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Age-related distance esotropia (ARDET) is characterized by an esodeviation greater at distance than near in older aged patients and generally managed with prism spectacles or surgery. The purpose of this study is to describe the prevalence, clinical characteristics, and natural history of age-related distance esotropia in a defined population. The medical records of all adult (≥19 years of age) residents of Olmsted County, Minnesota, diagnosed with an esodeviation at least 2 prism diopters (PD) greater at distance than near, from 1 January 1985, through 31 December 2004, were retrospectively reviewed. Seventy-three (9.7%) of 751 new cases of adult-onset strabismus were diagnosed with age-related distance esotropia during the 20-year period. The mean age of onset was 70 years (range, 19 to 93 years) and 48 (65.8%) were female (

OBJECTIVE Health disparities are evident for Black Americans with HIV disease, who are disproportionally affected by the epidemic in the United States. The current study investigated whether the higher rates of neurocognitive impairment in Black Americans with HIV disease may be at least partly attributable to health literacy, which is a potentially modifiable factor. Method: Participants were 61 White and 25 Black participants (ages 27-70) with HIV disease who were enrolled in studies at an urban academic center in Southern California. Neurocognitive function was assessed by an age-adjusted global score from the Cogstate battery. Health literacy was measured by a composite score derived from the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine, Newest Vital Sign, and 3-Brief. Results: Bootstrap confidence interval mediation analyses showed that health literacy was a significant mediator of the relationship between race and neurocognition; that is, there were no direct ethnoracial differences in neurocognition after accounting for health literacy. A follow-up model to confirm the directionality of this association demonstrated that neurocognition was not a significant mediator of the relationship between race and health literacy. Conclusions: Low health literacy may contribute to the higher rates of neurocognitive impairment for Black Americans with HIV disease. Future studies might examine the possible mechanism of this mediating relationship (e.g., access to health information, health behaviors, socioeconomics) and determine whether culturally tailored interventions that improve health literacy also confer broader brain health benefits for Black Americans with HIV disease.

Background: Mutations in the RCC1 and BTB domain-containing protein 1 (RCBTB1) gene have been implicated in a rare form of retinal dystrophy. Herein, we report the clinical features of a 45-year-ol...

Animal interactions can provide numerous benefits for child development and education. In the United States, goats are increasingly used in urban farm to school (FTS) programs to enhance children's...

Women are becoming more prevalent in clinical neuropsychology, but gender bias and disparities persist across multiple professional domains. This study examined potential gender disparities in hist...

Heterozygous c.440 G > T mutation in the S-antigen visual arrestin (SAG) gene has been described as a cause of autosomal dominant retinitis pigmentosa (adRP) in a series of patients of Hispanic ori...

Mutations in the splicing factor pre-messenger RNA processing factor 31 (PRPF31) gene cause autosomal dominant retinitis pigmentosa 11 (RP11) through a haplo-insufficiency mechanism. We describe th...

To examine the usefulness of the Edinburgh Cognitive and Behavioral Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Screen (ECAS) as a cognitive screening tool for the detection of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). A secondary aim was to determine whether people with FTD combined with ALS (ALS-FTD) exhibit a similar ECAS profile to that of people with bvFTD alone. Methods: Patients with ALS-FTD and bvFTD and healthy controls were recruited. Participants were administered the ECAS, which comprises tests of language, verbal fluency, executive functions, memory, and visual-spatial functions. They also carried out analogous, full-length cognitive tests that examine naming, spelling, sentence completion, and social cognition skills. Results: The study cohort comprised 20 ALS-FTD patients, 23 with bvFTD, and 30 controls. Highly significant group differences were elicited for all cognitive domains, reflecting poorer performance in patients compared to controls. No significant differences in overall test scores were found between ALS-FTD and bvFTD patients, although ALS-FTD patients showed a higher frequency of impairment on verbal fluency. Correlative analyses revealed inter-relationships in patients (but not controls) between scores in different domains, most marked in bvFTD. There were strong correlations between performance on ECAS subtests and analogous cognitive tasks. Conclusion: The ECAS is a sensitive and valuable tool for the assessment of FTD. Executive, language and behavioral breakdown may, however, compromise performance in other cognitive domains, reducing the specificity of the ‘frontotemporal’ cognitive profile. Subtle differences observed between ALS-FTD and bvFTD raise questions regarding the precise relationship between bvFTD with and without ALS.

