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At least 487 records · Page 27Linked to original sources

PubMed1978

Tactual exploration by normal infants.

The age of onset for tactual exploration of the fingers, body (torso), knee, foot and penis by the fingers was determined in 100 normal infants. Exploration of the mouth, face, head, ears, nose and eyes was also studied by daily observations in the first three days of life in a second sample of 12 normal newborns, and the age of onset was recorded. The data show that the ability of the normal infant to explore by touch the various parts of his body appears to have a definite age of onset and a definite sequence.

Age Factors↗

PubMed2006

Reliability of different blood indices to explore the oxidative stress in response to maximal cycling and static exercises.

This study compares the changes in four blood markers of exercise-induced oxidative stress in response to exercise protocols commonly used to explore the global muscle performance at work (maximal incremental cycle) and endurance to fatigue of selected muscles (static handgrip and thumb adduction). Cycling and static exercises allow the muscle to work in aerobic and anaerobic conditions, respectively. Healthy adults performed an incremental cycling exercise until volitional exhaustion and, on separated days, executed infra-maximal static thumb adduction and handgrip until exhaustion. Exercise-induced oxidative stress was assessed by the increased plasma concentration of thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS), the consumption of plasma reduced ascorbic acid (RAA), and erythrocyte reduced glutathione (GSH) antioxidants, and the changes in the total antioxidant status (TAS) of plasma. Five minutes after the end of the incremental cycling exercise, we measured a peak increase in TBARS level, maximal consumption of GSH and RAA, and a modest but significant decrease in TAS concentration. In response to both static thumb adduction and handgrip, significant variations of TBARS, GSH and RAA occurred but we did not measure any significant change in TAS level throughout the 20-min recovery period of both exercise bouts. The present study shows that only the changes in TBARS, GSH and RAA explore both dynamic and static exercises. In addition, TAS measurement does not seem to represent a reliable and unique tool to explore exercise-induced oxidative stress, at least during isometric efforts that allow the muscle to work under anaerobic condition.

Adult↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Reinfusion of mediastinal blood in CABG patients: impact on homologous transfusions and rate of re-exploration.

BACKGROUND: Reinfusion of mediastinal shed blood after cardiac surgery has been used in some centers to reduce exposure to homologous blood transfusions. The method has not been widely applied mostly because some studies have failed to demonstrate a significant benefit. METHODS: A group of 675 consecutive patients undergoing first-time, isolated coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG) was studied. Prospective data was collected on the first 375 patients receiving autotransfusion (ATS) of mediastinal shed blood. The charts of 338 patients immediately preceding the institution of the ATS program at our institution (NO ATS group) were retrospectively reviewed. Transfusion of homologous blood products and rate of re-exploration for bleeding were closely monitored. RESULTS: The two groups were identical. The net blood loss was significantly less in the ATS group than in the NO ATS group (1013 +/- 431 cc vs 1371 +/- 631 cc, p < 0.0001). Rate of exploration for postoperative bleeding was 1.5% in the ATS group and 5.0% in the NO ATS group (p < 0.01). In the ATS group, 51.9% of patients were not exposed to any homologous blood product (vs 17.8% in the NO ATS group, p < 0.0001). The ATS patients received on the average 2.9 +/- 7.2 units of blood products versus 6.4 +/- 9.7 units in the NO ATS group (p < 0.0001). CONCLUSION: Reinfusion of mediastinal shed blood significantly reduces exposure to homologous blood transfusions and rate of reexploration. The ATS system reduces the number of re-explorations for coagulopathy-related postoperative hemorrhage.

Blood Loss, Surgical↗

PubMed1997

Exploring the use of explanatory models in nursing research and practice.

PURPOSE: To address the lack of information in nursing for delivering culturally appropriate care and provide a framework for nurses to incorporate diverse beliefs and health needs into research and practice. People interpret and react to health and illness events within a cultural system. However, the nursing literature contains little about how to elicit cultural beliefs. ORGANIZING FRAMEWORK: Use of Kleinman's (1980) concept of explanatory models (EMs) is explored first, by describing the concept as it was developed by Kleinman, and second, by illustrating how it was used in three research studies conducted between 1990 and 1994. METHOD: Individual in-depth interviews were conducted with community-based convenience samples. Data were analyzed using content analysis. Explanatory models were explored with health people following illness, and with people having a condition with potential health risks, to illustrate their usefulness in nursing research and practice. CONCLUSIONS: The findings provide a beginning understanding of the complex linkages between beliefs and actions and demonstrate the versatility and usefulness of EMs for nursing research and practice. Assessing models offers one means for researchers and clinicians to explore health beliefs and the linkages between beliefs and behaviors.

