Older People's Conceptualisation of Elder and neglect

Purpose

To be effective, definitions of elder abuse should be informed by the perspectives of older people themselves.

Methods

This qualitative study used data from eight focus groups involving 58 people aged over 65 years in both urban and rural settings across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Following training, four older people assisted in facilitation and analysis as ‘peer-researchers'.

Findings

Increasing lack of respect within society was experienced as abusive. The vulnerability of older people to abuse was perceived as relating to the need for help and support, where standing up for themselves might have repercussions for the person's health or safety. Emotional abusiveness was viewed as underpinning all forms of abuse, and as influencing its experienced severity. Respondents' views as to whether an action was abusive required an understanding of intent; some actions that professionals might view as abusive were regarded as acceptable if they were in the older person's best interests.

Implications

Preventing abuse requires a wide-ranging approach including re-building respect for older people within society. Procedures to prevent elder abuse need to take into account the emotional impact of family relationships and intent, not just a description of behaviours that have occurred.

Clinical Trials Abroad: The Marketable Ethics, Weak Protections and Vulnerable Subjects of EU Law

This chapter explores how the EU is a largely overlooked exporter of normative power through its facilitation and use of clinical trials data produced abroad for the marketing of safe pharmaceuticals at home; a move that helps to foster the growing resort to pharmaceuticals as a fix for public health problems. This is made possible by the EU’s (de)selection of international ethical frameworks in preference to the international technical standards it co-authors with other global regulators. Clinical trials abroad underscore how ethics are contingent and revisable in light of market needs, producing weak protections for the vulnerable subjects of EU law. I argue that these components and effects of the regime are ultimately about that which undergirds, shapes and directs regulatory design. That is, I point to the use, infiltration, perpetuation and extension of market-oriented ideas, values and rationalities into formally non-market domains like biomedical knowledge production and public health. I explain how these are central to efforts at producing and legitimating the EU, its related imagined socio-political order based on a more innovative, profitable and competitive pharmaceutical sector in order to foster economic growth, jobs and prosperity, and with them the project of European integration. ‘Bioethics as risk’ is highlighted as a way to reshape and redirect the regulatory regime in ways that are more consistent with the spirit and letter of the ethical standards (and through them the human rights) the EU claims to uphold.

Aggressiveness as a component of fighting ability in pigs using a game-theoretical framework

Understanding animal contests has benefited greatly from employing the concept of fighting ability, termed resource-holding potential (RHP), with body size/weight typically used as a proxy. However, victory does not always go to the larger/heavier contestant and the existing RHP approach thereby fails to accurately predict contest outcome. Aggressiveness, typically studied as a personality trait, might explain part of this discrepancy. We investigated whether aggressiveness forms a component of RHP, examining effects on contest outcome, duration and phases, plus physiological measures of costs (lactate and glucose). Furthermore, using the correct theoretical framework, we provide the first study to investigate whether individuals gather and use information on aggressiveness as part of an assessment strategy. Pigs, Sus scrofa, were assessed for aggressiveness in resident-intruder tests whereby attack latency reflects aggressiveness. Contests were then staged between size-matched animals diverging in aggressiveness. Individuals with a short attack latency in the resident-intruder test almost always initiated the first bite and fight in the subsequent contest. However, aggressiveness had no direct effect on contest outcome, whereas bite initiation did lead to winning in contests without an escalated fight. This indirect effect suggests that aggressiveness is not a component of RHP, but rather reflects a signal of intent. Winner and loser aggressiveness did not affect contest duration or its separate phases, suggesting aggressiveness is not part of an assessment strategy. A greater asymmetry in aggressiveness prolonged contest duration and the duration of displaying, which is in a direction contrary to assessment models based on morphological traits. Blood lactate and glucose increased with contest duration and peaked during escalated fights, highlighting the utility of physiological measures as proxies for fight cost. Integrating personality traits into the study of contest behaviour, as illustrated here, will enhance our understanding of the subtleties of agonistic interactions.

Identification of tone duration, line length and letter position: An experimental approach to timing and working memory deficits in schizophrenia.

Patients with schizophrenia display numerous cognitive deficits, including problems in working memory, time estimation, and absolute identification of stimuli. Research in these fields has traditionally been conducted independently. We examined these cognitive processes using tasks that are structurally similar and that yield rich error data. Relative to healthy control participants (n = 20), patients with schizophrenia (n = 20) were impaired on a duration identification task and a probed-recall memory task but not on a line-length identification task. These findings do not support the notion of a global impairment in absolute identification in schizophrenia. However, the authors suggest that some aspect of temporal information processing is indeed disturbed in schizophrenia.

Letter to the Editor: Calculation of photoionized plasmas with an average-atom model

We use a simple average-atom model (NIMP) to calculate the distribution of ionization in a photoionization-dominated plasma, for comparison with recent experimental measurements undertaken on the Z-machine at the Sandia National Laboratory. The agreement between theory and experiment is found to be as good for calculations with an average-atom model as for those generated by more detailed models.

Copying letters to patients with cystic fibrosis (CF): Letter content and patient perceptions of benefit

Background: Copying letters involves generating an extra copy of all correspondence between healthcare professionals about the patient, to the patient.

'Dancing at the English Opera':'Marie Salle's letter to the Duchess of Richmond

A letter from dancer Marie Salle to her patroness dated 1731 reveals her ambitions to dance at the English opera.

Making space: English women, letter-writing, and the life of the mind, c.1650-1750

This article uses women's letter-writing from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to explore the home as a site of female intellectual endeavour. Far from representing a static backdrop to the action of domestic life, the home played a dynamic role in women's experiences of the life of the mind and shaped the ways in which women thought and wrote. Letters were penned in dining rooms, parlours and closets, by firesides, and on desks and laps. In their letters, women projected images of themselves scribbling epistles to friends in order to maintain their mental intimacy. Space was both real and imagined and the physical realities of a hand-written and hand-delivered letter gave way to the imaginative possibilities brought by networks of epistolary exchange and the alternative spaces of creative thought. By reinstating the home more fully in the history of female intellectual experience, a more nuanced view of the domestic arena can be developed: one that sees the home not as a site of exclusion and confinement, but as a space for scholarship and exchange. 

Women, letter-writing and the life of the mind in England, c.1650-1750

Drawing on national and regional letter collections dating from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this article explores women's experiences of the life of the mind through an analysis of their letter-writing. This study also highlights the shortcomings of the compartmentalised nature of scholarship on women's writing and intellectual lives and proposes the letter both as a beneficial historical source and methodological tool for research on women's mental worlds. By employing an inclusive definition of intellectual and creative life, and eschewing traditional benchmarks of achievement, this article contends that women took a full part in the cultures of knowledge of their time. 

PET/CT imaging for target volume delineation in curative intent radiotherapy of non-small cell lung cancer: IAEA consensus report 2014

This document describes best practice and evidence based recommendations for the use of FDG-PET/CT for the purposes of radiotherapy target volume delineation (TVD) for curative intent treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). These recommendations have been written by an expert advisory group, convened by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to facilitate a Coordinated Research Project (CRP) aiming to improve the applications of PET based radiation treatment planning (RTP) in low and middle income countries. These guidelines can be applied in routine clinical practice of radiotherapy TVD, for NSCLC patients treated with concurrent chemoradiation or radiotherapy alone, where FDG is used, and where a calibrated PET camera system equipped for RTP patient positioning is available. Recommendations are provided for PET and CT image visualization and interpretation, and for tumor delineation using planning CT with and without breathing motion compensation.