated that cost-effectiveness was critically dependent on the ratio between the cost of treatment and the cost of a diagnostic block. For cervical zygapophysial joint pain, reimbursements discourage best practice, both in Australia and in the United States, by rendering the use of controlled blocks more expensive than no controls. For lumbar zygapophysial joint pain, controlled blocks are cost-effective under Australian fee schedules, and under some but not all American schedules. In the name of cost-effectiveness, the US fee structure encourages presumptive therapy without regard to diagnosis, but ignores the ethical and logistic consequences of inordinately high failure rates of therapy when a diagnosis is not established using controlled blocks. Conclusions. Best practice, using placebo-controlled diagnostic blocks before neurosurgical therapy of zygapophysial joint pain, is not encouraged and rewarded in the United States. In Australia it is compensated only in the context of lumbar zygapophysial joint pain. In the interests of short-term financial savings, the US fee structure sacrifices the majority of patients to failed treatment because of lack of proper diagnosis. Clinical absurdity, rather than evidence-based, best practice is encouraged.
Antioxidants has been utilized to prevent oxidative damage in diabetes and hypertensive diseases.... more Antioxidants has been utilized to prevent oxidative damage in diabetes and hypertensive diseases. The current study evaluated the effect of alpha-tocopherol supplementation on blood pressure and the lipid profile in streptozotocin-induced diabetes mellitus in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR). The systolic blood pressure and total cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol and triglycerides were measured in SHR-diabetes induced. Treatment with alpha-tocopherol (vitamin E) led to a decrease on systolic blood pressure and showed an increase of HDL-cholesterol and a decrease of LDL-cholesterol, but the concentrations of triglycerides and total cholesterol were not changed. The vitamin E was able to modulate the blood pressure and the lipidic profile as well, and therefore can be considered as an alternative treatment of lipid disorder found on diabetes and hypertension diseases.
BackgroundPredictors of the costs of psychosis have received insufficient research attention, par... more BackgroundPredictors of the costs of psychosis have received insufficient research attention, particularly factors associated with indirect costs.AimsTo identify the predictors of direct mental health care costs and indirect or time-loss costs in psychotic disorders and to discuss their implications for future interventions.MethodStructured interview data from the Low Prevalence Disorders Study (n=980) were used to examine predictors of the costs of psychosis in Australia. Estimates of annual costs per patient were derived from the perspectives of government and society. Hierarchical regressions were used to assess the contributions to costs of premorbid, psychosocial and clinical factors.ResultsSchizophrenia involved greater costs than other psychotic disorders. Non-completion of high-school education and chronicity of illness course were predictive of higher costs across all categories, and some factors were linked primarily with mental health care costs (e.g. age at onset, curren...
he supervises the Civil Litigation Clinic and teaches civil rights litigation, criminal procedure... more he supervises the Civil Litigation Clinic and teaches civil rights litigation, criminal procedure, trial practice, legal problems of the poor, and restorative justice. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for both Law School and undergraduate studies. This article was inspired from his representation of protesters in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina who were charged with removing Confederate monuments. See David A. Graham, How the Activists who tore down Durham's Confederate Statute got away with it, THE ATLANTIC (Feb. 21, 2018), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/durham-confederate-monument-charges-dismissed/553808/; Tammy Grubb, 2 guilty, 2 cases dismissed in toppling of UNC's Silent Sam statue. And a knife charge, NEWS & OBSERVER (Apr. 26, 2019), https://www.newsobserver.com/news/loca1article229620599.hnl. 2. N'dea Yancey-Bragg, UNC Chancellor Carol Folt resigns, approves removal of 'Silent Sam' Confederate statue, USA TODAY (Jan. 14, 2019), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/14/carol-folt-unc-chancellor-resigns-approves-sient-sam-remva/2577206002/. 3. Hannah McLellen, In less than a month, the Board of Governors will present a plan for Silent Sam, THE DAILY TARHEEL (Apr. 25, 2019), https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2019/04ibog-silentsam-update-0425 Jane Stancill and Carli Brosseau, UNC board tells Chancellor Folt to leave her job in 2 weeksearlier than expected, NEWS & OBSERVER (Jan.