Adults with low-income often lack access to nutrition education and experience food insecurity, which compromises nutrition-related chronic disease management. Through qualitative interviews, we ex...

We investigated what a cognitive framework for measuring classroom teaching could reveal about (a) the impact of a professional development (PD) program on teaching practices and (b) the relationsh...

A cornerstone of feminist thinking, intersectionality offers a critical analytical tool for exploring how gender intersects with other social structures of power. However, this leaves intersectiona...

A cornerstone of feminist scholarship, intersectionality theory and method explore how gender intersects with other forms of social difference such as race and class. However, in light of the entangled relationships between nature and society, this article argues that human experience cannot be understood through social analysis alone, as offered by intersectionality. This article interrogates how materialities in the physical world might be incorporated within intersectionality. Drawing on gender and water research, the article explores how intersectionality complicates the social dimensions of water access, use, and control. Yet, applying intersectional thinking to water, scholars show how ecological processes of differentiation are also at play. Case studies from Sudan and Bangladesh exemplify how spatial and temporal aspects of water distribution intersect with the social complexities of water access. The article then returns to examine how intersectionality works to explore a framework for in...

This pilot study explores children's understanding of informed consent (IC) and the potential of participatory visual methods for improving the IC process. Strategies used to improve the IC process have generated mixed evidence as to their ability to increase understanding and willingness to participate among potential research participants. Two workshops with 13 children aged 8–12 years were held to discuss the content of IC forms, particularly confidentiality and voluntary participation, and the children took photographs to represent these concepts. Simplified written IC forms generated boredom, disengagement, and/or anxiety for some children. Preliminary results of this pilot study indicate the potential to enhance the IC process by using participatory visual methods with children to make visual IC forms.

Photographs taken by women and men through a photovoice research project about conservation in rural Sierra Leone identify water as an important community resource. Water is crucial for survival. In this rural African context, women are responsible for collecting and managing domestic water. The points of access to water-taps, rivers, and wells-occupy and construct particular spaces. These spaces are texts rich with meaning: they can be interpreted in order to learn something about how water is used. Drawing from visual studies and theories of space and place, I examine photographs of water spaces taken by participants in the photovoice project to better understand and particularise the gendered nature of water in Sierra Leone. My interpretation of the arrangement of space and objects depicted in the photographs makes connections between water spaces and the social relationships within which they are located. Incorporating my own research and volunteer experiences in Sierra Leone, I illustrate nuanced per...

Patients with semantic dementia (SD) show relative preservation of number skills, contrasting with their severe multimodal semantic impairment. Underpinning this preservation, it is argued, is spared understanding of numerical quantity, a competence likened to a spatial map and subserved by the parietal lobes. The study investigated quantity knowledge in 14 SD patients to determine whether it is consistently preserved irrespective of disease severity or whether there are constraints on this preserved knowledge domain. Performance was well preserved on Piagetian conservation tasks, estimating object numerosity, and understanding of basic numerical magnitude. However, patients showed impairment on real-world estimation tasks, increasing with semantic severity. More surprisingly, on an analogue scale task, they produced implausible responses, suggesting degraded knowledge of precise numerical relationships. The findings challenge the view that knowledge of quantity is totally preserved in SD and suggest that the temporal lobes have a contributory role in the conceptual understanding of quantity.

This essay includes selected examples of interview discourse derived from a larger study exploring how social structures and cultural identification issues of race, sex, and class are jointly negotiated in the relational accounts of black and white interracial marital partners. A dialectic of critical and interpretive perspectives is utilized to uncover complex intersecting cultural and relational identifications. The discourse shows that couples negotiate who they are in their relationships; ambivalence, contradiction, and change over time are evident. At some points, couples' negotiations reveal disassociation from the label “interracial,” and discursive forms that show both problematizing and evading race in their personal relationships and in the workplace. Overall, couples' collaborative interview discourse reveals a vigilance and protection of the partners, their relationship, and family from discrimination.

