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Biomedical subjects

M Blades

Publications and source records attributed to M Blades.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2007

A qualitative investigation of school-aged children's answers to items from a generic quality of life measure.

BACKGROUND: The development of instruments to measure child self-reported quality of life (QOL) is dependent on whether children can understand the concepts behind items. Researchers need more information on how children are interpreting and answering items. This paper aims to investigate the strategies school-aged children use to answer QOL items. METHODS: A generic 30-item QOL measure (the TedQL) was administered to 266 healthy children (5-6, 7-9 years old). Children were asked to 'think aloud' while answering a selection of 10 TedQL items (n = 4 ability, n = 4 social, n = 2 mood items), and their responses were recorded verbatim. RESULTS: The strategies children reported using when answering items were coded into five categories: (1) social comparisons; (2) stable character references; (3) concrete examples; (4) other reasons; or (5) no reason given. Concrete examples were used most frequently by children. Strategy type was dependent on age, with 7-9-year-olds reporting social comparisons and concrete examples more frequently than 5-6-year-olds. Five-to-six-year-olds gave no reasons for their response choices more frequently than 7-9-year-olds. Strategy type also differed by item type, with social comparisons used more frequently for ability items, and stable character references for social items. However, concrete examples were used consistently highly across ability and social items. CONCLUSIONS: Children aged 5-9 years most commonly report using concrete examples of specific instances when answering QOL items. However, strategy use varies as a function of age and types of items. Our results highlight the importance of keeping in mind children's developmental age when interpreting responses from child QOL instruments.

Child↗
PubMed2006

The effect of interviewing techniques on young children's responses to questions.

BACKGROUND: Research into the effect of interviewing techniques has been predominantly within the paradigm of eyewitness testimony. This review focuses on the issues of questioning and examines whether children's responses are affected by questioning techniques, and whether these effects are generic to all interviewing contexts. METHODS: Systematic literature searches were used to identify areas of concern and current findings in research on interviewing young children (aged 4-12). RESULTS: The style and wording of questioning can affect children's responses and accuracy positively and negatively. These effects were especially apparent in interviews with the youngest children. CONCLUSIONS: The implications of these findings are relevant in all contexts where an adult questions a child. It has been demonstrated that interviewing techniques can affect responses from children and that it is therefore imperative that interviewers are aware of, understand and control their influence in order to elicit complete, accurate and reliable information from the child.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

An interface with a linear quadrupole ion guide for an electrospray-ion trap mass spectrometer system.

A new ion sampling interface for an electrospray ionization 3D ion trap mass spectrometer system is described. The interface uses linear rf quadrupoles as ion guides and ion traps to enhance the performance of the 3D trap. Trapping ions in the linear quadrupoles is demonstrated to improve the duty cycle of the system. Dipolar excitation of ions trapped in a linear quadrupole is used to eject unwanted ions. A resolution of ejection of up to 254 is demonstrated for protonated reserpine ions (m/z 609.3). A composite waveform with a notch in frequency space is used to eject a wide range of matrix ions and to isolate trace analyte ions in a linear quadrupole before ions are injected into the 3D trap. This is useful to overcome space charge problems in the 3D trap caused by excess matrix ions. For trace reserpine in a 500-fold molar excess of poly(propylene glycol) (PPG), it is demonstrated that the resolution and sensitivity of the 3D trap can be increased dramatically with ejection of the excess PPG matrix ions. In comparison to ejection of matrix ions in the 3D trap with a similar broad-band waveform, a 5-fold increase in sensitivity with a 7 times shorter acquisition time was achieved.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2000

The effect of a nonverbal aid on preschoolers' recall for color.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether the provision of a nonverbal memory aid would improve preschoolers' recall of color. Forty 4-year-old children carried out 2 tasks with the same set of colored objects. Colors were not referred to, nor were children told that their recall would later be tested. One day later, the children were split into 2 groups. One group was given a chart containing both the colors of the objects and distractor colors. The other group was not given a chart. Recall for object color was tested. There was an effect of chart provision; children who used the chart recalled more colors correctly than did those who did not use a chart. This result indicates (a) that even very young children can make use of props to facilitate their recall and (b) that such memory aids need not be exact copies of previously seen objects. Implications of these findings for eyewitness recall are discussed.