Adult↗

PubMed1992

Exploration and support in psychotherapeutic environments for psychotic patients.

Clinical experience and previous investigations suggest that insight-oriented milieu therapy with psychotic patients presupposes a specific balance of explorative and supportive factors in the milieu. Explorative and supportive factors were translated here to two optimal ward atmosphere profiles using the subscales in the Community-oriented Programs Environment Scale (COPES) as profile variables. Three Swedish therapeutic communities for psychotic patients were then studied by means of COPES. The study showed distinct patterns in these units regarding deviations from the optimal profiles, differences in the balance between the explorative and supportive factors, divergences between explicit treatment philosophy and the perceived ward atmosphere, and differences between patient and staff perceptions of the ward atmosphere. These patterns followed a continuum from a self-governing, nonhierarchical and nonmedical organization to a hierarchical unit that is an integral part of the medical care organization. The conclusion was that a beneficial psychotherapeutic environment requires consistency in the applied treatment model, including an organization and setting that corresponds to the explicit treatment philosophy, well mirrored in the patients' perceptions.

Data Collection↗

PubMed2003

Explorer probing of root caries lesions: an in vitro study.

Probing with a dental explorer is the preferred method of root caries diagnoses. However, studies suggest that use of a dental explorer in coronal caries detection may damage tooth structure. This pilot study investigated the effect of probing on remineralization of root surface lesions in vitro. Root-surface lesions were created on 10 extracted teeth by exposing them to a demineralizing solution for 21 days. One side of each lesion was then randomly selected and probed with an explorer, while the other side was not probed. The teeth then were placed in a remineralizing solution containing 10 parts per million (ppm) fluoride for 21 days. Of the 9 teeth with usable sections, all showed frank evidence of defects on the probed halves. Sites of remineralization were seen in the non-probed halves and adjacent to the probed defects, but not within or at the base of these defects. These results suggest that probing of root surfaces may create defects that do not fully remineralize.

Cariostatic Agents↗

PubMed2006

Novelty exploration elicits a reversal of acute stress-induced modulation of hippocampal synaptic plasticity in the rat.

Acute behavioural stress has been recognized as a strong influence on the inducibility of hippocampal long-term synaptic plasticity. We have reported previously that in adult male rats, acute behavioural stress impairs long-term potentiation (LTP) but enhances long-term depression (LTD) in the hippocampal CA1 region. In this study we report that the effects of stress on LTP and LTD were reversed when animals were introduced into a novel 'stimulus-rich' environment immediately after the stress. Novelty exploration-induced reversal of stress effects was prevented when the animals were given the NMDA receptor antagonist D-(-)-2-amino-5-phosphonopentanoic acid, the cholinergic antagonist atropine and the protein phosphatase (PP) 2B inhibitors cyclosporin A and cypermethrin, but not the alpha1-adrenergic antagonist prazosin, the beta-adrenergic antagonist propranolol or the PP1/2A inhibitor okadaic acid, respectively before being subjected to the novel environment. In addition, the ability of novelty exploration to reverse the stress effects was mimicked by a direct application of the cholinergic agonist carbachol. Exposure to the novel environment following stress was accompanied by the activation of both PP2B and striatal-enriched tyrosine phosphatase (STEP). Taken together, these findings suggest that the activation of the cholinergic system and, in turn, the triggering of an NMDA receptor-mediated activation of PP2B to increase STEP activity appear to mediate the novelty exploration-induced reversal of stress-related modulation of hippocampal long-term synaptic plasticity.

Animals↗

PubMed2006

Therapeutic targets: progress of their exploration and investigation of their characteristics.

Modern drug discovery is primarily based on the search and subsequent testing of drug candidates acting on a preselected therapeutic target. Progress in genomics, protein structure, proteomics, and disease mechanisms has led to a growing interest in and effort for finding new targets and more effective exploration of existing targets. The number of reported targets of marketed and investigational drugs has significantly increased in the past 8 years. There are 1535 targets collected in the therapeutic target database compared with approximately 500 targets reported in a 1996 review. Knowledge of these targets is helpful for molecular dissection of the mechanism of action of drugs and for predicting features that guide new drug design and the search for new targets. This article summarizes the progress of target exploration and investigates the characteristics of the currently explored targets to analyze their sequence, structure, family representation, pathway association, tissue distribution, and genome location features for finding clues useful for searching for new targets. Possible "rules" to guide the search for druggable proteins and the feasibility of using a statistical learning method for predicting druggable proteins directly from their sequences are discussed.

