Drug Breakdown: Minoxidil

In this column, Sharon Rees aims to refresh knowledge and interest in some of the commonly used drugs in a series of tweets. This month she is talking about #minoxidi

Drug breakdown: Bempedoic Acid

In this column, Sharon Rees aims to refresh knowledge and interest in some of the commonly used drugs in a series of tweets. This month she is talking about #bempedoic aci

Sulfasalazine

In this column, Sharon Rees aims to refresh knowledge and interest in some of the commonly used drugs in a series of posts on X. This month she is talking about #sulfasalazin

Drug Breakdown: Colchicine

In this column, Sharon Rees aims to refresh knowledge and interest in some of the commonly used drugs in a series of tweets. This month she is talking about #colchicin

Unexpected Findings in an Alternative High School: New Implications for Values Education

It has been well documented that today’s adolescents are at great risk for health-compromising behaviors. Researchers have identified values orientation and values education as important change agents in reducing these “risky” behaviors. It has also been suggested that an individual’s values orientation that is focused on the future and in a societal view of life is associated with protective and resilience factors with fewer health-compromising behaviors. This study examined adolescents’ values orientation and the occurrence of health-compromising behaviors. Health-compromising behaviors for this study included substance abuse, unsafe sexual practices, violence, and sensation-seeking activities. Results indicated that participants were not at risk for health-compromising behaviors related to a present, self-interest value orientation. Contrary to conventional wisdom about the health-compromising behaviors of students determined to be at “higher risk,” the students in this sample did not exhibit the traditional high-risk behaviors or the value orientations. Health-compromising behaviors of adolescents continue to be a priority for health educators, school administrators, as well as parents and other community members. It is imperative that further research explore the relationship between adolescent participation in “risky” behavior as well as the protective factors related to healthier choices

Preserved local but disrupted contextual figure-ground influences in an individual with abnormal function of intermediate visual areas

Visual perception depends not only on local stimulus features but also on their relationship to the surrounding stimulus context, as evident in both local and contextual influences on figure-ground segmentation. Intermediate visual areas may play a role in such contextual influences, as we tested here by examining LG, a rare case of developmental visual agnosia. LG has no evident abnormality of brain structure and functional neuroimaging showed relatively normal V1 function, but his intermediate visual areas (V2/V3) function abnormally. We found that contextual influences on figure-ground organization were selectively disrupted in LG, while local sources of figure-ground influences were preserved. Effects of object knowledge and familiarity on figure-ground organization were also significantly diminished. Our results suggest that the mechanisms mediating contextual and familiarity influences on figure-ground organization are dissociable from those mediating local influences on figure-ground assignment. The disruption of contextual processing in intermediate visual areas may play a role in the substantial object recognition difficulties experienced by LG

Ounce of Prevention: Internship Planning and Implementation for Students, University Advisors, and Site Supervisors

Internships in the health profession, specifically in public and community health education and promotion, are a valuable opportunity for students to acquire new skills, as well as implement their recently acquired academic knowledge. There are generally three key players in the internship process: the faculty advisor or coordinator, the site supervisor, and the student intern. There are processes and procedures that can greatly help facilitate a positive experience for all three parties. Essential to this internship process are good organization skills, meticulous planning abilities, and clear communication channels. This article provides easy steps that all three individuals can benefit from during the planning and implementation phases of the internship experiences

The role of human ventral visual cortex in motion perception.

Visual motion perception is fundamental to many aspects of visual perception. Visual motion perception has long been associated with the dorsal (parietal) pathway and the involvement of the ventral 'form' (temporal) visual pathway has not been considered critical for normal motion perception. Here, we evaluated this view by examining whether circumscribed damage to ventral visual cortex impaired motion perception. The perception of motion in basic, non-form tasks (motion coherence and motion detection) and complex structure-from-motion, for a wide range of motion speeds, all centrally displayed, was assessed in five patients with a circumscribed lesion to either the right or left ventral visual pathway. Patients with a right, but not with a left, ventral visual lesion displayed widespread impairments in central motion perception even for non-form motion, for both slow and for fast speeds, and this held true independent of the integrity of areas MT/V5, V3A or parietal regions. In contrast with the traditional view in which only the dorsal visual stream is critical for motion perception, these novel findings implicate a more distributed circuit in which the integrity of the right ventral visual pathway is also necessary even for the perception of non-form motion

Investigating Representations of Facial Identity in Human Ventral Visual Cortex with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

The occipital face area (OFA) is face-selective. This enhanced activation to faces could reflect either generic face and shape-related processing or high-level conceptual processing of identity. Here we examined these two possibilities using a state-dependent transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) paradigm. The lateral occipital (LO) cortex which is activated non-selectively by various types of objects served as a control site. We localized OFA and LO on a per-participant basis using functional MRI. We then examined whether TMS applied to either of these regions affected the ability of participants to decide whether two successively presented and physically different face images were of the same famous person or different famous people. TMS was applied during the delay between first and second face presentations to investigate whether neuronal populations in these regions played a causal role in mediating the behavioral effects of identity repetition. Behaviorally we found a robust identity repetition effect, with shorter reaction times (RTs) when identity was repeated, regardless of the fact that the pictures were physically different. Surprisingly, TMS applied over LO (but not OFA) modulated overall RTs, compared to the No-TMS condition. But critically, we found no effects of TMS to either area that were modulated by identity repetition. Thus, we found no evidence to suggest that OFA or LO contain neuronal representations selective for the identity of famous faces which play a causal role in identity processing. Instead, these brain regions may be involved in the processing of more generic features of their preferred stimulus categories

Economising learning: how nurses maintain competence with limited resources

Continuous learning is essential for registered nurses to maintain knowledge of current best practice, and therefore facilitate the best possible outcomes for patients. Gaining access to learning, and the time to engage in learning, requires the nurse to contribute personal resources such as time and money. Nurses often have limited access to learning while at work due to staffing levels and the fast pace of the work environment. They often have limited resources outside of work hours to contribute to their learning. Therefore alternative strategies for learning need to be explored to enable the nurse to continuously learn. This research sought to discover how registered nurses were currently using mobile devices in their work and private lives, to ascertain if mobile learning would be of value in nursing education and where it would be best used. Nurses mostly did not have concerns about using mobile devices, however, it became evident in interviews that they were mostly concerned with maintaining competence with limited resources. This classic grounded theory research revealed that nurses economise learning to enable them to address their concern of maintaining competence with limited resources. They achieve this by balancing personal resources against motivational issues within the continuous process of economising learning. The process of economising learning commences and ends with the nurse’s personal curriculum, which has been developed throughout the nurse’s career, and is what the nurse identifies as important learning needs within the work area. Nurses become aware of a learning need when their personal curricula are compromised or they become aware of other knowledge that is needed for their work area. The learning opportunity to meet the learning need will be found and balanced by individual nurses, to determine if and how they will engage with the opportunity. Finally nurses will engage or not in the learning and update their personal curricula accordingly. The Theory of Economising Learning, together with the reviewed literature has led to the development of a Healthy Learning Workplace Model to determine and improve the health of the workplace in regard to learning. The model contains the four domains of expectations, current, economical access, and support. Each of these domains needs to be occurring at the optimum level in order for learning to be ‘healthy’ within the organisation and have nurses undertaking continuing learning