Background: Pictorial stimuli are a traditional means of discourse elicitation for individuals with aphasia. The discourse genre produced in response to pictures may be affected by the presence of aphasia, the nature of the stimulus, or both. Ethnicity may also influence discourse responses, an issue critical for effective differentiation between communication changes associated with pathology and normal differences associated with ethnicity. There is a need for discourse research with African Americans who have aphasia, highlighted by ethnic group differences in stroke prevalence, and potential ethnic group differences in dialect. Aims: This study was designed to address whether the quantity and quality of discourse produced in response to pictorial stimuli differed between African Americans and Caucasians with and without aphasia. Methods & Procedures: We investigated the discourse of 33 African Americans with aphasia, 30 African American non-brain-injured controls, 29 Caucasians with aphasia, and 32 Ca...

The earliest changes in the development of Huntington's disease (HD) remain controversial. Studies of cognitive function in preclinical individuals who have the HD mutation have yielded contradictory results. This study compared cognitive and motor performance in 51 people with the HD mutation who had no clinical signs of HD, 85 at-risk individuals without the HD mutation and 43 individuals in the early stages of HD. Whereas highly significant differences were detected between the preclinical and early-HD groups, only subtle impairments were present in at-risk individuals with the HD mutation compared to those with normal HD alleles, principally for low-demand psychomotor tasks. Complementing these observations, longitudinal investigation showed that performance on psychomotor tasks in people with the mutation who were close to clinical onset of HD was intermediate between that of individuals many years from onset and those in the early stages of HD, suggesting a slowly insidious evolution of deficit. In contrast, memory performance showed a more precipitous decline around the time of clinical onset of HD. The findings, which suggest that HD patients' functional deficits do not evolve uniformly, help to resolve some of the disparities in the literature on preclinical HD.

We compared performance on language impairment, functional communication, and discourse measures between 33 African-American aphasic patients and 30 African-American normal subjects. The aphasic group performed significantly lower than the normal group on the Western Aphasia Battery Aphasia and Cortical Quotients, Token Test, and ASHA Functional Assessment of Communication Skills for Adults. Moreover, the aphasic group performed significantly lower than the normal group in their quality of language on a discourse task that required telling a frightening experience. Significant relationships between performance on the measures were confined to those that index language impairment. Use of a normal ethnic cohort for comparison with African-American aphasic performance may control for potential ethnic bias in the measures. In addition, use of a discourse task permits observation of grammatical and stylistic features in African-American English that may not be captured or are ignored by traditional language im...

This article provides a review of the literature related to presence and performance within virtual environments. Summary tables are provided to present the reader with a general framework in which to evaluate the type of studies that have been run, as well as representative findings across different tasks and virtual environments. Within the general area of performance, the topics of navigation and knowledge acquisition have been expanded, as they are seen as important aspects of tasks performed within virtual environments drawing much attention from researchers. In addition, given that a sense of presence is an important aspect of the virtual environment experience, the literature related to presence within virtual environments is also reviewed. The summary tables provided can be used to indicate areas where additional research efforts are needed to more fully explain how human performance and presence are affected by use of virtual environment technology. This article concludes with a discussion of pot...

This study compared proverb processing across three groups, i.e. patients with fluent aphasia (APH), patients with Alzheimer's Disease (AD), and normal control subjects (NC). Proverb stimuli were used to examine the effects of group membership and proverb familiarity in two presentation formats (i.e. spontaneous versus multiple-choice) on performance. The sensitivity of cognitive measures as predictors of ability to interpret proverbs was also investigated. In relation to NC subjects, patients with fluent APH exhibited significant difficulty formulating responses for familiar and unfamiliar spontaneous proverbs, whereas patients with AD demonstrated lower performance only on the unfamiliar proverbs. On the multiple-choice paradigm, however, patients with APH exhibited minimal difficulty. Conversely, the patients with AD manifested significant problems selecting the correct abstract response for familiar proverbs. With regard to predictors, language was relevant to familiar proverb interpretations and to proverbs presented in the spontaneous format. Cognition was a sensitive predictor for unfamiliar proverb interpretations and to the multiple-choice format. Deficits on the proverb tasks are discussed with reference to the potential breakdown of underlying linguistic and cognitive processes. The present data support the diagnostic value of proverbs in elucidating brain- behaviour relationships.

(1995). Race & Racism in the Last Quarter of '95: The OJ & Post-OJ Trial & The Million Man March—A Symposium. The Black Scholar: Vol. 25, Million Man March, pp. 37-59.