Adrenergic beta-Antagonists↗

PubMed2005

Exploring diagnostic processes: social science perspectives.

This review explores social science analyses of diagnosis of childhood neurological disabilities. The paper moves through three sections, which capture the historical and conceptual trends within the literature. The first focuses on work identifying the need to communicate effectively with parents when giving a diagnosis, the second explores the role parents can play as "partners" or contributors to diagnosis, and the final section goes further in exploring the social complexity of diagnoses in order to examine the embedded nature of social practices, power relations and hierarchies, and institutions in the diagnosis encounter.

Child↗

PubMed2006

The role of the basal ganglia in exploration in a neural model based on reinforcement learning.

We present a computational model of basal ganglia as a key player in exploratory behavior. The model describes exploration of a virtual rat in a simulated water pool experiment. The virtual rat is trained using a reward-based or reinforcement learning paradigm which requires units with stochastic behavior for exploration of the system's state space. We model the Subthalamic Nucleus-Globus Pallidus externa (STN-GPe) segment of the basal ganglia as a pair of neuronal layers with oscillatory dynamics, exhibiting a variety of dynamic regimes such as chaos, traveling waves and clustering. Invoking the property of chaotic systems to explore state-space, we suggest that the complex exploratory dynamics of STN-GPe system in conjunction with dopamine-based reward signaling from the Substantia Nigra pars compacta (SNc) present the two key ingredients of a reinforcement learning system.

Animals↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Multum in parvo: explorations with a small bag of carbon dioxide.

A collection of 12 papers published between 1957 and 1972 are revisited. The papers had a common theme of the use of rebreathing carbon dioxide and explored a variety of topics in respiratory physiology. The first study established a method for the noninvasive and indirect estimation of arterial carbon dioxide pressure that was suitable for the routine clinical monitoring of respiratory failure and whose clinical utility remains to this day, but which also provided observations that were the stimulus for the studies that followed. The rate of rise in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide (PCO(2)) during rebreathing led to an analysis of body carbon dioxide storage capacity. Knowledge of carbon dioxide storage led to a method for quantifying lactate production in exercise without the need for blood sampling. The changes in ventilation that accompanied the increase in PCO(2) provided the basis for a rapid method for measuring aspects of breathing control (Read's method), which was later modified to measure the ventilatory response to hypoxia. The physiology of breath-holding was explored through observations of the fall in breath-holding time as PCO(2) climbed. Rebreathing also allowed increases in voluntary ventilation to be achieved without the development of alkalosis, leading to studies of maximal voluntary ventilation and respiratory muscle fatigue. Equilibration of PCO(2) during rebreathing was used to measure mixed venous PCO(2) during exercise and develop an integrated approach to the physiology of exercise in health and disease; alveolar-arterial disequilibrium in PCO(2) during exercise was uncovered. Equilibration of PCO(2), as well as PO(2), during rebreathing of carbon dioxide and nitrogen gas mixtures showed different time courses of venous gases at the onset of exercise. Starting with the rebreathing of carbon dioxide in oxygen mixtures in a small rubber bag, an astonishing range of topics in respiratory physiology was explored, with observations that remain valid, but in some respects unresolved, to the present day.

Carbon Dioxide↗

PubMed1999

Acute and chronic citalopram treatment differently modulates rat exploratory behavior in the exploration box test: no evidence for increased anxiety or changes in the [3H]raclopride binding.

The effect of acute and chronic desipramine (10 mg/kg) and citalopram (10 mg/kg) treatment on rat exploratory behavior in the recently developed exploration box test was studied on 5 consecutive days. Acute desipramine but not citalopram treatment decreased the time spent exploring, the number of line crossings, rears, investigative approaches, entries into the large arena, and sum of exploratory events. After 3 weeks of pretreatment, both desipramine and citalopram attenuated rat exploratory behavior, whereas the number of entries into the large arena was unchanged. In the open field test, acute desipramine or citalopram treatment (5, 10, 15 mg/kg) attenuated rat exploratory behavior in a dose-dependent manner. In the subsequent rota-rod test, neither desipramine nor citalopram treatment (0-20 mg/kg) impaired motor performance capacity. In an additional experiment, [3H]raclopride binding was unchanged after single as well as 3 weeks of desipramine or citalopram treatment in the rat brain neostriatum. Our experiments demonstrate that acute citalopram treatment in the open field test and chronic citalopram treatment in the exploration box test attenuate rat exploratory behavior, but these effects may not be implicated with enhanced anxiety or changed dopamine D2 receptor characteristics.

