Characteristics of patients aged over 75 not seen during one year in general practice.

A study was carried out in two large urban practices to determine the number of patients aged over 75 years who had had no contact with the primary care team during one year and to examine their medical and social characteristics. Although their general health was considered to be good, over half needed treatment or other action and half had no identifiable career.     

Perceptual Compensation Is Correlated with Individuals' “Autistic” Traits: Implications for Models of Sound Change

Variation is a ubiquitous feature of speech. Listeners must take into account context-induced variation to recover the interlocutor''s intended message. When listeners fail to normalize for context-induced variation properly, deviant percepts become seeds for new perceptual and production norms. In question is how deviant percepts accumulate in a systematic fashion to give rise to sound change (i.e., new pronunciation norms) within a given speech community. The present study investigated subjects'' classification of /s/ and // before /a/ or /u/ spoken by a male or a female voice. Building on modern cognitive theories of autism-spectrum condition, which see variation in autism-spectrum condition in terms of individual differences in cognitive processing style, we established a significant correlation between individuals'' normalization for phonetic context (i.e., whether the following vowel is /a/ or /u/) and talker voice variation (i.e., whether the talker is male or female) in speech and their “autistic” traits, as measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). In particular, our mixed-effect logistic regression models show that women with low AQ (i.e., the least “autistic”) do not normalize for phonetic coarticulation as much as men and high AQ women. This study provides first direct evidence that variability in human''s ability to compensate for context-induced variations in speech perceptually is governed by the individual''s sex and cognitive processing style. These findings lend support to the hypothesis that the systematic infusion of new linguistic variants (i.e., the deviant percepts) originate from a sub-segment of the speech community that consistently under-compensates for contextual variation in speech.     

Generation of aspartate aminotransferase multiple forms by deamidation.

The development of aspartate aminotransferase subforms in vitro was followed by densitometry after thin-film isoelectric focusing. At the same time ammonia production was measured. Each reaction can be expressed in terms of a first-order process in which 2 mol of glutamine or asparagine/mol of dimer are deamidated with a half time of 22 days. The more negatively charged subforms developed in vitro were almost fully active. Another process occurred leading to inactivation by coenzyme modification, and this was independent of deamidation. Although the enzyme formed absorbed maximally at 340nm, it was different from the naturally occurring inactive enzyme that absorbs at this wavelength.     

Biosynthesis of man-β-G1cNAc-G1cNAc-pyrophosphoryl-polyprenol by a solubilized enzyme from aorta

The particulate enzyme fraction from pig aorta was treated with Triton X-100 or Nonidet P-40 to yield a soluble enzyme preparation. This solubilized enzyme catalyzed the transfer of mannose from GDP-[¹⁴C]mannose, but not from [¹⁴C]mannosyl-phosphoryl-polyprenol, to G1cNAc-G1cNAc-pyrophosphoryl-polyprenol to form the trisaccharide-lipid, Man-β-GlcNAc-GlcNAc-pyrophosphoryl-polyprenol. The trisaccharide-lipid formed in these reactions was isolated by solvent fractionation and was subjected to mild acid hydrolysis to release the [¹⁴C]trisaccharide. Essentially all of the radioactivity was released from this trisaccharide as mannose upon treatment with β-mannosidase while α-mannosidase had no effect.