Successful treatment of cytomegalovirus encephalitis in a patient with Hodgkin's disease in remission

Cytomegalovirus encephalitis is a rare but life-threatening infection in non-AIDS patients. To our knowledge, no case that followed conventional treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma has been reported. We present a patient with Hodgkin's disease in complete remission after combined modality treatment who was succesfully treated with a combination of ganciclovir and foscarnet.     

Heuristic and analytic processes in propositional reasoning with negatives.

The authors report 4 studies on heuristic and analytic processes in conditional reasoning with negations and show that a heuristic negative conclusion bias cannot account for the effects observed on problem solving latencies derived from eye-movement measures (Experiment 1) and a novel mouse-tracking methodology (Experiment 2). A double negation elimination process can account for both the latency and response-frequency effects of a negation in the clause about which an inference is made. It is further shown that other negation effects cannot be explained by an affirmative premise bias proposed in the literature. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that a novel availability hypothesis provides a viable alternative. It is argued that extant analytic theories need to be extended to incorporate a validating search for counter examples and need to specify how pragmatic and comprehension processes influence such a search. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Deductive rationality in validating and testing conditional inferences.

We asked people to validate conditional inferences (e.g., "A, therefore C" with "if A then C"). People are more likely to look for falsifications ("A and not-C") versus confirmations ("A and C") given a forced choice. Second, falsification rates are lower for logically valid versus invalid inferences. Logically valid inferences are inferences that follow necessarily. Experiment 1 (N = 96) shows that emphasising this logicality constraint increases falsification rates in the validation task and corroborates that validation-by-falsification increases logically correct inference evaluations. Experiment 2 (N = 41) corroborates the other way round that people who are more likely to make logically correct evaluations, show higher falsification performance in the validation task. The results support mental-models theory and suggest alternative theories similarly need to specify how people would go about looking for counterexamples. We proffer such a specification for two alternatives to the model theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The right visual field advantage and the optimal viewing position effect: On the relation between foveal and parafoveal word recognition.

Recent developments on the optimal viewing position (OVP) effect suggest that it may be caused by the same factors that underlie the right visual field advantage in word recognition. This raises the question of the relationship between foveal and parafoveal word recognition. Three experiments are reported in which participants identified tachistoscopically presented words that were presented randomly in foveal and parafoveal vision. The results show that both the OVP effect and the right visual field advantage for word recognition are part of a larger extended OVP curve that has the shape of a Gaussian distribution with the mode shifted to the left of the center of the stimulus word. The shift of the distribution is a function of word length, but not of presentation duration; it is also slightly moderated by the information value of word beginning and word end. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recurrence of blackwater fever: triggering of relapses by different antimalarials

A monoclonal antibody that reacts with a 150-kDa protein of Entamoeba histolytica on Western immunoblotting under nonreducing conditions inhibits the adherence and cytotoxicity of the ameba to mammalian cells in vitro. Affinity purification of solubilized trophozoites using the monoclonal antibody and electrophoresis yielded three glycoproteins with molecular masses of 150, 170, and 260 kDa, suggesting the existence of either a common epitope or the close association of these proteins. The 260-kDa fraction was identified as the well-known galactose (Gal)- and N-acetyl-D-galactosamine (GalNAc)-inhibitable lectin. The 150- and 170-kDa fractions seemed to exist as part of a 380-kDa native protein with an isoelectric point of pH 6.9. The N-terminal amino acid sequence of the 150-kDa protein was unique, indicating that the protein was not a degraded product of the 260-kDa lectin. By gel filtration, the 260-kDa lectin and the 150/170-kDa protein could be separated. When Chinese hamster ovary cells were pretreated with the fraction consisting of the 150/170-kDa protein the adherence of trophozoites to Chinese hamster ovary cells was competitively inhibited to a level equivalent to that observed for the 260-kDa lectin. The inhibitory effect was lost in the presence of Gal and GalNAc but was not influenced by the presence of glucose. These results demonstrate that the 150/170-kDa protein is a Gal/GalNAc-inhibitable lectin. The existence of a sugar-binding domain in the protein was confirmed by Gal-affinity chromatography.