Courses in clinical epidemiology usually include acquainting students with a single 2X2 table. All diagnostic test characteristics are explained using this table. This pedagogic approach may be misleading. A new didactic approach is hereby proposed, using two tables, each with specific analogous notations (uppercase and lowercase) and derived…

The Pre-Kindergarten Inventory of Demonstrated Skills (Pre-KIDS) is designed to be used before the school year begins so that teachers and staff can obtain information about incoming kindergarten students. This information is intended to give teachers insight about what skills a student may or may not have before entering their classrooms. This…

Recent scientific discoveries have made it much easier to test prenatally for various genetic disabilities, such as Down syndrome. However, while many observers have heralded such "advances" for their effectiveness in detecting certain conditions, others have argued that they perpetuate discrimination by preventing the birth of children with…

Detecting and managing "Mycobacterium tuberculosis" (TB) infection in a health-science center population is a clinical dilemma. Tuberculin skin tests are still the preferred method for detecting present or past infection of TB. The authors discuss the performance of whole blood interferon gamma release assay test commercially known as…

Children with Down syndrome have a high prevalence of ocular disorders. The UK Down's Syndrome Medical Interest Group (DSMIG) guidelines for ophthalmic screening were locally implemented into a protocol that included neonatal eye examination by an opthalmologist and a comprehensive ophthalmological examination (cycloplegic refraction,…

The success of screening for individuals at suicidal risk among the general population relies heavily on the availability of a reliable and validated instrument. However, there remains a lack of a well-validated screening tool for suicidal risk in Chinese, despite the fact that about a quarter of the world's suicides takes place in China. In view…

Visual stress is the experience of unpleasant visual symptoms when engaged in reading and some other visual tasks. There is currently no objective diagnostic test for this condition, which affects a substantial proportion of the population and which can disrupt development of reading skills. The reliability of subjective reports of symptoms has…

This study investigated the ability of the English and Spanish versions of the "Get Ready to Read!" Screener (E-GRTR and S-GRTR) administered at the beginning of the preschool year to predict the oral language and phonological and print processing skills of Spanish-speaking English-language learners (ELLs) and English-only speaking children (EO)…

This study assessed the feasibility of doing hearing screening in Migrant, American Indian and Early Head Start programs using otoacoustic emissions (OAE) technology. Staff members were trained to screen 0-3-year-old children for hearing loss using hand-held OAE equipment and a multi-step screening and referral protocol. Of the 3486 children…

Background: This study is part of a larger UK-wide study investigating psychiatric illness in people with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS), and describes the longitudinal aspect of psychiatric illness, in particular psychotic illness, and examines the use and role of psychotropic medication. Method: A total of 119 individuals with genetically confirmed…

The author of this article relates how she was initially dismayed at the demographics of gifted and talented education (GATE) students at a public school where she taught. Not one in her class was an ESOL (English Speakers of Other Languages) student. The lack of ESOL students at her school's GATE program was caused by the school's inability to…

An abundance of literature on caregivers of individuals with dementia has been written since the mid-1980s. However, most of this literature focused on the experience of stress, burden, and depression in caregivers, thus excluding the grief experience that also accompanies the caregiving experience. The purpose of this multimethod study is to…

This study investigated the classification validity of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) using a sample of kindergarteners (N = 177). Results indicated the cutoff scores for determining "at-risk" status on the DIBELS produced substantial false negative rates. Cutoff scores identifying students as at "some risk"…

The purpose of this study was to determine if phonemic awareness skills improved for first grade students classified as at-risk whose teachers used the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (LiPS; Lindamood & Lindamood, 1998). Students' scores on a Kindergarten screening tool (Learning Disabilities Working Committee-LDWC, 2005) were compared to…

Parents of children in most elementary grades in Minnesota's Independent School District 191 receive an annual notice with potentially life-altering data for their children--and they are not state test scores, attendance rates, or grades. The notice contains the child's body mass index (BMI) score, which estimates whether the student has excess…