[Evaluation of the body composition by anthropometry and bioelectric impedance in a group of elderly patients recovering from cerebrovascular accidents]. / Evaluación de la composición corporal por antropometría e impedancia bioeléctrica en un grupo de ancianos en recuperación de accidentes cerebrovasculares.

Body composition was assessed by bioelectrical impedance and anthropometry in 25 subjects, 13 men and 12 women aged 68 +/- 9 with approximately 1 year of recovering from stroke. Most of them with a high independence in their diary activities. The main purpose of this study is to know the body composition of elderly patients with this pathology and how affects the two compartments, fat mass and fat free mass when they are measured by two different techniques anthropometry and BIA. Body Mass Index was higher in women than in men and correlation coefficient (r = 0.6) with body fat per cent was similar with both methods: BIA and anthropometry. The body fat per cent values obtained by BIA showed the same trend to be lower for men than for women and in general were higher than the anthropometric values; the high correlation between the body fat per cent by anthropometry and by BIA support this tendency (r = 0.748, p < 0.01). The comparative studies of ours results in elderly subjects recovered from stroke and the literature data in healthy elderly subjects suggests that this pathology do not lean to important changes in body composition. However, further research is necessary to confirm these results.

Limited visual control of the intelligibility of speech in face-to-face dialogue.

Speakers are thought to articulate individual words in running speech less carefully whenever additional nonacoustic information can help listeners recognize what is said (Fowler & Housum, 1987; Lieberman, 1963). Comparing single words excerpted from spontaneous dialogues and control tokens of the same words read by the same speakers in lists, Experiment 1 yielded a significant but general effect of visual context: Tokens introducing 71 new entities in dialogues in which participants could see one another's faces were more degraded (less intelligible to 54 naive listeners) than were tokens of the same words from dialogues with sight lines blocked. Loss of clarity was not keyed to moment-to-moment visual behavior. Subjects with clear sight lines looked at each other too rarely to account for the observed effect. Experiment 2 revealed that tokens of 60 words uttered while subjects were looking at each other were significantly less degraded (in length and in intelligibility to 72 subjects) vis-à-vis controls than were spontaneous tokens of the same words produced when subjects were looking elsewhere. Intelligibility loss was mitigated only when listeners looked at speakers. Two separate visual effects are discussed, one of the global availability and the other of the local use of the interlocutor's face.

Alprazolam compared to clobazam and placebo in anxious outpatients.

In this double-blind study we compared alprazolam, clobazam, and placebo for the treatment of outpatients suffering from generalized anxiety disorder. At the end of the treatment, the three groups were significantly improved without showing differences among them. However, both active-drug groups were much improved at the end of week 1 in contrast to the placebo group. We were unable to find any difference on efficacy evaluations between alprazolam and clobazam, but alprazolam reached a consistently better outcome on some ratings compared to placebo. Although benzodiazepines share many common properties, it is necessary to identify selected groups of patients that can be helped by specific compounds or even placebo.