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Biomedical subjects

John J Downes

Publications and source records attributed to John J Downes.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

Pediatric anesthesia historical perspective.

This article examines how anesthesia evolved to serve the needs of children. Discussion includes milestones in technologic advancement related to pediatric anesthetic care and how collaboration among pediatric surgeons, neonatologists, and pediatric anesthesiologists has helped our specialty to progress. Conversely, the significant contributions of pediatric anesthesiology to pediatric critical care medicine, pain management, and pediatric public health care are also presented.

Anesthesia↗
PubMed2003

Validation of the Wechsler Memory Scale-III in a population of people with intractable temporal lobe epilepsy.

The Wechsler Memory Scale-Third Edition (WMS-III) was developed to overcome the limitations of the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised and is now routinely used for pre-surgical assessment of memory for patients considering elective surgery for the relief of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). We investigated the validity of this relatively new measure in a population of people with resistant TLE. The sample consisted of 99 patients with a diagnosis if TLE in which the epileptogenic focus was clearly identified and localised to either the right or left hemisphere. Patients underwent a full neuropsychological assessment as part of their pre-surgical investigation, including the WMS-III. Patients with right temporal focus had significantly lower scores on the visual immediate and delayed indices of the WMS-III than they did on the corresponding auditory indices. The left temporal focal epilepsy group, however, showed no significant disparity between auditory and visual scores. The overall scores of the WMS-III were significantly lower than the normative data from the WMS-III standardisation samples. Like its predecessor the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised, the WMS-III has limited value in identifying particular memory deficits associated with either left and right temporal lobe focus. The results of the WMS-III show that it is capable of lateralising to right hemispheric impairment but is more problematic in the assessment of left hemispheric impairment. The visual verbal discrepancy has questionable validity. The search for reliable and valid measures to distinguish between left and right temporal epileptic focus continues.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Proust nose best: odors are better cues of autobiographical memory.

The Proust phenomenon is an enduring piece of folk wisdom that asserts that odors are particularly powerful autobiographical memory cues. We provide a more formal exposition of this phenomenon and test it in two experiments, using a novel double-cuing methodology designed to negate less interesting explanations. In both studies, recall of an autobiographical event was initially cued by a verbal label (an odor name) for a fixed period, following which a second, extended recall attempt was cued by the same verbal label, the relevant odor, an irrelevant odor, or a visual cue. The focus of Experiment 1 was participants' ratings of the emotional quality of their autobiographical memories. In Experiment 2, content analysis was employed to determine the quantity of information in participants' recollections. Results revealed that odor-cued autobiographical memories were reliably different in terms of qualitative ratings and reliably superior in the amount of detail yielded. Moreover, visual cues and incongruent olfactory cues appeared to have a detrimental effect on the amount of detail recalled. These results support the proposal that odors are especially effective as reminders of past experience.

Autobiographies as Topic↗
PubMed1988

Organization of depressive symptoms in the elderly population: hierarchical patterns and Guttman scales.

Survey data from the US-UK Cross-National Geriatric Community Study was examined for hierarchical patterns in the organization of depressive symptomatology in the elderly population. A pattern similar to that previously found in a younger sample (Sturt, 1981) was evident. Low prevalence symptoms were associated with increased numbers of other symptoms. The poor fit of high-frequency somatic symptoms in this hierarchy was explained by their low specificity for depression in an elderly population. Derived Guttman scales of somatic and affective symptoms suggested, nonetheless, that such low-specificity symptoms may be clinically significant in the ontogeny of depression.

Aged↗