Development of integrated provision for pre-fives in the UK

This paper analyses the diverse services currently available for children under five in the UK, and considers the nature of the demand for them. It recounts the initiative made by Strathclyde Region to co-ordinate and integrate pre-five provision, administratively and at a service level. It then considers the efforts of other local authorities to integrate administratively and looks at some of the complexities of attempting to do so at a service level.     

Going, going, gone . . . ? Implicit and explicit tests of conceptual knowledge in a longitudinal study of semantic dementia

Patients suffering from semantic dementia provide important constraints on theories of the structure and organisation of semantic memory. In this article we report one such patient, AM, whose progressive deterioration of semantics enables us to address the much-debated issue of whether conceptual structure is hierarchically organised. The hierarchical account predicts that brain damage should impair lower levels of the hierarchy (property information) before affecting higher level (category) information (Warrington and Shallice, Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 1975, 27, 635–657). We evaluate this prediction by repeated testing of AM in two studies—a semantic priming task and a verification task—over an 18 month period, contrasting the progressive deterioration of properties (functional and perceptual) and category relations (category co-ordinates and category labels). Properties were preserved longer than category information, arguing against a hierarchical account of semantic memory. In addition, functional properties were most robust to brain damage, supporting our claim that functional information plays a special role in semantic representations (Durrant-Peatfield et al., Proc. 19th Ann. Conf. of the Cognitive Science Society. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 1997, pp. 193–198. Tyler et al., Cognitive Neuropsychol. 1997, 14, 511–545).     

The Results of Water Fluoridation in Ireland

The visit of Dr. Trendley Dean to Dublin in the mid-1950s helped accelerate the decision to introduce water fluoridation as a public health measure in the prevention of caries in the Republic of Ireland. A challenge to the constitutional validity of the Health (Fluoridation of Water Supplies) Act 1960 failed and in 1964 the water supplies of Dublin city were fluoridated. Over the next seven to eight years all the major urban communities in the Republic of Ireland were fluoridated. Currently, 67 percent of the 3.5 million people in the country reside in fluoridated communities. Studies conducted over the last 20 years show that residents of fluoridated communities have better dental health than those in nonfluoridated communities—the mean dmft is lower in children and the number of natural teeth present in adults is higher.     

Terminal transverse limb defects and early chorionic villus sampling: Evaluation of 4,300 cases with completed follow-up

Data from 4,300 consecutive cases following prenatal diagnosis by transcervical (TC) CVS (n = (1,570) and transabdominal (TA) CVS (n = 2,370) were evaluated. In the follow-up study only infants examined by a physician were included. Gestational age varied between 8.5 and 11.6 weeks (mean 10.3 weeks) for TC-CVS and between 9.3 and 20 weeks (mean 12.3 weeks) for TA-CVS 98% of TC-CVS was performed at 9–10 weeks, 80.7% of TA-CVS procedures were carried out at 12–15 weeks. Selective termination took place in 97 cases of TC-CVS (6.1%) and in 72 cases of TA-CVS (2.6%). Another 8 Women had a termination for psychosocial reasons, resulting in 4,123 (1,469 TC, 2,645 TA) continuing pregnancies. The overall fetal loss rare <28 weeks was 5.4% (n = 80) for TC-CVS and 2.6% (n = 70) for TA-CVS. The overall incidence of congenital abnormalities after birth was 0.9%. Two terminal transversal limb defects were detected in the TC-CVS group (0.14%) against one (0.04%) in the TA-CVS group. © 1993 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Neurological disease associated with Mycoplasma pneumoniae infection. PCR evidence against a direct invasive mechanism

Aims—To investigate the pathology in patients presenting with sudden onset neurological illnesses associated with Mycoplasma pneumoniae infection.     

Pelvic Pain Complicating LHRH Analogue Treatment of Fibroids

We present these 3 cases to alert others to the possibility of severe pain with rapid shrinkage of fibroids occurring during LHRH analogue treatment. We suggest management of such events should not be surgical except for vaginal excision of prolapsed fibroid polyps.