Cerebral Phaeohyphomycosis with Onychomycosis: Case Report and Review of Literature.

The term phaeohyphomycosis (PHM) means dark-pigmented fungal hyphae. Cerebral PHM (CPHM) with onychomycosis is extremely rare; very few have been reported so far. The authors report a case of CPHM with onychomycosis in a 37-year-old male from a rural background in Haryana, India, with involvement of the left frontal lobe. The mass was resected and biopsy was sent for histopathological examination. He was given antifungal drugs in the postoperative period. The patient responded very well to the treatment, and there were no signs of recurrence at the 6-month follow-up visit. The clinical features, imaging and histopathological investigations, and management of this rare entity are discussed, and the available literature is also reviewed.

An item response theory analysis of the Parenting Stress Index-Short Form with parents of children with autism spectrum disorders.

BACKGROUND: The Parenting Stress Index-Short Form (PSI-SF) is one of the most widely used instruments for measuring parenting stress in families of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, no research to date has examined the psychometric properties of the PSI-SF in a sample of parents of young children with ASD. In this regard, item response theory (IRT) can be used to estimate how much information or discrimination each item of a scale offers across the entire range of the latent variable being measured, by creating individual item information curves or profiles. The purpose of this study was to use IRT to examine the discriminability of PSI-SF items in a sample of parents of young children with ASD who experience varying levels of parental stress. METHODS: The study involved the parents of 141 children with autism spectrum disorders (91.4% mothers; mean age 36.2 years) who completed the PSI-SF following diagnosis. Item characteristic curves were constructed for each of the PSI-SF items and examined with regard to item functioning. RESULTS: Results indicated that, for the most part, changes in parental distress severity were reflected in changes on item scores. However, several items on the subscales measuring parent-child dysfunctional interactions and child behavior difficulty functioned poorly to discriminate parents across a range of total stress severity. CONCLUSIONS: The parent-child dysfunctional interaction and difficult child subscales of the PSI-SF scale should be used with caution with parents of young children with ASD. More research is required to examine PSI-SF content validity, at least among parents of children with ASD and perhaps parents of children with other disabilities as well.