62 research outputs found
The coagulation-time of the blood in disease: some clinical records and considerations
It is now almost twenty years since Wright first
drew attention to the value of measuring the rate of
coagulation of the blood in disease. Since then much
has been written upon the subject and many new methods
of observation have been devised.Much of the work done in the earlier days was
rather of the nature of physiological experiment: but
indeed the results obtained by the various methods
differed so widely and were so inconsistent even in
themselves that there was little encouragement given
for an advance to clinical observations. Later, with
improved technique (most especially with a due regard
to the knowledge of the effect of temperature as a
factor in variation) much more reliable and consistent
results were obtained and the advance to clinical problems
was made with more assurance. Yet even now
there are but few records in the literature of research
into the coagulation time of the blood in disease.
Haemophilia and purpura, it is true, have been studied
in some detail, as also the assertions of Wright
respecting the value of calcium salt administration (though in this last the examination has been chiefly,
as by Addis'' along pharmacological lines) but in other
diseases the records are few and imperfect. This comparative
scantiness of clinical records has encouraged
me to embark upon the series of observations here
recorded. They have been arrived at by the uso of
yet another method - a method borrowed from Drs. Dale
and Laidlaw, as set forth by them in the Journal of
Pathology and Bacteriology. ( This for brevity's sake
I have termed the "Ball method"
The effect of ageing on fMRI: Correction for the confounding effects of vascular reactivity evaluated by joint fMRI and MEG in 335 adults.
In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research one is typically interested in neural activity. However, the blood-oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal is a composite of both neural and vascular activity. As factors such as age or medication may alter vascular function, it is essential to account for changes in neurovascular coupling when investigating neurocognitive functioning with fMRI. The resting-state fluctuation amplitude (RSFA) in the fMRI signal (rsfMRI) has been proposed as an index of vascular reactivity. The RSFA compares favourably with other techniques such as breath-hold and hypercapnia, but the latter are more difficult to perform in some populations, such as older adults. The RSFA is therefore a candidate for use in adjusting for age-related changes in vascular reactivity in fMRI studies. The use of RSFA is predicated on its sensitivity to vascular rather than neural factors; however, the extent to which each of these factors contributes to RSFA remains to be characterized. The present work addressed these issues by comparing RSFA (i.e., rsfMRI variability) to proxy measures of (i) cardiovascular function in terms of heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) and (ii) neural activity in terms of resting state magnetoencephalography (rsMEG). We derived summary scores of RSFA, a sensorimotor task BOLD activation, cardiovascular function and rsMEG variability for 335 healthy older adults in the population-based Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience cohort (Cam-CAN; www.cam-can.com). Mediation analysis revealed that the effects of ageing on RSFA were significantly mediated by vascular factors, but importantly not by the variability in neuronal activity. Furthermore, the converse effects of ageing on the rsMEG variability were not mediated by vascular factors. We then examined the effect of RSFA scaling of task-based BOLD in the sensorimotor task. The scaling analysis revealed that much of the effects of age on task-based activation studies with fMRI do not survive correction for changes in vascular reactivity, and are likely to have been overestimated in previous fMRI studies of ageing. The results from the mediation analysis demonstrate that RSFA is modulated by measures of vascular function and is not driven solely by changes in the variance of neural activity. Based on these findings we propose that the RSFA scaling method is articularly useful in large scale and longitudinal neuroimaging studies of ageing, or with frail participants, where alternative measures of vascular reactivity are impractical.The Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience
(Cam-CAN) research was supported by the Biotechnology
and Biological Sciences Research Council (grant number
BB/H008217/1). We are grateful to the Cam-CAN
respondents and their primary care teams in Cambridge
for their participation in this study. We also thank col-
leagues at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
MEG and MRI facilities for their assistance.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.22768/ful
Status and overview of development of the Silicon Pixel Detector for the PHENIX experiment at the BNL RHIC
We have developed a silicon pixel detector to enhance the physics
capabilities of the PHENIX experiment. This detector, consisting of two layers
of sensors, will be installed around the beam pipe at the collision point and
covers a pseudo-rapidity of | \eta | < 1.2 and an azimuth angle of | \phi | ~
2{\pi}. The detector uses 200 um thick silicon sensors and readout chips
developed for the ALICE experiment. In order to meet the PHENIX DAQ readout
requirements, it is necessary to read out 4 readout chips in parallel. The
physics goals of PHENIX require that radiation thickness of the detector be
minimized. To meet these criteria, the detector has been designed and
developed. In this paper, we report the current status of the development,
especially the development of the low-mass readout bus and the front-end
readout electronics.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures and 1 table in DOCX (Word 2007); PIXEL 2008
workshop proceedings, will be published in the Proceedings Section of
JINST(Journal of Instrumentation
Age-related Neural Reorganization during Spoken Word Recognition: The Interaction of Form and Meaning
The neural correlates of picture naming facilitated by auditory repetition
Background: Overt repetition of auditorily presented words can facilitate picture naming performance in both unimpaired speakers and individuals with word retrieval difficulties, but the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms and longevity of such effects remain unclear. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine whether different neurological mechanisms underlie short-term (within minutes) and long-term (within days) facilitation effects from an auditory repetition task in healthy older adults
Functional MRI evidence for the decline of word retrieval and generation during normal aging
International audienceThis fMRI study aimed to explore the effect of normal aging on word retrieval and generation. The question addressed is whether lexical production decline is determined by a direct mechanism, which concerns the language operations or is rather indirectly induced by a decline of executive functions. Indeed, the main hypothesis was that normal aging does not induce loss of lexical knowledge, but there is only a general slowdown in retrieval mechanisms involved in lexical processing , due to possible decline of the executive functions. We used three tasks (verbal fluency, object naming , and semantic categorization). Two groups of participants were tested (Young, Y and Aged, A), without cognitive and psychiatric impairment and showing similar levels of vocabulary. Neuropsychological testing revealed that older participants had lower executive function scores, longer processing speeds, and tended to have lower verbal fluency scores. Additionally, older participants showed higher scores for verbal automa-tisms and overlearned information. In terms of behav-ioral data, older participants performed as accurate as younger adults, but they were significantly slower for the semantic categorization and were less fluent for verbal fluency task. Functional MRI analyses suggested that older adults did not simply activate fewer brain regions involved in word production, but they actually showed an atypical pattern of activation. Significant correlations between the BOLD (Blood Oxygen Level Dependent) signal of aging-related (A > Y) regions and cognitive scores suggested that this atypical pattern of the activation may reveal several compensatory mechanisms (a) to overcome the slowdown in retrieval, due to the decline of executive functions and processing speed and (b) to inhibit verbal automatic processes. The BOLD signal measured in some other aging-dependent regions did not correlate with the behavioral and neuro-psychological scores, and the overactivation of these uncorrelated regions would simply reveal dedifferentia-tion that occurs with aging. Altogether, our results suggest that normal aging is associated with a more difficult access to lexico-semantic operations and representations by a slowdown in executive functions, without any conceptual loss
Using Web-Based Key Character and Classification Instruction for Teaching Undergraduate Students Insect Identification
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