Exploring Play and Playfulness in the Everyday Lives of Older Women

There is an emerging body of literature about older women and play, often focused on social groupings (e.g., Red Hats Society, Raging Grannies). This study aimed to contribute to this body of literature by exploring the meaning, experience, and place of play and playfulness in the day-to-day lives of older women. Interpreting older women’s play as a phenomenologist informed by the feminist gerontology literature, I explored, described, and interpreted play using the voices, words, lived experiences, and artful reflections of four focus groups comprised of nineteen women between the ages of 63 to 95 years. Play emerged to be a wonderful, complex, and paradoxical phenomenon for older women that interconnected in three ways: as a doing, a feeling, and a being. Within and across the women, play was characterized by these paradoxes: time flies by and time slows down, productive and unproductive, social and solitary, and serious and silly. Play was infused into the everyday lives of these older women. Arts-based methods served to invigorate and engage the women and me, and transformed the research environment into a comfortable, open space to play and be playful, and to share, gather, and build knowledge. Thus this research contributes to the growing body of literature about the lives and experiences of older women, from their perspective, adds insight into older women’s play, and grows our knowledge about collecting data through arts-based methods with older women

Effect of Music Therapy on Anxiety and Depression in Patients With Alzheimer\u27s Type Dementia: Randomised, Controlled Study

BACKGROUND/AIMS: Numerous studies have indicated the value of music therapy in the management of patients with Alzheimer\u27s disease. A recent pilot study demonstrated the feasibility and usefulness of a new music therapy technique. The aim of this controlled, randomised study was to assess the effects of this new music therapy technique on anxiety and depression in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer-type dementia. METHODS: This was a single-centre, comparative, controlled, randomised study, with blinded assessment of its results. The duration of follow-up was 24 weeks. The treated group (n = 15) participated in weekly sessions of individual, receptive music therapy. The musical style of the session was chosen by the patient. The validated \u27U\u27 technique was employed. The control group (n = 15) participated under the same conditions in reading sessions. The principal endpoint, measured at weeks 1, 4, 8, 16 and 24, was the level of anxiety (Hamilton Scale). Changes in the depression score (Geriatric Depression Scale) were also analyzed as a secondary endpoint. RESULTS: Significant improvements in anxiety (p \u3c 0.01) and depression (p \u3c 0.01) were observed in the music therapy group as from week 4 and until week 16. The effect of music therapy was sustained for up to 8 weeks after the discontinuation of sessions between weeks 16 and 24 (p \u3c 0.01). CONCLUSION: These results confirm the valuable effect of music therapy on anxiety and depression in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer\u27s disease. This new music therapy technique is simple to implement and can easily be integrated in a multidisciplinary programme for the management of Alzheimer\u27s disease

IMGT unique numbering for immunoglobulin and T cell receptor constant domains and Ig superfamily C-like domains

IMGT, the international ImMunoGeneTics information system(R) (http://imgt.cines.fr) provides a common access to expertly annotated data on the genome, proteome, genetics and structure of immunoglobulins (IG), T cell receptors (TR), major histocompatibility complex (MHC), and related proteins of the immune system (RPI) of human and other vertebrates. The NUMEROTATION concept of IMGT-ONTOLOGY has allowed to define a unique numbering for the variable domains (V-DOMAINs) and for the V-LIKE-DOMAINs. In this paper, this standardized characterization is extended to the constant domains (C-DOMAINs), and to the C-LIKE-DOMAINs, leading. for the first time, to their standardized description of mutations, allelic polymorphisins, two-dimensional (2D) representations and tridimensional (3D) structures. The IMGT unique numbering is, therefore, highly valuable for the comparative, structural or evolutionary studies of the immunoglobulin superfamily (IgSF) domains. V-DOMAINs and C-DOMAINs of IG and TR in vertebrates, and V-LIKE-DOMAINs and C-LIKE-DOMAINs of proteins other than IG and TR, in any species. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

IMGT-ONTOLOGY for Immunogenetics and Immunoinformatics

IMGT, the international ImMunoGeneTics information system® (http://imgt.cines.fr), is a high quality integrated knowledge resource specializing in immunoglobulins (IG), T cell receptors (TR), major histocompatibility complex (MHC) and related proteins of the immune system (RPI) of human and other vertebrates, created in 1989, by the Laboratoire d'ImmunoGénétique Moléculaire LIGM. IMGT provides a common access to standardized data which include nucleotide and protein sequences, oligonucleotide primers, gene maps, genetic polymorphisms, specificities, 2D and 3D structures. IMGT consists of several sequence databases (IMGT/LIGM-DB, IMGT/MHC-DB, IMGT/PRIMER-DB), one genome database (IMGT/GENE-DB) and one three-dimensional structure database (IMGT/3Dstructure-DB), interactive tools for sequence analysis (IMGT/V-QUEST, IMGT/JunctionAnalysis, IMGT/PhyloGene, IMGT/Allele-Align), for genome analysis (IMGT/GeneSearch, IMGT/GeneView, IMGT/LocusView) and for 3D structure analysis (IMGT/StructuralQuery), and Web resources ("IMGT Marie-Paule page") comprising 8000 HTML pages. IMGT other accesses include SRS, FTP, search by BLAST, etc. By its high quality and its easy data distribution, IMGT has important implications in medical research (repertoire in autoimmune diseases, AIDS, leukemias, lymphomas, myelomas), veterinary research, genome diversity and genome evolution studies of the adaptive immune responses, biotechnology related to antibody engineering (scFv, phage displays, combinatorial libraries) and therapeutical approaches (grafts, immunotherapy)