Adolescents and nuclear arms issues.

Concerned about adolescents' reactions to the ever present nuclear threat, we surveyed 10,720 high school students in New Jersey, U.S.A. Half felt anxious about an accidental war and expected a major nuclear blast. One-quarter expected a nuclear war involving the United States, and one-fifth expected to die in a nuclear blast. Most expected the United States to be destroyed if a major nuclear war occurred, did not believe that long term survival after the initial exchanges is possible, or that civil defense preparations can be effective. Responses were similar across economic background, time period and type of high school.

The fractional hepatic extraction of histidine in acute and chronic renal failure.

The fractional hepatic extraction (FHE) of histidine absorbed from the in vivo-perfused jejunum was measured in rats with chronic renal failure (CRF) and acute renal failure (ARF). CRF rats were compared with two groups: (a) animals pair-fed with the CRF rats, designated as a protein-calorie malnutrition (PCM) group, and (b) animals fed ad libitum. Despite their poor dietary intake, the FHE of histidine in the CRF animals did not differ from that of rat fed ad libitum. As expected, the PCM animals demonstrated a substantial reduction in the FHE of histidine, thereby making the amino acid more available for peripheral tissue utilization. Animals with ARF also manifested no change in the FHE of histidine. The present study was designed to examine the hypothesis that in CRF, the lack of hepatic adaptations to the diminished intake of histidine may contribute to the abnormal metabolism of this amino acid in uremia.

Treatment benefit functions for a drug abuse rehabilitation treatment system.

While generally justifying the large amount of money invested in the treatment effort, evaluation studies of treatment centers for drug addiction do not offer a rational method of allocating scarce resources among the various available treatment programs. The problem is further confounded by different costs associated with the different programs and also because clients rarely complete the prescribed treatment. We developed functional relationships between treatment outcomes and time in treatment that allow the inclusion of probable length of stay of patients and cost per week for a particular treatment program in the evaluation considerations. The model evolved from a drug addiction treatment system operating in Newark, New Jersey consisting of six different treatment centres. Treatment outcome measures are derived from a psychosocial questionnaire which was administered to patients at appropriate time intervals. The questionnaire probed into the important facets of human behavior as related to the use or non-use of drugs for non-medical reasons. Gompertz curves reflecting treatment benefit are computed for each treatment center by least square fit of the collected data to appropriate differential equations and used together with cost of treatment and treatment retention rates to compute expected net benefit for each treatment center. These enable the researcher to find the treatment centers with the best treatment outcome or alternately with the best expected cost benefit ratio for any patient type.