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Purpose: Down syndrome occurs in one of 700 births, and high rates of hearing loss are reported in this population. This puts children with Down syndrome at risk for communication, learning, and social development difficulties, compounding known language and cognitive vulnerabilities in this population. The purpose of this study was to comprehensively characterize audiological profiles in children with Down syndrome, including the use of extended high-frequency sensitivity and speech intelligibility index assessment. Method: Participants were 18 children with Down syndrome between 5 and 17 years of age. Audiological profiles were characterized using behavioral audiometry, tympanometry, and wideband acoustic immittance (WAI). Audibility was characterized using the speech intelligibility index. Results: Of the participants successfully completing behavioral audiometry, hearing loss of a moderate or greater degree was observed in one or both ears for 46% of the participants at conventional audiometric test frequencies and 85% of the participants at frequencies above 8 kHz. Seven children met criteria for amplification based on the speech intelligibility index, but only two wore hearing aids. Abnormal middle ear function was found in approximately 50% of the participants for whom WAI or tympanometry were successfully measured. Conclusions: Consistent with prior research, high rates of hearing loss and middle ear dysfunction were observed. The high prevalence of hearing loss above 8 kHz suggests the importance of including extended high-frequency assessment in audiologic characterization of children with Down syndrome. Few children meeting audibility-based guidelines for amplification wore hearing aids, putting them at additional risk for speech/language and educational difficulties. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21200422

The purpose of the conservation project was to conserve a mid-eighteenth century sofa and return it as far as possible to a historically accurate appearance for display in the ‘Art of Living’ galle...

Victims often respond to survival incidents with maladaptive behaviours that suggest impairment in executive function. To examine this hypothesis the authors tested sub-components of executive function during an intensive military survival exercise. Compared to a control group the survival course participants showed significant impairment in the incongruent condition of the Stroop task; the mean repetition gap and adjacent letter pair components of the random letter generation task; and the planning and action components of the Tower of London task. No impairment was found in dual-task performance nor in verbal fluency. The pattern of the data suggests that the maladaptive behaviour frequently observed in survival incidents may be explained by dysfunction in the supervisory systemcontention scheduler interface.

SummaryChemical synthesis in combination with precision polymer modification allows the systematic exploration of the effect of protein properties, such as charge and hydrodynamic radius, on potency using defined, homogeneous conjugates. A series of polymer-modified synthetic erythropoiesis proteins were constructed that had a polypeptide chain similar to the amino acid sequence of human erythropoietin but differed significantly in the number and type of attached polymers. The analogs differed in charge from +5 to −26 at neutral pH and varied in molecular weight from 30 to 54 kDa. All were active in an in vitro cell proliferation assay. However, in vivo potency was found to be strongly dependent on overall charge and size. The trends observed in this study may serve as starting points for the construction of more potent synthetic EPO analogs in the future.