IntroductionQuantitative sensory testing (QST) is often used to understand the perceptual basis o... more IntroductionQuantitative sensory testing (QST) is often used to understand the perceptual basis of acute and chronic conditions, including pain. As the need grows for developing a mechanistic understanding of neurological pathways underlying perception in the basic and clinical sciences, there is a greater need to adapt techniques such as QST to the magnetic resonance (MR) environment. No studies have yet evaluated the impact of the MR environment on the perception of thermal stimuli. This study aimed to evaluate the differences in temperature sensitivity outside an MR environment and during an MRI scanning session. We hypothesized that there would be a difference in how participants reported their pain sensitivity between the two environments.MethodsHealthy participants underwent thermal QST outside the MR scanning environment, where they were asked to rate the temperature of a noxious stimulus at which they perceived their pain to be 7/10, using a Likert scale ranging from 0 to 10...
Physical insult from a mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) leads to changes in blood flow in the b... more Physical insult from a mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) leads to changes in blood flow in the brain and measurable changes in white matter, suggesting a physiological basis for chronic symptom presentation. Post-traumatic headache (PTH) is frequently reported by persons after an mTBI that may persist beyond the acute period (>3 months). It remains unclear whether ongoing inflammation may contribute to the clinical trajectory of PTH. We recruited a cohort of pediatric subjects with PTH who had an acute or a persistent clinical trajectory, each around the 3-month post-injury time point, as well as a group of age and sex-matched healthy controls. We collected salivary markers of mRNA expression as well as brain imaging and psychological testing. The persistent PTH group showed the highest levels of psychological burden and pain symptom reporting. Our data suggest that the acute and persistent PTH cohort had elevated levels of complement factors relative to healthy controls. The gr...
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
Post-traumatic headache (PTH) is a challenging clinical condition to identify and treat as it int... more Post-traumatic headache (PTH) is a challenging clinical condition to identify and treat as it integrates multiple subjectively defined symptoms with underlying physiological processes. The precise mechanisms underlying PTH are unclear, and it remains to be understood how to integrate the patient experience with underlying biology when attempting to classify persons with PTH, particularly in the pediatric setting where patient self-report may be highly variable. The objective of this investigation was to evaluate the use of different machine learning (ML) classifiers to differentiate pediatric and young adult subjects with PTH from healthy controls using behavioral data from self-report questionnaires that reflect concussion symptoms, mental health, pain experience of the participants, and structural brain imaging from cortical and sub-cortical locations. Behavioral data, alongside brain imaging, survived data reduction methods and both contributed toward final models. Behavioral dat...
Henry Clay standout and United States Olympian Megan Kleine is preparing for the State Swim Meet ... more Henry Clay standout and United States Olympian Megan Kleine is preparing for the State Swim Meet to be held February 1 9-20 at the Lancaster Aquatics Center on the University of Kentucky campus. Kleine, a senior, won a gold medal on the relay team in Barcelona last summer. Photo credit to the Kleine family.
CON F E R E NC E VOLU M E | 2 015 * The authors are from the University of Western Sydney and DBM... more CON F E R E NC E VOLU M E | 2 015 * The authors are from the University of Western Sydney and DBM Consultants, respectively. The authors would like to acknowledge Brian Fine at the QOR online access panel company, Luke Aitken from the NSW Business Chamber, and Dr Russell Blamey, Dr Dieu Anh Vu and David Claridad from DBM Consultants for their contributions. Opening Aladdin’s Cave: Unpacking the Factors Impacting on Small Businesses
Acute peripheral nerve injury can lead to chronic neuropathic pain. Having a standardized, non-in... more Acute peripheral nerve injury can lead to chronic neuropathic pain. Having a standardized, non-invasive method to evaluate pathological changes in a nerve following nerve injury would help with diagnostic and therapeutic assessments or interventions. The accurate evaluation of nerve fiber integrity after injury may provide insight into the extent of pathology and a patient's level of self-reported pain. The aim of this investigation was to evaluate the extent to which peripheral nerve integrity could be evaluated in an acute ankle injury cohort and how markers of nerve fiber integrity correlate with self-reported pain levels in afferent nerves. We recruited 39 pediatric participants with clinically defined neuropathic pain within 3 months of an ankle injury and 16 healthy controls. Participants underwent peripheral nerve MRI using diffusion tensor (DTI) and magnetization transfer imaging (MTI) of their injured and non-injured ankles. The imaging window was focused on the branchi...
