Sentence production by aphasic patients in a constrained task.

Sixty aphasic patients and 55 normal control subjects were tested on a sentence production protocol that required subjects to produce specific sentence types from semantic representations. Normal subjects produced the expected targets with great reliability. Analysis of the patients' performance indicated that patients had difficulty producing both grammatical forms and thematic roles. Patients had more trouble producing grammatical elements than content words, and showed differential difficulty on sentence types that had more grammatical elements and in which the order of thematic roles was non-canonical. The results provide evidence regarding the processing load imposed by different components of the sentence production process.

MR imaging in seminal vesiculitis.

Seminal vesicle disorders may be clinically vague owing to the nonspecific nature of the associated signs and symptoms. Thus, the diagnosis of seminal vesicle disease is frequently difficult. Two cases of seminal vesiculitis are presented to illustrate the usefulness of pelvic magnetic resonance imaging in making this difficult diagnosis.

Amrinone: acute electrophysiologic and hemodynamic effects in patients with congestive heart failure.

Amrinone is an effective inotropic agent, but its electrophysiologic effects in humans have not been previously determined. Fifteen patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) New York Heart Association functional class II to IV, underwent an electrophysiologic study after withdrawal of all other cardioactive drugs before and after 10 to 20 micrograms/kg/min of intravenous amrinone (doses that increased cardiac index and decreased pulmonary capillary wedge pressure and systemic vascular resistance, p less than 0.002). Amrinone caused no change in PR, QRS, QTc, AH or HV intervals or maximal corrected sinus node recovery time and had no significant effect on the ventricular effective refractory periods. Amrinone decreased the atrial effective refractory period from 256 +/- 40 to 240 +/- 38 ms (p = 0.015), and the atrioventricular (AV) nodal functional refractory period from 374 +/- 65 to 356 +/- 64 ms (p less than 0.05), and enhanced maximal 1:1 AV nodal conduction from 371 +/- 46 to 334 +/- 47 ms (p = 0.006). Nine patients had baseline HV prolongation; this was not affected by amrinone. The frequency of inducible ventricular tachycardia was not significantly affected by amrinone. Holter recordings (24 to 48 hours) were obtained from 10 patients before and after acute oral amrinone dosing (75 to 150 mg every 8 hours). There was no change in the number of ventricular premature contractions per 24 hours (2,197 +/- 3,305 vs 2,616 +/- 2,436) or number of runs of ventricular tachycardia per 24 hours (10 +/- 12 vs 12 +/- 13); however, the number of ventricular couplets per 24 hours increased from 22 +/- 34 to 52 +/- 55 (p = 0.054).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Urinary tract infection after transrectal needle biopsy of the prostate.

After routine cleansing enemas 80 patients were randomized to undergo irrigation of the rectal vault with either povidone-iodine or saline. A transrectal prostatic needle biopsy then was performed. Antimicrobials were not used before biopsy and were only ordered after biopsy if fever developed or a positive urine culture was obtained. Over-all, 41 per cent of the patients had positive urine cultures post-biopsy and 44 per cent had febrile episodes. There was no significant difference between the group receiving the povidone-iodine versus those receiving saline irrigations.