Portrait of the Patient as a Young Man: An Exploration of the Use of Photographs in Hospital

The display of personal photographs in hospital is a common practice that has yet to be rigorously examined. The photographs displayed are subject to interpretation by the viewer and may lead to misunderstandings or miscommunication if clarification of meaning is not sought. This paper explores a range of possible meanings that the display of photographs in hospital may hold, based on a case study of a 15 year old boy hospitalised with a life threatening illness. Further research is needed into the actual meanings attributed to the display of photographs in hospital by patients and family members.     

Sacral curvature and supine posture

Sacral curvature (SC), represented by the angle between the first and the last sacral vertebrae, is a feature that differentiates the human pelvis from that of other animals. The sacral curvature was measured and studied in 14 cebids, 31 cercopithecids, 17 hylobatids, 85 pongids, 23 normal human children, 15 children with orthopedic handicaps, 49 normal adult human males, and 64 normal adult human females. Sacral curvature was minimal to nil in monkeys (mean 11.5 +/- 6 SD degrees), and moderate in apes (hylobatids, mean 16 +/- 10 SD degrees; pongids, mean 27.2 +/- 16 SD degrees). In human newborns SC is minimal, increasing progressively until adolescence, reaching a mean of 64.7 +/- 29 SD degrees in adult humans. This study investigates the different factors contributing to the formation of the sacral curvature. These factors include 1) the effect of erect posture, which tilts the upper part of the sacrum dorsally and the lower part of the sacrum ventrally, and 2) the influence of supine posture, which affects the development of the lower part of the sacrum. In addition to supine posture the levator ani, which is well developed in Homo sapiens, also affects the lower part of the sacrum and coccyx and influences its ventral orientation. Variation in SC can result from differences in onset and frequency of supine posture. This is the first time that supine posture has been shown to play a role in shaping the human pelvis, although it is as characteristic of H. sapiens as is erect posture.     

Growth status of disadvantaged urban Guatemalan children of a resettled community

This paper reports the physical growth and body composition from the first year of longitudinal study of 519 Guatemalan children, and their families, from a disadvantaged urban community consisting largely of refugees of the 1976 earthquake. Four cohorts are described, composed of children of 1,3,5, and 7 years at examination. The children are smaller, weigh less, and have reduced fat stores compared either to NCHS reference data or to upper SES Guatemalan children. Stature (or length) and head circumference deviate more from reference data than do triceps or upper arm muscle circumference. Greater deviations are found in the linear dimensions of males than of females. These children are the smallest yet described from Guatemala City, though they are slightly larger than available rural samples. This suggests a continuum of environmental effects acting upon the growth of children of differing socioeconomic levels.     

Femur/stature ratio and estimates of stature in children.

The present study examines the relationship between femur length and stature in children between the ages of 8 and 18 years. In previous investigations, my colleagues and I reported the surprising finding that femur length bears a nearly constant relationship to stature in adult humans regardless of ethnicity or gender. This earlier study revealed that the femur/stature ratio averages 26.74% in adult humans, and that using the ratio to predict stature from femur length yields remarkably accurate estimates. The current study shows that femur/stature ratios of children between the ages of 8 and 11 differ significantly from their older counterparts. Between the ages of 12 and 18, there are no significant differences due to age in the femur/stature ratio; however, there are significant differences in this age group attributable to gender. This study also shows that the worldwide average adult femur/stature ratio does not adequately describe children in this age range. This study strongly documents the adolescent growth spurt in the femur/stature ratios of both males and females at the precise time one would expect to see the spurt occur (10-12 in females; 12-14 in males). This growth follows a nearly identical trajectory in both genders, with relative femur growth dominating before the peak years of the growth spurt, and relative stature growth dominating afterward. This accounts for the ratio's rise to maximum values just before peak growth, and its decline toward the adult ratio thereafter. These findings require us to use separate adolescent femur/stature ratios of 27.16 (females) and 27.44 (males) to estimate the stature of children between the ages of 12 and 18. Preliminary testing shows these ratios to be more accurate in estimating stature than the properly selected Trotter and Gleser adult regression equation. Use of the adolescent male ratio with the Homo erectus juvenile WT 15000 results in a lower stature estimate (157.4 cm) than previously reported. It is suggested that continued testing of the ratio occur, but that the values herein derived may be useful in routine forensic cases involving children in this age range, and with subadult paleontological specimens.     

Mother-infant bonding

A study of the research on postpartum mother-infant bonding shows that results from poorly constructed research programs were published in major journals and became a part of hospital policy because the bonding concept was politically useful in the struggle between advocates of natural childbirth and managers of the medical model of birth. The concept was also uncritically accepted because it was consistent with a longstanding ideology of motherhood that sees women as the prime architects of their children’s personalities. Diane Eyer earned her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently writing a book on the ways in which the concepts of bonding and attachment have affected our understanding of appropriate early childcare.     

Physical violence,child abuse,and child homicide

The study of child abuse and child homicide has been based on the often implicit assumption that there is a continuum of violence ranging from mild physical punishment to severe abuse and homicide. Empirical data supporting this assumption are sparse. Existing data can be shown, however, to support an assumption that there are distinct forms of violence, not a continuum. This paper reviews these data and discusses their implications for the study of violence, abuse, and homicide in terms of substantive and methodological explanations. In addition, the implications of the assumption that violence consists of distinct behaviors as opposed to a continuum are discussed in light of sociobiological and evolutionary explanations of child abuse and child homicide. This paper was written under the auspices of the Family Violence Research Program at the University of Rhode Island. A complete list of books and articles is available upon request. Richard J. Gelles is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology and the Director of the Family Violence Research Program at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author or coauthor of 14 books and more than 90 articles and chapters on family violence. His most recent books areIntimate Violence, published in 1988 by Simon and Schuster;Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations in 8,145 Families, published by Transaction Books in 1990; andIntimate Violence in Families, published in 1990 by Sage Publications.     

A general method for constructing increment-decrement life tables that agree with the data

A general method for making increment-decrement life tables is presented. The method involves the finding of probabilities of transition between states, graduated to small intervals of time and age, that are consistent with (i.e., can reproduce) the data, whether the data consist of central age-state specific rates, or some other feature, such as state distributions of a real cohort. The method is then illustrated with a fetal loss life table.     

Family ties and child obesity in Italy

This paper examines the impact of overweight family members on weight outcomes of Italian children aged 6–14 years. We use an original dataset matching the 2012 cross sections of the Italian Multipurpose Household Survey and the Household Budget Survey. Since the identification of within-family peer effects is known to be challenging, we implement our analysis on a partially identified model using inferential procedures recently introduced in the literature and based on standard Bayesian computation methods. We find evidence of a strong, positive effect of both overweight peer children in the family and of overweight adults on children weight outcomes. The impact of overweight peer children in the household is larger than the impact of adults. In particular, the estimated confidence sets associated to the peer children variable is positive with upper bound around one or larger, while the confidence sets for the parameter associated to obese adults often include zero and have upper bound that rarely is larger than one.     

National Alliance on Art and Industry Shows New Design Trend

Since the Bush administration enacted the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002, lawmakers and school administrators have questioned what changes, if any, the Obama administration will make. This article discusses the effects of NCLB on nontested subjects, specifically music and arts in the general curriculum. Major effects on scheduling and funding policies have forced educators to reconsider how advocacy for the arts should be approached.