Contributors: DEW designed the audit, collected and analysed the data, and participated in writing the paper with EHB. EHB provided DEW with the list of subjects to be investigated, discussed core ideas, and participated in writing the paper; she maintains the database of mothers who are hepatitis B positive and advises on appropriate immunisations. EHB will act as guarantor for the paper. Comp...

extra points need to be made. Firstly, although the results of the questionnaire (Q1 6) seem at first glance to show differences between exposed workers and controls, they do not differ to a statistically significant degree, as the authors themselves stated. Furthermore there is no unequivocal trend in the answers given. Whereas questions No 1, 3, and 15 are rated with Yes more often by exposed...

In order to select actions appropriate to current needs, a subject must identify relationships between actions and events. Control over the environment is determined by the degree to which action consequences can be predicted, as described by action-outcome contingencies--i.e. performing an action should affect the probability of the outcome. We evaluated in a first experiment adaptation to con...

BACKGROUND Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and metals (lead and cadmium) are neurotoxic and affect neurobehavioral performance. Yet little is known about the association between exposure to multiple neurotoxic compounds and cognitive functioning in older adults. METHODS Using data from two consecutive cycles of the National Health and Nutrition and Examination Survey (1999-2002), path analys...

The abundance of ectoparasites requires ongoing management and this is most commonly achieved with insecticides or endectocides. However, the growth in resistance, the slow rate of development of new actives, coupled with environmental and health concerns associated with the continued use of some of the existing neurotoxic insecticides, suggest that alternative approaches to their management ne...

For much of the history of toxicology, the sensitivity of the developing organism to chemical perturbation attracted limited attention. Several tragic episodes and new insights finally taught us that the course of early brain development incurs unique risks. Although the process is exquisitely controlled, its lability renders it highly susceptible to damage from environmental chemicals. Such di...

To facilitate the early detection of neurotoxicity in workers exposed to hazardous substances, we assembled a set of noninvasive neurobehavioral tests designed to assess memory, verbal concept formation, visuomotor performance, and mood. The tests were administered to an unexposed reference population and multivariate prediction equations were developed to control for effects of age, gender, an...

Although there is evidence to suggest that the retrosplenial cortex is involved in spatial learning and memory, many lesion studies have left the more caudal part of this region intact so leaving its role untested. In the first experiment, rats with neurotoxic lesions of the caudal half of the retrosplenial cortex (RspC1) were tested on a reference memory task in the water-maze. The RspC1 anima...

Neurotoxic lesions of the amygdala did not affect the postoperative acquisition of a nonspatial test of object recognition (delayed nonmatching to sample) even when retention delays were increased from 0 s to 20 or 60 s, or when test stimuli were deliberately repeated within a session. Although these amygdaloid lesions did not alter forced-choice spatial alternation, they slightly increased neo...