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Biomedical subjects

P M Fitzpatrick

Publications and source records attributed to P M Fitzpatrick.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Effect of socioeconomic status on aphasia severity and recovery.

Low levels of educational attainment and low socioeconomic status have been significantly linked to poor health and increased incidence of disease, including Alzheimer's disease and diseases of the cardiovascular, pulmonary, renal, and gastrointestinal systems. Our goal in the present study was to determine the degree to which educational level and socioeconomic status influence initial severity of aphasia and subsequent recovery. We evaluated the records of 39 persons with aphasia twice: at about 4 months and 103 months postonset. We found early severity of aphasia to be significantly greater for subjects in the lower educational and occupational groups. However, rate of recovery (the slope of the recovery curve) was the same regardless of educational or occupational status.

Aphasia↗
PubMed2000

Amlodipine besylate induced acute interstitial nephritis.

Adverse effects of amlodipine besylate, a widely used antihypertensive medication, include peripheral edema, flushing, headache, pruritus, and rash. An adverse renal effect attributable to the medication has hitherto not been reported in the literature. We herein report a case of amlodipine besylate induced acute interstitial nephritis.

Acute Disease↗
PubMed1998

Visible changes in lesion borders on CT scan after five years poststroke, and long-term recovery in aphasia.

This study examined 12 aphasia patients at approximately 1 year poststroke (Time 1) and again at 5-12 years poststroke (Time 2) with language testing and CT scan. Significant increases in naming scores, and phrase length in nonfluent speech were observed after 5 years poststroke. Significant expansion in visible lesion borders (lesion size) was observed after 5 years poststroke; an increase in lesion size of > 1% was present in 9/12 cases (75%). Not one case had a second stroke. Thus, it appears that even though lesion expansion may occur after 5 years poststroke, as long as this expansion is unilateral and gradual, it has no adverse effect on language, and in fact, continued recovery in naming and nonfluent speech may also occur. Long-term recovery patterns in aphasia which may be associated with brain reorganization deserve further study, especially with functional brain imaging techniques.

Aged↗
PubMed1995

Transcriptional activators differ in their responses to overexpression of TATA-box-binding protein.

We investigated how overexpression of human TATA-box-binding protein (TBP) affects the action of estrogen receptor (ER) and compared the response with that of other activators. When ER activates a simple promoter, consisting of a response element and either the collagenase or tk TATA box, TBP overexpression potentiates transcription. TBP potentiates only estrogen-induced and not basal transcription and does so independent of spacing between response element and TATA box. TBP overexpression also reduces autoinhibition by overexpressed ER, suggesting that one target of the autoinhibition may be TBP itself. Both AF-1 and AF-2 domains of ER are potentiated by TBP, and each domain binds TBP in vitro. Like ER, chimeric GAL4/VP16 and GAL4/Tat activators are also potentiated by TBP, as is the synergistic activation by ER and GAL4/VP16 on a complex promoter. Unlike ER, GAL4/Sp1 and GAL4/NF-I become less potent when TBP is overexpressed. Furthermore, synergy between ER and Sp1 or between ER and NF-I, whether these are supplied by transfected GAL4 fusions or by the endogenous genes, is inhibited by TBP overexpression. Thus, ER resembles VP16 in response to TBP overexpression and is different from Sp1 and NF-I, which predominate over ER in setting the response on complex promoters.

Animals↗
PubMed1994

Nitrofurantoin: mechanism of action and implications for resistance development in common uropathogens.

