The association of oral frailty with fall risk in community-dwelling older adults: a cross-sectional, observational study.

PURPOSE: This cross-sectional study examined the direct association of oral frailty with falls in community-dwelling older adults, controlling for the effects of sarcopenia and physical performance. METHODS: The participants were 237 community-dwelling older people (age: 76.0 ± 5.7 years, male: 23.6%). Oral frailty was assessed using the Oral Frailty Index-8. History of falls, timed up and go test (TUG), and sarcopenia were also assessed. The association between oral frailty and fall incidence was analyzed using multivariate logistic regression analysis adjusted for TUG and sarcopenia. RESULTS: Forty-six (19.4%) participants fell, and 130 (54.9%) had a risk of oral frailty. On multivariate logistic regression analysis, oral frailty was significantly associated with fall incidence (odds ratio = 2.38, 95% confidence interval 1.11-5.07), even after adjusting for TUG and sarcopenia. CONCLUSION: Oral frailty is a possible fall risk factor, independent of sarcopenia and physical performance, in community-dwelling older people.

Development of a Screening Test for the Early Identification of Japanese Children with Difficulties Learning English: A Preliminary Study.

Objectives: In Japan, there is no established method to assess the ability to read and write in English. To address this problem, we sought to develop a screening test for the early detection of students who show difficulties in reading and writing in English. Methods: The participants were 425 fifth- and sixth-grade elementary school students and 526 first- through third-grade junior high school students. While setting up the task items, we focused on the assessment of visual information processing ability related to letter-symbol information processing. Q1 was a letter identification task, Q2 was a letter recognition task, Q3 was a discrimination task, Q4 was a lexical decision task, Q5 was a semantic comprehension task, Q6 was a meaningful sentence copy task, and Q7 was a nonsensical sentence copy task. Q1 to Q5 assessed reading ability and Q6 and Q7 assessed writing ability. Results: The comparison of basic distribution between elementary and junior high school showed that there were differences in the distribution of both reading and writing scores between the two school types (P<0.05). At the cut-off value of -1.5 SD, 7.8% of the students were extracted for reading scores and 4.2%-5.5% for writing scores. Conclusions: The extraction rate of students using this screening test supports the results of previously published studies. Thus, this screening test is considered suitable for identifying elementary and junior high school students who face difficulties in reading and writing in English.

Association between tongue pressure and skeletal muscle mass and muscle function in community-dwelling older people without sarcopenia.

PURPOSE: This study aimed to cross-sectionally investigate relationships between maximum tongue pressure (MTP) and whole-body muscle mass and strength for non-sarcopenic older adults. METHODS: Study participants comprised 341 adults (105 men, 236 women) ≥ 65 years old (mean age, 72.7 ± 4.8 years). Participants were measured for MTP, grip strength, five-time chair stand test (FCST), gait speed, and skeletal muscle mass index (SMI). Multiple regression analysis adjusted for confounding factors was used to analyze relationships between MTP and each other variable. RESULTS: MTP was significantly related to SMI (r = 0.15, p < 0.001), grip strength (r = 0.12, p < 0.05), FCST (r = - 0.14, p < 0.05), and age (r = 0.25, p < 0.001). Multiple regression analysis showed a positive association between MTP and SMI, even after accounting for the influence of age, sex, physical performance, and other potential confounding factors. CONCLUSION: Whole-body muscle mass was suggested to be decreasing with tongue pressure decline before sarcopenia diagnosis in community-dwelling older adults.

Bidirectional aftereffects in perceived contrast.

It is well known that prolonged observation of a high-contrast stimulus alters the perception of a subsequent test stimulus. Previous studies of perceived contrast shifts only reported perceived contrast reductions. Here, we used successive presentations of test and reference stimuli and found that perceived contrast was reduced if tests had a lower contrast than adaptors but was significantly enhanced when tests had a higher contrast than adaptors. Such bidirectional contrast aftereffects were not observed for single adaptor flashes but became increasingly pronounced for repeated adaptor presentations, thereby suggesting that the aftereffect is a consequence of adaptation rather than of attentional cuing or temporal repulsion. In addition, perceived contrast reduction weakened as we increasingly jittered the spatial position of the adaptor, but perceived contrast enhancement was observed for large spatial range of jittered adaptor positions. We conclude that aftereffects involve adaptation in distinct mechanisms with narrow and broad spatial tunings. Results suggest that the visual system not only possesses low-level contrast encoding units, which monotonically increase their responses as physical contrast increases, but is also equipped with high-level channels selectively tuned for particular contrast ranges.

Syntactic comprehension in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Recent neuropsychological studies of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) have demonstrated that some patients have aphasic symptoms, including impaired syntactic comprehension. However, it is not known if syntactic comprehension disorder is related to executive and visuospatial dysfunction. In this study, we evaluated syntactic comprehension using the Syntax Test for Aphasia (STA) auditory comprehension task, frontal executive function using the Frontal Assessment Battery (FAB), visuospatial function using Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM), and dementia using the Hasegawa Dementia Scale-Revised (HDS-R) in 25 patients with ALS. Of the 25 patients, 18 (72%) had syntactic comprehension disorder (STA score < IV), nine (36%) had frontal executive dysfunction (FAB score < 14), six (24%) had visuospatial dysfunction (RCPM score < 24), and none had dementia (HDS-R score < 20). Nine of the 18 patients with syntactic comprehension disorder (50%) passed the FAB and RCPM. Although sample size was small, these patients had a low STA score but normal FAB and RCPM score. All patients with bulbar onset ALS had syntactic comprehension disorder. These results indicate that it might be necessary to assess syntactic comprehension in patients with bulbar onset ALS. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the pathological continuum of ALS.