Adrenergic Uptake Inhibitors↗

PubMed2006

Exploring supervised and unsupervised methods to detect topics in biomedical text.

BACKGROUND: Topic detection is a task that automatically identifies topics (e.g., "biochemistry" and "protein structure") in scientific articles based on information content. Topic detection will benefit many other natural language processing tasks including information retrieval, text summarization and question answering; and is a necessary step towards the building of an information system that provides an efficient way for biologists to seek information from an ocean of literature. RESULTS: We have explored the methods of Topic Spotting, a task of text categorization that applies the supervised machine-learning technique naïve Bayes to assign automatically a document into one or more predefined topics; and Topic Clustering, which apply unsupervised hierarchical clustering algorithms to aggregate documents into clusters such that each cluster represents a topic. We have applied our methods to detect topics of more than fifteen thousand of articles that represent over sixteen thousand entries in the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) database. We have explored bag of words as the features. Additionally, we have explored semantic features; namely, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) that are assigned to the MEDLINE records, and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) semantic types that correspond to the MeSH terms, in addition to bag of words, to facilitate the tasks of topic detection. Our results indicate that incorporating the MeSH terms and the UMLS semantic types as additional features enhances the performance of topic detection and the naïve Bayes has the highest accuracy, 66.4%, for predicting the topic of an OMIM article as one of the total twenty-five topics. CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that the supervised topic spotting methods outperformed the unsupervised topic clustering; on the other hand, the unsupervised topic clustering methods have the advantages of being robust and applicable in real world settings.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

PubMed2006

An interactive visualization tool to explore the biophysical properties of amino acids and their contribution to substitution matrices.

BACKGROUND: Quantitative descriptions of amino acid similarity, expressed as probabilistic models of evolutionary interchangeability, are central to many mainstream bioinformatic procedures such as sequence alignment, homology searching, and protein structural prediction. Here we present a web-based, user-friendly analysis tool that allows any researcher to quickly and easily visualize relationships between these bioinformatic metrics and to explore their relationships to underlying indices of amino acid molecular descriptors. RESULTS: We demonstrate the three fundamental types of question that our software can address by taking as a specific example the connections between 49 measures of amino acid biophysical properties (e.g., size, charge and hydrophobicity), a generalized model of amino acid substitution (as represented by the PAM74-100 matrix), and the mutational distance that separates amino acids within the standard genetic code (i.e., the number of point mutations required for interconversion during protein evolution). We show that our software allows a user to recapture the insights from several key publications on these topics in just a few minutes. CONCLUSION: Our software facilitates rapid, interactive exploration of three interconnected topics: (i) the multidimensional molecular descriptors of the twenty proteinaceous amino acids, (ii) the correlation of these biophysical measurements with observed patterns of amino acid substitution, and (iii) the causal basis for differences between any two observed patterns of amino acid substitution. This software acts as an intuitive bioinformatic exploration tool that can guide more comprehensive statistical analyses relating to a diverse array of specific research questions.

Amino Acid Sequence↗

PubMed2006

An exploration of job stress and health in the Norwegian police service: a cross sectional study.

BACKGROUND: Police work is regarded as a high-stress occupation, but so far, no nationwide study has explored the associations between work stress and health. AIMS: To explore physical and mental health among Norwegian police and associations to job stress. Comparisons were made with a nationwide sample of Norwegian physicians and the general Norwegian population. METHODS: Comprehensive nationwide questionnaire survey of 3,272 Norwegian police at all hierarchical levels, including the Norwegian Police Stress Survey with two factors (serious operational tasks and work injuries), the Job Stress Survey with two factors (job pressure and lack of support), the Basic Character Inventory, the Subjective Health Complaint questionnaire, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and Paykel's Suicidal Feelings in the General Population. RESULTS: The frequency of job pressure and lack of support was mainly associated to physical and mental health problems. Females showed higher means on anxiety symptoms than males (4.2, SD 2.9 and 3.7, SD 2.9, respectively; p < 0.01), while males showed higher means on depressive symptoms (3.1, SD 2.9 and 2.4, SD 2.5, respectively; p < 0.001). Police reported more subjective health complaints, depersonalization and higher scores on three of four personality traits than physicians, but lower scores on anxiety and depressive symptoms than the general population. CONCLUSION: This is the first nationwide study to explore job stress and physical and mental health in police. The results indicate that Norwegian police have high levels of musculoskeletal health problems mainly associated to the frequency of job pressure and lack of support. However, also frequent exposure to work injuries was associated to health problems. This may indicate that daily routine work as well as police operational duties must be taken into consideration in assessing job stress and police health.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2005

Management of chest pain: exploring the views and experiences of chiropractors and medical practitioners in a focus group interview.

