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Biomedical subjects

Judy Robertson

Publications and source records attributed to Judy Robertson.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Assessing health status and health care utilization in adolescents with chronic kidney disease.

Few validated health status measures have been assessed in children with chronic kidney disease (CKD). The objective was to assess the validity of a generic health status measure, the Child Health and Illness Profile-Adolescent Edition (CHIP-AE), in adolescents with CKD. A case-control study was performed (1) to assess scores on the CHIP-AE in adolescents with CKD compared with two control groups of age-, socioeconomic-, and gender-matched peers and (2) to compare health of patients who had chronic renal insufficiency (CRI), were on dialysis, and were posttransplantation. Seven pediatric nephrology centers recruited 113 patients (mean age, 14 yr; 39 CRI, 21 dialysis, 53 posttransplantation). Compared with 226 control subjects, patients with CKD had lower overall satisfaction with health and more restriction in activity. Positively, patients with CKD had more family involvement, better home safety and health practices, and better social problem-solving skills and were less likely to participate in risky social behaviors or socialize with peers who engaged in risky behavior. Patients who received dialysis were less physically active and experienced more physical discomfort and limitations in activities than did transplant or CRI patients. It is concluded that patients with CKD have poorer functional health status than age-matched peers. Among CKD patients, dialysis patients have the poorest functional health status. These results suggest that the CHIP-AE can be used to measure functional health status in adolescent patients with CKD.

Adolescent↗

The NITE XML Toolkit: flexible annotation for multimodal language data.

Multimodal corpora that show humans interacting via language are now relatively easy to collect. Current tools allow one either to apply sets of time-stamped codes to the data and consider their timing and sequencing or to describe some specific linguistic structure that is present in the data, built over the top of some form of transcription. To further our understanding of human communication, the research community needs code sets with both timings and structure, designed flexibly to address the research questions at hand. The NITE XML Toolkit offers library support that software developers can call upon when writing tools for such code sets and, thus, enables richer analyses than have previously been possible. It includes data handling, a query language containing both structural and temporal constructs, components that can be used to build graphical interfaces, sample programs that demonstrate how to use the libraries, a tool for running queries, and an experimental engine that builds interfaces on the basis of declarative specifications.

Communication↗

Social class gradients and health in childhood.

OBJECTIVE: To determine if there are social class gradients in health in children aged 6 to 11 years. METHODS: Self and parent reports of health of children in 5 sites across the United States were assessed using the Child Health and Illness Profile-Child Edition. Distribution of scores in 4 domains: satisfaction (with health); comfort; resilience; and risk avoidance were used to create profiles of health. Social class was defined as a composite of parental education and work participation. RESULTS: Social class gradients were found for all but the satisfaction domain and for most subdomains in the parent version; the most notable gradient was in the risk avoidance domain, with better health the higher the social class. Apparent gradients did not reach statistical significance in the child reports. Children from a higher social class were more likely to be in excellent/average health and less likely to be in poor health profiles than were lower class children. CONCLUSIONS: The findings generally mirror those from a prior study of adolescents, using the same conceptual framework for health and the same measure of social class, and are consistent with a cumulative effect for most aspects of health, and with a critical-period effect for risky behaviors.

Child↗