Electronic Cigarette Burns: A Case Report and Review of Current Literature.

Due to the development of electronic cigarettes and their use in our patient population, this article seeks to evaluate the safety and associated morbidity that may result from their use. This article also presents a patient case regarding an explosion of an electronic cigarette battery and the resultant injury and deformity that occurred.

Morphosyntactic abilities of toddlers with hearing impairment and normal hearing: evidence from a sentence-repetition task.

BACKGROUND: While considerable research exists on morphosyntax of school-age children with hearing impairment (HI), little is known about development of morphosyntax at younger ages. Some studies show that young children with HI have a delay in language abilities compared with children with normal hearing (NH); conversely, other studies show evidence that they achieve age-appropriate language development. AIMS: To investigate whether characteristics of morphosyntactic development displayed by young children with HI are unique or whether they are similar to those of NH children. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Fifty-four Hebrew-speaking children (15 with HI and 39 with NH), aged 22-40 months, completed a novel Hebrew sentence repetition (SRep) task designed to evaluate morphosyntactic abilities. Accuracy on the total correct structure, repetition of content and function words, and repetition of specific morphemes were compared across groups. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: At the earliest stages of combining words to sentences, toddlers in both groups showed a large variation in morphosyntactic development, with no significant difference between the two groups. Children with HI and NH showed similar results for the acquisition of morphemes and various syntactic structures. In the group of children with HI, hearing capability accounted for 28% of the variance of the SRep task. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The findings suggest typical morphosyntax capacity at the onset of language development among of children with HI who are diagnosed early and receive intensive intervention.

Generic patient self-report and investigator report instruments of therapeutic safety and tolerability.

A patient self-report instrument was designed as a patient event index that maps to a parallel investigator instrument. Event importance (a composite of severity, frequency, and duration) was reported, but attribution was not required. The patient instrument used a checklist but also allowed for spontaneous reporting for new or unusual events. The investigator instrument (also a checklist) includes all events reported by the patient, as well as events such as signs, investigations, and diagnoses that would not generally be known to the patient. Presently, both patient and investigator instruments are to be used alongside current methods of adverse event reporting in clinical trials. The patient instrument would serve as a safety/tolerability index, whereas the investigator instrument would be a fully quantifiable (appropriately weighted), standardized adverse event index. As in many methodological projects in medicine, the overriding problem was the tradeoff between validity (comprehensiveness and accuracy) and feasibility (clarity and short administration time) in instrument development. A summary of pilot studies and results of instrument reliability and validity are presented.