Child Behavior↗
PubMed1999

Recall readiness in children with autism.

When people are asked to learn information they need to judge when they have encoded the information accurately and will be able to retrieve it correctly. Making such a judgment is an aspect of metacognitive ability, and is referred to as "recall readiness." Previous researchers have not considered recall readiness in children with autism, therefore we asked matched groups of children with autism, children with mental retardation, and normally developing children (mean mental age: 7 years) to study several pictures of objects until they felt ready to recall all the objects without error. Their recall was then tested. The children with autism and the children with mental retardation had impaired recall readiness compared to the normally developing children. We discuss this result with reference to other research into the metacognitive abilities of children with autism.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

Source monitoring by children with autism.

The term "source monitoring" refers to the ability to distinguish the origins of memories. One type of source monitoring is reality monitoring-which means distinguishing internally and externally generated memories. This experiment examined reality monitoring by children with autism (with a mean mental age of 7 years 8 months). The children said several words and listened to another person say similar words. The children were then given a surprise memory test and asked to identify which words they had said and which the other person had said. The children with autism were compared to matched groups of normal children and children with mental retardation. There were no differences between the groups and, at least for this task, there was no evidence that children with autism have a deficit in their reality monitoring abilities.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Dietary advice in the management of diabetes mellitus--history and current practice.

Diet has been recognised for over three thousand years as being vital to the overall management of diabetes mellitus (DM). Today dietary advice for the person with diabetes continues to play just as an important role, not just as regards the day to day control but also in respect of the prevention of complications. The history of dietary advice for diabetes is examined as well as current dietary advice.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Mental rotation of a tactile layout by young visually impaired children.

Mental rotation tasks have been used to probe the mental imagery both of sighted and of visually impaired people. People who have been blind since birth display a response pattern which is qualitatively similar to that of sighted people but tend to respond more slowly or with a higher error rate. It has been suggested that visually impaired people code the stimulus and its (or their own) motion in a different way from sighted people-in particular, congenitally blind people may ignore the external reference framework provided by the stimulus and surrounding objects, and instead use body-centred or movement-based coding systems. What has not been considered before is the relationship between different strategies for tactually exploring the stimulus and the response pattern of congenitally blind participants. Congenitally blind and partially sighted children were tested for their ability to learn and recall a layout of tactile symbols. Children explored layouts of one, three, or five shapes which they then attempted to reproduce. On half the trials there was a short pause between exploring and reproducing the layouts. In an aligned condition children reproduced the array from the same position at which they had explored it; in a rotated condition children were asked to move 90 degrees round the table between exploring and reproducing the layout. Both congenitally blind and partially sighted children were less accurate in the rotated condition than in the aligned condition. Five distinct strategies used by the children in learning the layout were identified. These strategies interacted with both visual status and age. We suggest that the use of strategies, rather than visual status or chronological age, accounts for differences in performances between children.

Blindness↗
PubMed1994

Young children's ability to understand a model as a spatial representation.

Children's ability to understand that a real environment can be represented in a symbolic form (i.e., by a model) is an important developmental achievement. Researchers have claimed that children who are just 3 years of age appreciate models as representations. This research was based on tasks that involved having young children use a model to locate a hiding place in an actual room. In this article, however, we point out the difficulties in interpreting previous model tasks, and we describe two studies that showed that young 3-year-olds could perform model tasks successfully when the hiding place they were looking for was a unique place in the model (and room). When the hiding place was unique, the children had to note only that place and they needed no further knowledge about the relationship between the model and the room. When the hiding place was one of two identical places, however, the children needed to take spatial relationships into account to distinguish the correct place, and young 3-year-olds were unable to do this. Four-year-olds were able to use spatial relationships to distinguish identical places when the model was aligned with the space it represented, but they had difficulty when the model was not aligned. Five-year-olds could use spatial relationships effectively between one model space and another whether or not the model was aligned.

