Articles: adult.
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Hemodynamic monitoring gives early warning of changes in a critically ill patient's condition. Accuracy is essential; for example, a blood pressure cuff is inaccurate at low pressures. Hospitalized adults will usually have a higher central venous pressure, so a CVP less than 4 cm H(2)O may indicate hypovolemia. ⋯ Measurement of cardiac output eliminates the need for arterial and mixed venous blood samples, and can be valuable in decision-making. Calculation of vascular resistance can also be very important in management of the critically ill. With today's facilities, routine clinical assessment is no longer adequate care for these patients.
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Senior citizens, particularly those aged 75 or older, are the fastest growing group in the US today. 25 million strong, the elderly make up 11% of the total population, the proportion ranging from 18.1% in Florida to 2.6% in Alaska. 1/4 of the federal budget, $155 billion in 1980, now goes to their support yet many face difficulty in gaining access to the programs designed to benefit them. The elderly, especially those who rely solely on Social Security, comprise a disproportionate share of all poor households. The retirement system itself is facing financing challenges that promise to grow as the baby boom generation swells the number of senior citizens to 55 million in 2030. Plans to coordinate government programs and improve the method of financing the retirement system are receiving increasing attention. Financing Social Security from revenue funds, or with actuarial reserves, are 2 alternatives to the present pay-as-you-go system. Another area of concern to policymakers is America's health care system, which is now crisis oriented and heavily biased toward institutionalization. Health care must be made more responsive to the long-term needs of the oldest segment of the population, many of whom suffer from chronic illnesses. Impaired elderly receive most of their care from family or friends, and private organizations, but this natural support network largely has been ignored by government. New program initiatives might emphasize homemaker services, geriatric day care, compensation for families that provide for the needs of an elderly relative, and the strengthening of the informal partnership between the elderly themselves, their families and friends, community groups, private organizations, and government at the state and local as well as the federal level.
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Male swamp sparrows learn their songs; they fail to learn songs of the sympatric song sparrow. Syllables from tape recordings of both species of sparrow were spliced into an array of swamp sparrow-like and song sparrow-like temporal patterns. ⋯ They did so irrespective of whether the temporal pattern was swamp sparrow-like or song sparrow-like. Selectivity was retained by birds reared in total isolation from adult conspecific sounds.
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In a paradigm that avoids methodological problems of earlier studies, evidence was gathered addressed to the question of whether we read letter by letter. If word recognition involves letter recognition, then the difficulty of recognizing a word should vary with the difficulty of recognizing its letters. ⋯ Word frequency and word length were also manipulated. Results indicated no effect for letter difficulty, although recognition latency reliably decreased with word frequency and monotonically increased with word length (21 msec/letter), suggesting that we do not read letter by letter, but that whatever plays a role in word recognition is smaller than the word and correlated with word length in letters.