Life-span development: a review of theory and practice for families with chronically ill members

While the family's primacy in the patient's adaptation to chronic illness increasingly is being recognized by health professionals and social scientists, the reverse side of the coin, that is, the impact of chronicity on the family, has received little attention. A life-span development perspective is used to enrich the more traditional frameworks employed to study family development and also as a unifying framework from which to view the impact of illness on individual family members and the family as a unit. A review of selected literature reveals a profile of families most at risk for serious disruption in situations involving chronic illness. Propositions suggesting interventions directed at patients and families experiencing chronicity are derived.     

Sex,stress, and health: Does stress predict health symptoms differently for the two sexes?

Objectives: Previous studies have been inconsistent with regard to the extent to which stress perception, rather than stressor exposure, predicts negative health symptoms. Because sex differences have been observed in all three of these variables, in this study the possibility that sex differences also exist in the relationships between them is investigated. Methods: Self‐report inventories of perceived stress, stressor exposure, and negative health symptoms were given to 107 young‐adult participants (65 females, 42 males). Results: Sex differences were observed in the associations among perceived stress, stressor exposure, and negative health symptom rates. Specifically, while higher perceived stress and higher stressor exposure rates independently predicted higher negative health symptoms rates in females, only higher stressor exposure rates independently predicted higher negative health symptoms in males. Indeed, unexpectedly, after controlling for exposure to stressors there was a trend towards higher perceived stress predicting lower negative health symptoms in males. Conclusions: While exposure to stress was a significant negative predictor of health for both sexes, perception of stress was predictive only for females. One implication of this finding is that different psychological models are needed to predict health symptoms in the two sexes. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Large clonal expansions of human virus-specific memory cytotoxic T lymphocytes within the CD57+ CD28- CD8+ T-cell population

The proportion of human peripheral blood CD8+ T cells that are CD57+ CD28- is low at birth but increases with age and in individuals infected with human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) or human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). These CD57+ CD28- CD8+ T cells contain large oligoclonal T-cell expansions whose antigen specificity is unknown. We identified clonal expansions of virus-specific memory cytotoxic T-lymphocyte precursors (CTLp) in both healthy carriers of HCMV and in asymptomatic HIV-infected subjects. In each subject, from the T-cell receptor (TCR) beta-chain hypervariable sequence of each immunodominant CTL clone, we designed complementary oligonucleotide probes to quantify the size and phenotypic segregation of individual virus-specific CTL clones in highly purified populations of peripheral blood CD8+ T cells. We found large clonal expansions of virus-specific CTL clonotypes in CD57+ CD28- CD8+ T cells. Using limiting dilution analysis, we found functional peptide-specific CTLp at high frequency in CD57+ CD28- cells. Thus, memory CTL specific for persistent viruses account for many oligoclonal expansions within CD57+ CD28- CD8+ T cells.     

Serratia plymuthica sepsis associated with infection of central venous catheter.

Serratia plymuthica was isolated from the blood and from a central venous catheter tip in a 54-year-old man with alcoholic cirrhosis and clinical signs of sepsis. This was the seventh reported isolate of S. plymuthica from a clinical specimen and the first in which the organism was clearly a significant pathogen.     

Bilingual deep dysphasia

We report B.R.B., a bilingual Turkish–English speaker with deep dysphasia. B.R.B. shows the typical pattern of semantic errors in repetition with effects of lexicality and imageability on performance in both languages. The question we asked is whether language type (Turkish or English) or language status—that is, first acquired (L1) or second acquired (L2)—has a greater impact on performance. Results showed that repetition in L1 (Turkish) was better than that in L2 (English). We also observed effects of language status on oral reading, writing to dictation, and naming (spoken and written) with greater impairment to repetition than other tasks in both languages. An additional finding was that spoken-word translation in both directions was worse than written-word translation, and word class had an effect on translation from L1 to L2. We argue that interactive activation models of deep dysphasia could explain deep dysphasia in bilingual speakers and interactions between task and language, if the weighted connections that support language processing in L2 are assumed to be weaker, thus causing rapid phonological decay to have more impact on task performance in L2. Implications of the results for models of bilingual language processing are also considered.     

Improved quantification of amyloid burden and associated biomarker cut-off points: results from the first amyloid Singaporean cohort with overlapping cerebrovascular disease

European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging - The analysis of the [11C]PiB-PET amyloid images of a unique Asian cohort of 186 participants featuring overlapping vascular diseases...