BACKGROUND: We report on a multidisciplinary focus group project related to the appropriate care of chiropractic patients who present with chest pain. The prevalence and clinical management, both diagnosis and treatment, of musculoskeletal chest pain in ambulatory medical settings, was explored as the second dimension of the focus group project reported here. METHODS: This project collected observational data from a multidisciplinary focus group composed of both chiropractic and medical professionals. The goals of the focus group were to explore the attitudes and experiences of medical and chiropractic clinicians regarding their patients with chest pain who receive care from both medical and chiropractic providers, to identify important clinical or research questions that may inform the development of 'best practices' for coordinating or managing care of chest pain patients between medical and chiropractic providers, to identify important clinical or research questions regarding the diagnosis and treatment of chest pain of musculoskeletal origin, to explore various methods that might be used to answer those questions, and to discuss the feasibility of conducting or coordinating a multidisciplinary research effort along this line of inquiry. The convenience-sample of five focus group participants included two chiropractors, two medical cardiologists, and one dual-degreed chiropractor/medical physician. The focus group was audiotaped and transcripts were prepared of the focus group interaction. Content analysis of the focus group transcripts were performed to identify key themes and concepts, using categories of narratives. RESULTS: Six key themes emerged from the analysis of the focus group interaction, including issues surrounding (1) Diagnosis; (2) Treatment and prognosis; (3) Chest pain as a chronic, multifactorial, or comorbid condition; (4) Inter-professional coordination of care; (5) Best practices and standardization of care; and (6) Training and education. CONCLUSION: This study carries implications for chiropractic clinical training relative to enhancing diagnostic competencies in chest pain, as well as the need to ascertain and improve those skills, competencies, and standards for referrals and sharing of clinical information that may improve cross-disciplinary coordination of care for chest pain patients.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2003

A successful educational collaboration between scientists and educators: microscopic explorations.

The teacher's guide, Microscopic Explorations: A GEMS Festival Guide (Brady and Willard, 1998), is the result of a partnership between Great Explorations in Math and Science (GEMS), a program of the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS), the public science and curriculum development center of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Microscopy Society of America (MSA). Microscopic Exploration supports the MSA's low-cost national outreach program and, also, reaches a very large educational community as part of the GEMS series. Some of the lessons learned through the extremely successful MSA/LHS collaboration are summarized here in hopes that they may be instructive to other scientists and educators as they launch their own partnerships and collaborations.

Cooperative Behavior↗

PubMed2004

An exploration looking at the impact of domiciliary and day hospital delivery of stroke rehabilitation on informal carers.

OBJECTIVES: To explore the impact of two methods of post-hospital stroke rehabilitation on both carers' perceptions of the health services offered and their quality of life. SETTING: East Dorset Health Authority. SUBJECTS: Forty-six informal carers were recruited from a sample of 106, initially identified from stroke patients participating in a larger randomized controlled trial. DESIGN: Qualitative methods. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews were used at baseline and six months to explore carers' perception of a good therapy, the advantages and disadvantages of the different services and their fulfilment with the services. In-depth thematic analysis was carried out to explore the impact of the two different methods of service delivery on carers' quality of life. RESULTS: Day hospitals provided carers with respite opportunities, whilst domiciliary stroke teams provided carers with better educational opportunities to be involved in therapy. No qualitative difference was found in the impact that the different services had on carers' quality of life, which were influenced by factors such as the degree of disruption that caring had on their lives, the loss of a shared life and the availability of social support. Ultimately, carers saw the services as providing benefit for survivors and not themselves. CONCLUSIONS: Domiciliary stroke teams provided informal stroke carers with skills that could help improve postdischarge stroke rehabilitation amongst stroke survivors. Informal carers also benefited from the respite elements of day hospital. A mixed model using both domiciliary care and day hospital care, could provide carers with the benefits of education, convenience and respite.

Aged↗