A national prevention program appears to reduce catheter use and catheter-associated UTI rates in non-ICUs. (Funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.).

BACKGROUND With limited numbers of intensive care unit (ICU) beds available, increasing patient acuity is expected to contribute to episodes of inpatient deterioration on general wards. OBJECTIVE To prospectively validate a predictive algorithm for clinical deterioration in general–medical ward patients, and to conduct a trial of real‐time alerts based on this algorithm. DESIGN Randomized, controlled crossover study. SETTING/PATIENTS Academic center with patients hospitalized on 8 general wards between July 2007 and December 2011. INTERVENTIONS Real‐time alerts were generated by an algorithm designed to predict the need for ICU transfer using electronically available data. The alerts were sent by text page to the nurse manager on intervention wards. MEASUREMENTS Intensive care unit transfer, hospital mortality, and hospital length of stay. RESULTS Patients meeting the alert threshold were at nearly 5.3‐fold greater risk of ICU transfer (95% confidence interval [CI]: 4.6‐6.0) than those not satisfying the alert threshold (358 of 2353 [15.2%] vs 512 of 17678 [2.9%]). Patients with alerts were at 8.9‐fold greater risk of death (95% CI: 7.4‐10.7) than those without alerts (244 of 2353 [10.4%] vs 206 of 17678 [1.2%]). Among patients identified by the early warning system, there were no differences in the proportion of patients who were transferred to the ICU or who died in the intervention group as compared with the control group. CONCLUSIONS Real‐time alerts were highly specific for clinical deterioration resulting in ICU transfer and death, and were associated with longer hospital length of stay. However, an intervention notifying a nurse of the risk did not result in improvement in these outcomes. Journal of Hospital Medicine 2013;8:236–242. © 2013 Society of Hospital Medicine

No abstract

No abstract

The experiment reported here examined implicit memory function, as measured through repetition priming, in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to examine whether impairments exist in this aspect of memory function. Young adults, healthy older controls, Alzheimer's disease patients, and MCI participants were asked to perform two types of implicit memory tests (word stem completion and threshold identification repetition priming tasks), as well as a recognition test for studied items. As expected, young adults performed better than the other participants on the recognition test and the word stem completion task; there was equivalent priming across groups on the word identification task. While both the older control and MCI participants showed lower levels of priming on the word stem completion task relative to the young adults, the magnitude of priming was equivalent for these two groups, and reliably greater than that of the dementia participants. These results suggest that not all aspects of memory function are impaired in MCI relative to healthy aging.

This study was designed to examine the influence a potential date's physical attractiveness and sexual history has on an individual's intentions to engage in safer sex. Over 1,200 participants completed an Internet survey. The questionnaire presented a randomized biography and photograph and asked participants to rate their interest in dating and having a sexual relationship with the target. Participants were randomly assigned to one of six conditions based on the target's physical attractiveness (low vs. high) and sexual experience (low, medium, or high). Results indicated that men reported greater intentions to have sex than women did, and all participants reported greater likelihood of having sex when the potential partner was highly attractive. Participants rated men and more experienced targets as more risky sexual partners, and the level of a target's sexual experience was directly related to participants' willingness to discuss sexual risks. Results indicate a continuing need to include discussion of cognitive factors in all HIV prevention efforts.

The study reported here was conducted to examine the role of frontal lobe function in false memory susceptibility in older adults, as little research has specifically examined this question in older adults. False recognition was compared in three groups of older adults (one with no evidence of cognitive impairment, one with evident frontal impairment but no other dysfunction, and an Alzheimer's dementia group) to a single group of young adults. Results indicate that false memory susceptibility was highest in the frontally impaired group, with young and older control participants performing similarly. In contrast, Alzheimer's dementia patients showed relatively low levels of false memory susceptibility, likely due to overall poor memory for list items, indicating that general memory impairments are not likely to be driving false memory susceptibility. Potential mechanisms underlying these effects are discussed.

Locomotor activity (tremor, ataxia, immobility, epilepsy, and paralysis) in the taiep rat, which suffers from a myelin deficient disorder, has not been previously documented. This study used walking track analysis of footprints to analyze locomotor activity in the taiep rat in comparison to normal, age-matched controls. The results confirmed differences between normal and taiep rats in terms of stride length, step length, and stride width. In addition, we found significant interactions between age and condition for stride and step length. The results suggest that locomotor analysis is a sensitive indicator of myelin deficiency. The results are discussed in terms of the underlying myelin deficiency and possible treatment regimens.