The evolution of peripheral and central changes following a peripheral nerve injury imply the ons... more The evolution of peripheral and central changes following a peripheral nerve injury imply the onset of afferent signals that affect the brain. Changes to inflammatory processes may contribute to peripheral and central alterations such as altered psychological state and are not well characterized in humans. We focused on four elements that change peripheral and central nervous systems following ankle injury in 24 adolescent patients and 12 age-sex matched controls. Findings include (a) Changes in tibial, fibular, and sciatic nerve divisions consistent with neurodegeneration; (b) Changes within the primary motor and somatosensory areas as well as higher order brain regions implicated in pain processing; (c) Increased expression of fear of pain and pain reporting; and (d) Significant changes in cytokine profiles relating to neuroinflammatory signaling pathways. Findings address how changes resulting from peripheral nerve injury may develop into chronic neuropathic pain through changes in the peripheral and central nervous system.
Differentiating subtypes of chronic pain still remains a challenge—both from a subjective and obj... more Differentiating subtypes of chronic pain still remains a challenge—both from a subjective and objective point of view. Personalized medicine is the current goal of modern medical care and is limited by the subjective nature of patient self-reporting of symptoms and behavioral evaluation. Physiology-focused techniques such as genome and epigenetic analyses inform the delineation of pain groups; however, except under rare circumstances, they have diluted effects that again, share a common reliance on behavioral evaluation. The application of structural neuroimaging towards distinguishing pain subtypes is a growing field and may inform pain-group classification through the analysis of brain regions showing hypertrophic and atrophic changes in the presence of pain. Analytical techniques such as machine-learning classifiers have the capacity to process large volumes of data and delineate diagnostically relevant information from neuroimaging analysis. The issue of defining a “brain type” ...
Conventional approaches to the study of SMEs finance tend to focus on the changing financing opti... more Conventional approaches to the study of SMEs finance tend to focus on the changing financing options and preferences as small businesses move through different stages. However, one of the limitations of such approaches is that they do not explain how small businesses make decisions that lead to their financial structures. This paper suggests that small business owners deliberately choose how they manage their firms' finance as a direct consequence of their personal objectives for owning a business. This paper summarises the findings of a qualitative study with eleven small business owners using a novel qualitative model developed by Holmes and Gupta (2015). The results uncover a series of underlying factors, such as personal perspectives, life events and future outlook, which shape small business owners' goal and perceptions, and influence their financial decision, actions and future funding options reinforcing the view that small firms are an extension of their personal objectives.
religiosity, family solidarity, and social cohesion). Data were used from the 533 participants ag... more religiosity, family solidarity, and social cohesion). Data were used from the 533 participants aged 60 and older who were part of the Asian American Quality of Life (AAQoL) survey (N = 2,614). Logistic regression models of mental distress Kessler 6 ≥ 6) were tested to examine the independent and interactive effect of perceived discrimination and sociocultural factors (ethnic identity, religiosity, family solidarity, and social cohesion). About 24.9% of the sample reported that they had experienced racial/ethnic discrimination, and 31.2% of the sample fell into the category of having mental distress. In multivariate analyses, the experience of discrimination was found to increase the odds of having mental distress by 3.56 times (95% CI = 2.08−6.09, p < .001) whereas family solidarity reduced the odds by 5% (95% CI = .91−.99, p < .05). No interaction reached statistical significance. The present study improved our understanding of mental distress in older Asian Americans by identifying its associated factors. Programs which would help reducing the incidence of discrimination and strengthening family solidarity may reduce the prevalence of mental distress in older Asian Americans.
