The great ephemeral tattooed skin

The skin is always and already a series of planes which signify race, gender, age and such. Tattooing creates a new surface of potential significance upon the body. Tattooing can call into question concepts of volition in reference to the power to inscribe and define one’s subjectivity through one’s own skin, and the social defining of the subject. Skin is the involution or event between subject and object, will and cultural inscription, the social and the self. Feminism, particularly corporeal feminists, have attempted to think ways in which the female flesh may be recognized and self-defined without risking essentialism through reification of the meaning of ‘woman’s body’. Thinking the tattooed female body thus resonates with some of the risks and benefits feminism has found in theorizing a marginalized body. Using Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard and other major influences on corporeal feminists this article explores ways in which significance is sought in skin and possible configurations of skin and world which challenge the desire to read the flesh as a legible incarnation of subjectivity

Diagnostic performance of an executive clock drawing task (CLOX) as a screening test for mild cognitive impairment in elderly persons with cognitive complaints.

&lt;i&gt;Background:&lt;/i&gt; CLOX, a clock drawing test protocol uniquely sensitive to impairment of executive functions, has been proposed as a screening tool for mild cognitive impairment (MCI), but data about its diagnostic efficiency are lacking. &lt;i&gt;Methods:&lt;/i&gt; There are data for 196 subjects, age ≧60 years, referred to a memory clinic for cognitive complaints. After extensive neuropsychological testing, 64 were diagnosed as cognitively normal and 132 with MCI. &lt;i&gt;Results:&lt;/i&gt; At standard cutoffs, both CLOX subtests had a fair specificity (CLOX1 72%, CLOX2 92%) but unacceptably low values of sensitivity (CLOX1 54%, CLOX2 28%) and likelihood ratio (CLOX1 1.91, CLOX2 3.59) for MCI. The use of different cutoffs or the combination of CLOX with the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) did not statistically increase diagnostic efficiency. &lt;i&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/i&gt; CLOX, either alone or in combination with MMSE, is not a useful screening test for MCI in a clinical setting.</jats:p

A comparison of frailty indexes for prediction of adverse health outcomes in an elderly cohort

This study aimed to compare the predictive accuracy for several frailty-related adverse health outcomes of a cumulative index derived from the Italian population-based elderly cohort of the Conselice Study of Brain Aging (CSBA), which takes into account multiple different domains (demographic, clinical, functional, and nutritional parameters), with that of an index derived from the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures (SOF), modified for application to the CSBA database and henceforth called mSOF, which is exclusively focused on muscular fitness. Data are for 1007 CSBA participants aged >= 65 years. Investigated adverse outcomes included 4- and 7-year risk of death and 4-year risk of fractures, falls, disability, hospitalization, and nursing home placement. Accuracy for prediction of these outcomes was investigated using area under the curve (AUC) statistics. CSBA index performed better than mSOF index for prediction of mortality (p < 0.001), hospitalization (p = 0.002), and nursing home placement (p = 0.049). For all outcomes excluding falls, frailty defined by CSBA index had a slightly lower specificity but a much higher sensitivity than frailty defined by mSOF Index. In conclusion, in this elderly cohort, the multidimensional CSBA index is a better predictor of frailty-related adverse health outcomes than the unidimensional mSOF index