Nitrofurantoin is an effective urinary tract antibacterial to which no clinically significant resistance development has occurred. We have previously shown that nitrofurantoin susceptibility in bacteria correlates with the presence of bacterial nitroreductases which convert nitrofurantoin to highly reactive electrophilic intermediates. These intermediates were shown to attack bacterial ribosomal proteins non-specifically, causing complete inhibition of protein synthesis. In the present study, we confirm previous reports that low concentrations of nitrofurantoin specifically inhibit inducible enzyme synthesis in bacteria, and show that this inhibition occurs at levels equivalent to the MICs of nitrofurantoin for several bacterial species. Our previous studies had shown that nitrofurantoin at different concentrations interacts with bacterial ribosomal proteins in qualitatively the same fashion; we now report that quantitative differences are seen in the labelling observed at different nitrofurantoin concentrations and discuss these differences as they may relate to the inhibition of inducible enzyme synthesis. In addition, we have now demonstrated the existence of a novel mechanism of action for nitrofurantoin which does not require the production of reactive nitrofurantoin metabolites by bacterial reductases. The lack of clinically significant bacterial resistance development to nitrofurantoin is likely due to the combination of nitrofurantoin's multiple sites of attack and multiple mechanisms of action.

Enzyme Induction↗
PubMed1990

Long-term outcome of renal transplantation in autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease.

This study was performed to determine the long-term outcome of renal transplantation in 54 patients with end-stage renal failure secondary to autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) and in 107 patients with renal diseases other than ADPKD or diabetes mellitus matched by gender, age, year of transplantation, and source of the allograft. The overall patient survival and patient survival with a functioning first renal allograft were similar in both groups. Infection and cardiovascular accidents were the leading causes of early and late death in both groups. No cause of death was greatly overrepresented in the ADPKD group. Serious complications from extrarenal manifestations of ADPKD following renal transplantation included a ruptured intracranial aneurysm in one patient, a dissection of the ascending thoracic aorta in one patient, and infected hepatic cysts in two patients. Neoplasia (other than skin or cervical) occurred in four ADPKD patients and in one control patient and included one lymphoma in each group. Two ADPKD and one control patient had monoclonal gammopathies of undetermined significance. No complications related to the retention of native kidneys were detected in 12 ADPKD patients with a mean follow-up of 3 years. Cysts were observed in the renal allografts of some patients in both groups at autopsy and in a prospective computed tomography (CT) study of the allograft. However, we failed to detect a significant difference in the occurrence and number of the cysts between ADPKD and control patients.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

The relationship between limb apraxia and the spontaneous use of communicative gesture in aphasia.

This study investigated the relationship between limb apraxia, as assessed by a formal clinical test, and the production of spontaneous communicative gesture, as measured by a newly designed rating scale--the Nonvocal Communication Scale (NCS). Subjects were aphasic adult males with cerebrovascular lesions of the left hemisphere. The performance of aphasic patients on the praxis test and the NCS was independent of demographic, neuroanatomic, linguistic, or cognitive variables, except for global aphasics who were low-scoring across the board. There was a significant positive correlation, however, between praxis ability and spontaneous gestural communication. Clinical implications of these findings are discussed.

Anomia↗
PubMed1982

Visual action therapy for global aphasia.

Eight globally aphasic patients who had not responded to traditional treatment received Visual Action Therapy (VAT), a nonvocal approach which ultimately trains patients to produce symbolic gestures for visually absent stimuli. Statistical analyses of pre and post VAT scores earned on the Porch Index of Communicative Ability (PICA) showed highly significant improvement on those subtests which measure pantomimic and auditory comprehension skills. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1981

Response of an agrammatic patient to a syntax stimulation program for aphasia.

A Syntax Stimulation Program (SSP) based on the findings of neurolinguistic studies of agrammatic aphasic patients was used to treat one patient with a three year history of severe agrammatism. The SSP is designed to elicit eight different sentence constructions at two levels of difficulty using a story completion technique. The patient received pre-, mid- and post-treatment testing with the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test (NSST) and the cookie theft picture description of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE). With 10 1/2 weeks of treatment, the patient's NSST expressive scores improved from 0 to 21, and his BDAE picture description showed increased phrase length and use of grammatical constructions. In addition, with this special treatment, the patient was able to produce grammatical speech in spontaneous conversation. Thus, the SSP appears to have therapeutic merit in training syntactic skills in presumably stable agrammatic patients.

Adult↗