Background: Cataract surgery is the most common operative procedure performed in Canada, and how patients are affected by wait times for this surgery has important clinical, public health and health policy considerations. We conducted a systematic review to understand the relation between wait time for cataract surgery and patient outcomes and the variables that modify this relation. Methods:We performed an electronic search of 11 databases and the proceedings of 4 conferences. The search was restricted to studies published after the transition to phacoemulsification (1990). We assessed the quality of the included studies using the Jadad Scale for randomized controlled trials and the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale for cohort and case-control studies. The data were found to be inappropriate for meta-analysis, thus we performed a qualitative synthesis. Results:We found a total of 27 studies that met our inclusion criteria. When these studies were reviewed, a dichotomy was observed for the wait time-outcome relation: outcomes associated with wait times of ≤ 6 weeks were better than outcomes associated with wait times of ≥ 6 months. Patients who waited more than 6 months to receive cataract surgery experienced more vision loss, a reduced quality of life and had an increased rate of falls compared with patients who had wait times of less than 6 weeks. The outcomes associated with wait times between 6 weeks and 6 months remain unclear. Interpretation:Patients who wait more than 6 months for cataract surgery may experience negative outcomes during the wait period, including vision loss, a reduced quality of life and an increased rate of falls. CMAJ 2007;176(9):1285-90 Abstract

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This paper reports the effects of a two-year supplemental reading program for kindergarten through third grade students that focused on the development of decoding skills and reading fluency. Two hundred ninety-nine students were identified for participation and were randomly assigned to the supplemental instruction or to a no-treatment control group. Participants' reading ability was assessed in the fall, before the first year of the intervention, and again in the spring of years 1, 2, 3, and 4. At the end of the two-year intervention, students who received the supplemental instruction performed significantly better than their matched controls on measures of entry level reading skills (i.e., letterword identification and word attack), oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The benefits of the instruction were still clear two years after instruction had ended with students in the supplemental-instruction condition still showing significantly greater growth on the measure of oral reading fluency. Hispanic students benefited from the supplemental reading instruction in English as much as or more than non-Hispanic students. Results support the value of supplemental instruction focused on the development of word recognition skills for helping students at risk for reading failure. Fostering the Development of Reading Skill through Supplemental Instruction: Results for Hispanic and Non-Hispanic StudentsThe long-term impact of reading failure on school success is well established (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998;Juel, 1988;Slavin et al., 1996). So, too, is the relation between learning to read in the primary grades and the development of reading ability throughout elementary school (Francis, Shaywitz, Steubing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1996;Juel, 1988). Reading acquisition is frequently viewed as a "bottom-up" process, based on the development of word recognition skills to promote fluency and comprehension (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pestsky, & Seidenberg, 2001). Within this framework, fluent word recognition allows the reader to allocate increased attention to key comprehension processes, such as making meaningful connections between sentences within a passage or relating text meaning to prior experiences and information (Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001). Thus, learning how to decode text provides a requisite foundation not only for reading fluency but also for higher-level comprehension processes.Evidence from 20 years of reading research points to the development of fluent word recognition skills as the biggest difficulty that students face in learning to read (Share & Stanovich, 1995). In particular, theories of word recognition (Ehri, 1998; Please send correspondence concerning this article to: Barbara Gunn, Ph.D., Oregon Research Institute, 1715 Franklin Blvd., Eugene, OR 97403-1983, Telephone: 541.484.2123/fax: 541.484.1108. E-mail: barbarag@ori.org. Grant #DA 09678 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse supported the preparation of this manuscript. The authors thank Christine Cody and ...

This paper reports a randomized controlled trial of the effects of behavioral parenting skills training, social skills training, and supplemental reading instruction on the social behavior of early elementary school children (K through 3). We selected children based on teacher-rated aggressive behavior or reading-skill deficits, delivered the intervention over a 2-year period, and obtained follow-up data for two additional years. The intervention affected only two of eight measures of child functioning--parent daily reports of antisocial behavior and parent ratings of coercive behavior. There was evidence that parents of boys in the intervention condition displayed significantly greater declines in their rated use of coercive discipline than did parents of boys in the control condition.

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