Biomedical subjects

K W Hirsh

Publications and source records attributed to K W Hirsh.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

The management of endometriosis: a survey of patients' aspirations.

The aim of this study was to determine the aspirations of women with endometriosis in terms of the management of their disease. We interviewed 32 women with confirmed endometriosis and asked them to discuss the potential benefits of the establishment of a specialist endometriosis clinic. Eighty-eight per cent of the participants agreed that a separate specialist clinic would be beneficial. The reasons they cited can be grouped under four main themes: information provision, quality and type of care, peer support and endometriosis awareness. On the basis of these responses we propose that a strategy utilised in the management of other chronic diseases, drop-in group medical appointments, may provide a way forward. In addition, on the basis of the range of symptoms reported by our participants, we would argue that a multidisciplinary approach is necessary if endometriosis management is to be effective.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2001

Deep dysphasic performance in non-fluent progressive aphasia: a case study.

We present a patient (PW) with non-fluent progressive aphasia, characterized by severe word finding difficulties and frequent phonemic paraphasias in spontaneous speech. It has been suggested that such patients have insufficient access to phonological information for output and cannot construct the appropriate sequence of selected phonemes for articulation. Consistent with such a proposal, we found that PW was impaired on a variety of verbal tasks that demand access to phonological representations (reading, repetition, confrontational naming and rhyme judgement); she also demonstrated poor performance on syntactic and grammatical processing tasks. However, examination of PW's repetition performance also revealed that she made semantic paraphasias and that her performance was influenced by imageability and lexical status. Her auditory-verbal short-term memory was also severely compromised. These features are consistent with 'deep dysphasia', a disorder reported in patients suffering from stroke or cerebrovascular accident, and rarely reported in the context of non-fluent progressive aphasia. PW's pattern of performance is evaluated in terms of current models of both non-fluent progressive aphasia and deep dysphasia.

Anomia↗

PubMed1998

Competitor priming in spoken word recognition.

Most models predict that priming a word should retard recognition of another sharing its initial sounds. Available short lag priming data do not clearly support the prediction. The authors report 7 continuous lexical-decision experiments with 288 participants. With lags of 1-5 min between prime and probe, response time increased for a monosyllabic word preceded by a word sharing its onset and vowel (but not one sharing its rime) and for a polysyllabic word preceded by another sharing its first syllable. The effect was limited to words primed by words, suggesting that identifying the prime strengthens its lexical attractor, making identification of a lexical neighbor more difficult. With lags of only a few trials, facilitatory effects of phonological similarity or familiarity bias effects were also seen; this may explain why clear evidence for inhibitory priming has been lacking hitherto.

Adolescent↗