PURPOSE Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disorder characterized by motor disabilities and increasing dependence on others for daily life activities with consequent impact on patients' and caregivers' quality of life. The aim of this study was to elucidate the burden on primary caregivers of patients with PD, and identify related factors. METHODS A cross-sectional descrip...

A series of studies have shown that the heavy burdens of diarrheal diseases in the first 2 formative years of life in children living in urban shanty towns have negative effects on physical and cognitive development lasting into later childhood. We have shown that APOE4 is relatively common in shanty town children living in Brazil (13.4%) and suggest that APOE4 has a protective role in cognitiv...

Ticks are important vectors of pathogens of medical and veterinary importance worldwide. In spite of their economic importance, our current knowledge about the factors affecting tick prevalence and abundance in tropical and subtropical regions is rather limited. Both abiotic (e.g. temperature) as well as biotic variables (e.g. host sex) have been identified as key determinants of distributions....

The present work examined whether secrets are experienced as physical burdens, thereby influencing perception and action. Four studies examined the behavior of people who harbored important secrets, such as secrets concerning infidelity and sexual orientation. People who recalled, were preoccupied with, or suppressed an important secret estimated hills to be steeper, perceived distances to be f...

Law360, New York (October 17, 2012) -A fundamental issue in many toxic tort cases is whether a plaintiff’s personal injuries were caused by something other than the defendant’s alleged misconduct. Defendants often raise this question in several ways — did the plaintiff’s causation expert properly consider potential alternative causes in reaching the offered opinion? Did the plaintiff meet his o...

I discuss two types of evidential problems with the most widely touted experiments in evolutionary psychology, those performed by Leda Cosmides and interpreted by Cosmides and John Tooby. First, and despite Cosmides and Tooby’s claims to the contrary, these experiments don’t fulfil the standards of evidence of evolutionary biology. Second Cosmides and Tooby claim to have performed a crucial exp...

This paper extends our previous logical analysis of presumptions and burden of proof by studying the force of a presumption once counterevidence has been offered. In the jurisprudential literature different accounts of this issue have been given: some have argued that a presumption is nullified by counterarguments while others have maintained that this gives presumptions a force that is too sli...

Neurocysticercosis (NCC) is the most common parasitic disease of the human central nervous system (CNS), a pleomorphic disease with a diverse array of clinical manifestations. The infection is pleomorphic and dependent on a complex range of interconnecting factors, including number and size of the cysticerci, their stage of development and localisation within the brain with resulting difficulti...

Most veterinarians continue to recommend anthelmintic (dewormer) treatment programs for horses that are based on knowledge and concepts that are more than 40 years old. However, recent studies demonstrate that resistance and multiple-drug resistance in equine parasites is extremely common, but few horse owners or veterinarians take this into account when making treatment decisions. Parasites ar...