Child↗
PubMed1994

A comparison of children's performance on different linear-ordering tasks.

The discrepancy between children's performances on Brown and Murphy's (1975) and Piaget and Inhelder's (1956) studies of ordering tasks was investigated. Twenty-two 4-year-old children were asked to carry out a linear-ordering task that was based on Piaget and Inhelder's (1956) task in which children copied the arrangement of clothes on a clothesline. The type of instructions and the type of layout were varied. There was an effect for the type of layout (p < .01), but the children performed equally well irrespective of the instructions they were given, and overall they were very successful. The results support Brown and Murphy's findings that ability to reproduce a sequence in linear-ordering tasks is developed earlier than previous research has indicated.

Child Behavior↗
PubMed1990

The development of 3- to 6-year-olds' map using ability: the relative importance of landmarks and map alignment.

Previous research (e.g., Bluestein & Acredolo, 1979) has demonstrated that children as young as 3 or 4 years of age can use simple maps, if the maps are aligned, and has suggested that when such young children use a map, they rely on the information provided about landmarks. The support for this suggestion, however, comes from research with older children. Our experiment was designed to find out how 3- to 6-year-olds used a map and whether they could use maps that were not aligned. The children were asked to find a hidden toy in a mapped layout that showed the toy's position and included a single landmark. The maps were either aligned or rotated 90 degrees, 180 degrees, or 270 degrees relative to the layout. The results showed that young children could use the maps, even when they were not aligned with the layout, and that they relied on landmark information to do so.

Aptitude↗
PubMed1989

Blood pressure and cardiac output during exercise: a longitudinal study of children undergoing repair of coarctation.

Data were examined from 21 children who underwent graded exercise studies prior to and within 5 years after repair of coarctation. A control group of 10 normal children was also studied longitudinally on two occasions. The exercise was performed on an upright bicycle ergometer using a continuous graded exercise protocol. Parameters measured were heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure at rest, and these pressures at the maximal voluntary exercise level. In addition, a subset of patients and controls had measurement of cardiac output by a modified acetylene rebreathing technique. Results indicate that coarctation patients had significant elevation of systolic and diastolic blood pressures at rest (p less than 0.001 for both) and with exercise (p less than 0.02 for both) prior to surgery. The group mean values for systolic and diastolic blood pressure did not differ from control values after surgery; however, some individuals continued to have hypertension at rest when compared to population-based norms. Heart rate, cardiac index, and stroke volume index did not differ from those of control subjects either at rest or during exercise before or after surgery. In conclusion, a group of coarctation patients studied longitudinally demonstrated marked improvement in both systolic and diastolic hypertension after surgery. The findings of normal cardiac output and stroke volume indices may have implications for the etiology of postoperative hypertension.

Aortic Coarctation↗
PubMed1975

Doxycycline treatment and human infertility.

The role of mycoplasmas in infertility was studied in 120 couples. During the twelve months of the study 27 couples (22-5%) conceived. T mycoplasmas were isolated from 63% of these couples, and Mycoplasma hominis from 18%, compared with 56% and 13%, respectively, in those who did not conceive. 88, with primary infertility of unascertained cause, took part in a controlled trial with doxycycline. The couples in the trial were allocated randomly to three groups: 30 received doxycycline, 28 received a placebo, and 30 couples were untreated. Although a twenty-eight-day course of doxycycline eradicated M. hominis and T-strain mycoplasmas from 27 (96%) of the 28 couples harbouring them, the rate of conception was no higher in those treated with the drug than in control groups. It is concluded that mycoplasmas are not associated with primary infertility and that, although doxycycline eradicates them, this drug is of no benefit in the treatment of primary infertility of unascertained cause.

Adult↗