The 'just noticeable difference' (JND) represents the minimum amount by which a stimulus must cha... more The 'just noticeable difference' (JND) represents the minimum amount by which a stimulus must change to produce a noticeable variation in one's perceptual experience and is related to initial stimulus magnitude (i.e., Weber's law). The goal of the present study was to determine whether aperture shaping for visually derived and memory-guided grasping elicit a temporally dependent or temporally independent adherence to Weber's law. Participants were instructed to grasp differently sized objects (20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 mm) in conditions wherein vision of the grasping environment was available throughout the response (i.e., closed-loop), when occluded at movement onset (i.e., open-loop), and when occluded for a brief (i.e., 0 ms) or longer (i.e., 2000 ms) delay in advance of movement onset. Within-participant standard deviations of grip aperture (i.e., the JNDs) computed at decile increments of normalized grasping time were used to determine participant's sensitivity to detecting changes in object size. Results showed that JNDs increased linearly with increasing object size from 10% to 40% of grasping time; that is, the trial-to-trial stability (i.e., visuomotor certainty) of grip aperture (i.e., the comparator) decreased with increasing object size (i.e., the initial stimulus). However, a null JND/object size scaling was observed during the middle and late stages of the response (i.e., >50% of grasping time). Most notably, the temporal relationship between JNDs and object size scaling was similar across the different visual conditions used here. Thus, our results provide evidence that aperture shaping elicits a time-dependent early, but not late, adherence to the psychophysical principles of Weber's law.
The aim of this study was to develop equations by which the costs could be compared of various mo... more The aim of this study was to develop equations by which the costs could be compared of various models of performing diagnostic blocks for spinal pain. Design. Algorithms were elaborated describing different strategies for the diagnosis of cervical or lumbar zygapophysial joint pain using placebo-controlled diagnostic blocks, comparative local anaesthetic blocks, or no control blocks, and its treatment with radiofrequency neurotomy. For each step in each algorithm cost functions were applied. Summary equations were derived that allowed the cost of the algorithms to be compared algebraically. A selection of costs were substituted for the unknown variables in the equations in order to illustrate the cost-effectiveness of different algorithms under Australian and US conditions. Results. The equations indicated that cost-effectiveness was critically dependent on the ratio between the cost of treatment and the cost of a diagnostic block. For cervical zygapophysial joint pain, reimbursements discourage best practice, both in Australia and in the United States, by rendering the use of controlled blocks more expensive than no controls. For lumbar zygapophysial joint pain, controlled blocks are cost-effective under Australian fee schedules, and under some but not all American schedules. In the name of cost-effectiveness, the US fee structure encourages presumptive therapy without regard to diagnosis, but ignores the ethical and logistic consequences of inordinately high failure rates of therapy when a diagnosis is not established using controlled blocks. Conclusions. Best practice, using placebo-controlled diagnostic blocks before neurosurgical therapy of zygapophysial joint pain, is not encouraged and rewarded in the United States. In Australia it is compensated only in the context of lumbar zygapophysial joint pain. In the interests of short-term financial savings, the US fee structure sacrifices the majority of patients to failed treatment because of lack of proper diagnosis. Clinical absurdity, rather than evidence-based, best practice is encouraged.
Antioxidants has been utilized to prevent oxidative damage in diabetes and hypertensive diseases.... more Antioxidants has been utilized to prevent oxidative damage in diabetes and hypertensive diseases. The current study evaluated the effect of alpha-tocopherol supplementation on blood pressure and the lipid profile in streptozotocin-induced diabetes mellitus in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR). The systolic blood pressure and total cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol and triglycerides were measured in SHR-diabetes induced. Treatment with alpha-tocopherol (vitamin E) led to a decrease on systolic blood pressure and showed an increase of HDL-cholesterol and a decrease of LDL-cholesterol, but the concentrations of triglycerides and total cholesterol were not changed. The vitamin E was able to modulate the blood pressure and the lipidic profile as well, and therefore can be considered as an alternative treatment of lipid disorder found on diabetes and hypertension diseases.
BackgroundPredictors of the costs of psychosis have received insufficient research attention, par... more BackgroundPredictors of the costs of psychosis have received insufficient research attention, particularly factors associated with indirect costs.AimsTo identify the predictors of direct mental health care costs and indirect or time-loss costs in psychotic disorders and to discuss their implications for future interventions.MethodStructured interview data from the Low Prevalence Disorders Study (n=980) were used to examine predictors of the costs of psychosis in Australia. Estimates of annual costs per patient were derived from the perspectives of government and society. Hierarchical regressions were used to assess the contributions to costs of premorbid, psychosocial and clinical factors.ResultsSchizophrenia involved greater costs than other psychotic disorders. Non-completion of high-school education and chronicity of illness course were predictive of higher costs across all categories, and some factors were linked primarily with mental health care costs (e.g. age at onset, curren...
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