A question of life or death.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Bioethics↗
Biomedical subjects
K L Woodward
Publications and source records attributed to K L Woodward.
The relationship between skin compliance, age, gender, and tactile discriminative thresholds in humans.
Earlier research has suggested that tactile sensitivity, like visual and auditory acuity, may decrease with increasing age. But are decrements in tactile sensitivity attributable to changes in the nervous system, or simply to alterations in the mechanical properties of the skin? In the present study, skin compliance and discriminative thresholds for two-point and gap stimuli were measured on the pad of the left index finger of 102 persons ranging in age from 18 to 84 years. For both types of stimuli, age was found to be a significant predictor of tactile sensitivity, even when skin compliance and gender were controlled. The relationship between increasing age and decrements in tactile discrimination is apparently not attributable to changes in the mechanical properties of the skin, but to other factors, which may include changes in the nervous system affecting the speed, quantity, or quality of information processing.
Adolescent↗
The recovery of sensory function following skin flaps in humans.
Two cross-sectional studies were made of the recovery of tactile and pain sensitivity in subjects having skin flaps in the region of the chest and neck as a result of tumor excision. In experiment 1, stimuli ranging from 2.46 to 17.10 gm of force were delivered by von Frey hairs to the flaps and comparable normal sites in 35 subjects at times ranging from 1 month to 10 years after surgery. No subjects perceived stimuli of less than 11.80 gm, thermal, or moving touch applied to flaps, whereas 21 percent perceived 11.80 gm or greater force (judged as painful applied to normal skin). The results of experiment 2 showed that these findings were not due to visual information available to subjects. Possible explanations for the fact that these results are radically different from those reported in the literature are discussed.
Adult↗