Age of acquisition is possibly the single most potent variable affecting lexical access. It is also a variable that determines the retention or loss of words in patients who have suffered brain injury, and in patients with Alzheimer's disease. But the norms of age of acquisition currently available have largely been obtained from university…

Most neuropsychological assessments of episodic memory bear little similarity to the events that patients actually experience as memories in daily life. The first aim of this study was to use a virtual environment to characterize episodic memory profiles in an ecological fashion, which includes memory for central and perceptual details,…

Impairment on standard tests of delayed recall is often already maximal in the aMCI stage of Alzheimer's Disease. Neuropathological work shows that the neural substrates of memory function continue to deteriorate throughout the progression of the disease, hinting that further changes in memory performance could be tracked by a more sensitive test…

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is recognized globally as the greatest health challenge of the present generation. It is widely acknowledged to be the foremost killer disease in Africa. Since the first AIDS case was publicly announced in 1986, the astronomical increase in victims has been a matter of concern. The rates of HIV/AIDS infection indicate that…

The aim of this article was to review the evidence of errorless learning on learning outcomes in patients with early-stage Alzheimer's disease. A computer-aided literature search from 1999 to 2011 was carried out using MEDLINE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), PsycINFO and PsycArticles. Keywords included…

Dravet syndrome, or as it was called in the past "severe myoclonic epilepsy in infancy", is a drug-resistant epilepsy first described by Charlotte Dravet in 1978. Besides the well-known and well-described therapy resistance, Dravet syndrome dramatically impacts the development and behaviour of the affected children. As it is still not a curable…

Psycholinguistic studies dealing with Alzheimer's disease (AD) commonly consider verbal aspects of language. In this article, we investigated both verbal and non-verbal aspects of speech production in AD. We used pauses and hesitations as markers of planning difficulties and hypothesized that AD patients show different patterns in the process of…

Using Functional Measurement (Anderson, 2008), Frileux, Lelievre, Munoz Sastre, Mullet, and Sorum (2003) examined the joint impact of several key factors on lay people's judgments of the acceptability of physicians' interventions to end patients' lives. The level of acceptability was high, and the information integration rule that best described…

This research involves an examination of the relationship between education and age on a wide array of neuropsychological test measures among patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's and vascular dementia. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of education as an attenuating factor to neurocognitive decline in dementia. Although numerous…

Numerous studies have identified that delays in diagnosis related to the mishandling of abnormal test results are an import contributor to diagnostic errors. Factors contributing to missed results included organizational factors, provider factors and patient-related factors. At the diagnosis error conference continuing medical education conference…

This article describes a 1-hour behavioral intervention designed to promote female condoms and safer sex to women at a high risk for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The intervention includes a promotional videotape; a skills-oriented counseling session with a nurse clinician; assorted take-home items, including a videotape for men; and free…

Access to health information on the Internet has revolutionized how medical patients learn about their illnesses. Valuable information can be found online; however, many health Web sites contain inaccurate or misleading information. The authors surveyed 324 adults with HIV concerning their Internet use for obtaining health information. Health…

Cyril Naidoo, who directs the department of family medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine, conducts workshops to traditional healers on how to help patients with AIDS and HIV. In Dr. Naidoo's workshop, the group discusses how to counsel patients about HIV and AIDS, how to refer them for testing, and then…

Introduction: A gap exists between asthma guidelines and actual care delivered. We developed an educational intervention using simulated physician-patient encounters as part of a project to improve asthma management by community-based primary care providers. We hypothesized that this type of skills-based interactive training would improve…

Given the national agenda on chronic disease self-management, the goal of the project described in this brief report was to develop a scale that measured adult perceptions about health but did not focus on a specific condition. The Perception of Health Scale (PHS) is based on earlier work that used the Health Belief Model as a focus. The 15-item…