A global approach to health care: the problem of the the patient''s wishes

A review of the literature of the last 5 years on retroperitoneal fibrosis is given. MRT seems to add to the exact extend of the disease and galliumscintigraphy can give new information on the activity of the process and the usefulness of medical therapy. The use of corticosteroid or other immunosuppressive drugs such a azathioprine, again is confirmed. Other drugs mentioned in the medical therapy are methotrexate, cyclophosfamide and penicillamine. A few cases responded well to tamoxifen, a drug which was already used in therapy of desmoid tumours. Medical treatment is anyhow superior to surgery alone.     

The "rainbow" model: an attempt at a global approach to the drug problem

A global, tridimensional, and comprehensive model for the drug problem is presented. On a flat matrix with five components (growing, production, processing, traffic/distribution, and consumption) and seven dimensions (individual, family, restricted group, neighborhood, city/region, national, and international), six different perspectives are employed (psychobiological, social/political, economics, legal, historical/cultural, and geographical). Each psychoactive substance may be analyzed separately.     

The problem with problem solving

PURPOSE: We conducted a prospective study of patients with primary pterygia to analyze surgically-induced astigmatic changes following pterygium surgery and their relation to pterygium morphology and size. METHODS: One hundred twenty-three eyes of 123 adult patients with primary pterygia were evaluated. Pterygium was graded according to morphology and the extent of corneal encroachment. Manifest refraction was performed preoperatively and at 1, 3, and 6 months postoperatively. Patients underwent either the bare sclera technique of pterygium excision or conjunctival grafting. Surgery was performed by one surgeon. Olsen's method of vector decomposition was used to analyze surgically-induced astigmatism. RESULTS: The mean magnitude of preoperative astigmatism was 0.99 D, with vector decomposition revealing a relative flattening of the cornea in the horizontal meridian. Astigmatism of 1.00 D or more was seen when the pterygium exceeded 3.5 mm beyond the limbus. Postoperatively, a steepening of the cornea in the horizontal meridian was demonstrated, the magnitude of which was related to pterygium size (P = 0.0001). ANOVA testing showed no significant difference (P > 0.05) when pterygia were divided according to morphology. CONCLUSIONS: This study confirms that pterygium excision induces a reversal of pterygium-related corneal flattening. A strong correlation was also found between the horizontal extent of pterygium encroachment and astigmatic change following surgery.     

Transient global amnesia

Transient global amnesia is an alarming but benign disorder of middle age, which prevents both the formation of new memories, and the retrieval of recently formed ones, for some hours. Research over the last 10 years has shed light on the epidemiology, neuropsychology, functional anatomy and differential diagnosis of this distinctive condition, and clarified its management.     

The global burden of cancer

The number of new cancer cases, and the annual incidence rates, of 25 different cancers have been estimated for the year 1990 for every country of the world. The distributions of the most common cancers in men and women are presented for 23 broad 'Areas'. The total number (excluding non-melanoma skin cancer) was 8.1 million, just over half of which occur in the developing countries. The most common cancer is lung cancer, which accounts for 18% of cancers of men worldwide. Stomach cancer is second in frequency (almost 10% of all new cancers) and breast cancer--by far the most important cancer of women (21% of the total) is third. There are very large differences in the relative importance of the different cancers by world area; some of the factors, environmental and genetic, underlying the geographic distributions, are discussed.     

Content effects in problem categorization and problem solving.

In many domains, the content of a problem (i.e., its surface cover story) provides useful clues as to the type of problem it is and to its solution. Five experiments examined this role of problem content on the problem solution and categorization of algebra word problems with experienced participants. In the first experiment, when problem content was atypical for the the problem's deep structure, people were worse at solving the problem. Differences were also detected in the problem solution where the problem's content was highly correlated with its deep structure versus problems where content was neutral to their deep structure. In the other experiments, problem categorization and determination of information relevance depended on how closely the problem's content matched its deep structure. These results suggest that content may be influential even for experienced problem solvers. The discussion examines the implications for problem schema access and application. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Local and global representations of velocity: transparency, opponency, and global direction perception

Human subjects can perceive global motion or motions in displays containing diverse local motions, implying representation of velocity at multiple scales. The phenomena of flexible global direction judgments, and especially of motion transparency, also raise the issue of whether the representation of velocity at any one scale is single-valued or multi-valued. A new performance-based measure of transparency confirms that the visual system represents directional information for each component of a transparent display. However, results with the locally paired random-dot display introduced by Qian et al, show that representations of multiple velocities do not coexist at the finest spatial scale of motion analysis. Functionally distinct scales of motion processing may be associated with (i) local motion detectors which show a strong winner-take-all interaction; (ii) spatial integration of local signals to disambiguate velocity; (iii) selection of reliable velocity signals as proposed in the model of Nowlan and Sejnowski; (iv) object-based or surface-based representations that are not necessarily organised in a fixed spatial matrix. These possibilities are discussed in relation to the neurobiological organisation of the visual motion pathway.