Background. Even under the new long-term care mantra for increased home-and community-based care options, attention to and an understanding of the ways that family caregivers are managing complex care for dependent elderly persons, for example, with medication administration, have been slow to materialize.

No abstract

Several lines of evidence suggest that in Alzheimer's disease (AD) there is a progressive degradation of the hierarchical organization of semantic memory. to evaluate this hypothesis, clustering and switching on phonemic and semantic fluency tasks were studied. For elderly controls, both clustering and switching were correlated with the numbers of correct words generated on both fluency tests, but the contribution of clustering was greater on the semantic task. Patients with AD generated fewer correct words and made fewer switches than controls on both fluency tests. the average size of their semantic clusters was smaller and the contribution of clustering to word generation was less than for controls. Severity of dementia was correlated with the numbers of correct words and switches, but not with cluster size. These results are consistent with various hypotheses which maintain that the structure of semantic memory in AD is degraded but provide no evidence that this process is progressive. Instead, progressive worsening of verbal fluency in AD seems to be more strongly associated with the deterioration of mechanisms that govern initiation of search for appropriate subcategories.

No abstract

During the past decade, agrarian reform emerged as a panacea for the problems of Latin America, with a popularity which transcended political and cultural divisions. This apparent accord vanished, however, in the many meanings given to the term and the divergent policies claiming to implement its principles. In Chile where the hacienda system, with its large estates (latijundios) and satellite dwarf holdings (minifundios) has defined for three centuries the rural economic, political and social structure, agrarian reform has been endorsed by successive governments of very different political persuasions and viewed as the key both to rural revolution and its prevention.