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Karen L Caldwell,1 Shawn M Bergman,2 Scott R Collier,3 N Travis Triplett,3 Rebecca Quin,4 John Bergquist,5 Carl F Pieper6 1Department of Human Development and Psychological Counseling, 2Department of Psychology, 3Department of Health and Exercise Science, 4Department of Theatre and Dance, 5Department of Psychology, Appalachian State University, Boone, 6Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC,USA Objective: To determine feasibility and estimate the effect of a 10-week tai chi chuan (TCC) intervention on anxiety and sleep quality in young adults. Participants: Seventy-five adults (18–40 years) from a predominately undergraduate mid-sized university. Methods: This was an assessor blinded, randomized feasibility trial, and participants were randomized into one of three groups: 10 weeks of TCC meeting 2 times per week, 10 weeks of TCC with a DVD of the curriculum, and control group receiving a handout on anxiety management. Anxiety and sleep quality were assessed 4 times: baseline, 4 weeks, 10 weeks (immediate post-intervention), and 2 months post-intervention. Retention was defined as a participant attending the baseline assessment and at least one other assessment. Adherence to the intervention was set a priori as attendance at 80% of the TCC classes. Results: Eighty-five percent of participants were retained during the intervention and 70% completed the 2 month follow-up assessments. To increase statistical power, the two TCC groups were combined in the analyses of anxiety and sleep quality measures. No significant changes in anxiety were found in the control group, while levels of anxiety decreased significantly over time in the two TCC groups. Sleep quality scores improved across time for all three groups, but adherent TCC participants reported greater improvement than control participants. Conclusion: TCC may be an effective nonpharmaceutical means of improving anxiety and poor sleep quality in young adults. Keywords: anxiety, sleep quality, tai chi chuan, randomized controlled trial, feasibility study

Small thalamic infarcts can present with a variety of sensory deficits that can be difficult to diagnose clinically because of their seemingly disconnected manifestations.Here we report a case of a 55-year-old man presenting with the clinical findings of Cheiro-Oral syndrome, a pure sensory thalamic lacunar syndrome that clinically presents with contralateral sensory deficits of the fingers and hemimouth.This report highlights both common and unusual clinical presentations of isolated thalamic infarctions, correlating clinical symptomatology with anatomic localization. In patients with such findings on examination, thalamic infarction should be considered, with a thorough workup initiated to both confirm the diagnosis and optimally reduce future stroke risk.

Most conceptualizations of evidence-based practice view it as a "three legged stool" consisting of: the use of best available research evidence, clinical expertise, and client preferences. Although empirical evidence and clinical expertise have received greater empirical attention, relatively little research has systematically explored client preferences. The present study analyzed self-reported treatment preferences for various clinical and non-clinical presentations. Adult participants (n = 1262) residing in the United States were presented with diagnostic vignettes and rated their relative preferences among 5 treatment variables, including: use of an empirically supported treatment (EST), quality of the client-therapist relationship, therapist empathy, therapist experience, and client speaking for the majority of therapy sessions. Results indicated that participants endorsed significant preference for receiving an EST over other treatment variables for all clinical disorders, with effect sizes ranging from small to large depending on the diagnosis. There was slightly greater variability in treatment preferences for non-clinical issues, though participants generally reported greater preference for receiving an EST. Follow-up questions provided further evidence for EST preferences. The implications of these results are discussed.

The aim of this investigation was to assess the operative response of a representative sample of Irish General Dental Practitioners of various times since qualification to carious lesions of varying extent in both approximal surfaces of a lower left first molar tooth. 82 General Dental practitioners participated. The dentists were asked to treat 2 manikin teeth for minimal caries on both approximal surfaces extending to the enamel dentine junction, 2 teeth for caries extending approximately to half the thickness of the dentine and 2 teeth for caries extending more than 3/4 of the dentine thickness. Weight measurements were made of the tooth substance cut away. Mean volumes of tooth material removed ranged from 21 mm3 for minimal caries to 76 mm3 for the largest amount of caries. A two-factor analysis of variance revealed that the type of cavity preparation the dentist used had a significant effect on the volume of tooth material removed for all three extents of caries. Time since graduation had a significant effect on the volume of tooth material removed for the least extent of caries, but not for the other categories of carious involvement.

The process of designing a lunar base involves architecture in a pure sense, with detailed programming, design and arrangement of peoples' living spaces and working interactions rigidly defined by programmatic function and site location, and coordinated closely with multiform complex feats of engineering. L-bAS (Lunar-based Astronomy Station) is a hypothetical test-case facility that must comfortably accommodate 30 people on the moon for a period of 24 months. Its crew is the critical human element in a masterplan for the operation or various types of astronomical observatories, remote sensing stations and other robotic scientific installations which will eventually be deployed on the lunar surface. As an exercise in creative thinking, the purpose of the design has been to explore, define and demonstrate the importance of humanist architectural design philosophy in the development of facilities engineered for long-duration missions in harsh extraterrestrial environments.

2 main concepts seem to exist for the progression of periodontitis: (1) a slow continuous process of attachment loss; (2) periodic bursts of activity followed by quiescence or remission. This study addresses this problem and presents data for 69 sites having experienced a net loss of probing attachment amounting to > or = 3.0 mm over 42 months. The sites originated from 16 adult patients monitored after nonsurgical treatment of advanced chronic periodontitis. Probing attachment level recordings were obtained every 3rd month. The sequential probing attachment level data for each site were smoothed using cubic splines. Subjective evaluation of the raw and the smoothed data from the study sites suggested that the majority of the sites seemed to lose probing attachment in a continuous fashion, and over periods of 12 months or more. The smoothed curves were subjected to principal components analysis, which allowed the 69 sites to be ordered according to curve similarity. Nonparametric runs test failed to show that the shape of the curves for the sites was significantly associated with any of the following characteristics: patient, tooth type, tooth surface, initial probing depth, bleeding frequency, occurrence of suppuration, or a combination of inflammatory characteristics of sites.