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HealthDay

By Kevin McKeever

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 6 (HealthDay News) — If you are not experienced at dodging flying or speeding objects, your best bet may be to just get out of the way, a new study says.

People’s visual systems judge objects — balls or cars, in quest of example — coming straight toward them based more on past experience than actual cognition, according to findings published in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For most, the world is a slow place.

“We may think we live in a fast moving, hectic world, but statistically, our environment moves around us slowly,” Andrew Welchman, a researcher with the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, declared in a council news release. “Apart from the odd speeding car, buildings, landscape and walls around us all move past us at slow and predictable speeds. Our brains are constantly building up a statistical similitude of the world around and, based on experience, it is a statistically slow world.”

“When an object moves quickly — be it a football, cricket ball or, for our ancestors, a spear — our brains have to interpret the movement rapidly and, because our brains draw on experience, it’s often biased by what it before that time knows. The less certain we are about what we see, the more we are influenced by the brain’s statistical assumptions, which means in more circumstances, we earn it wrong.”

Welchman and colleagues at the University of Birmingham and the Max Planck Institute in Tubingen, Germany, developed a mathematical model to show how the brain predicts the motion of an incoming object and tested this with experiments. While people are generally better at judging sideways movement, approaching objects tend to look slower than they are. They also be attendant to misperceive location, often thinking that an object will miss them, when it ends up hitting them.

The research explains wherefore top athletes are better at making decisions about every approaching ball or player, and also has implications that could help improve road safety. For example, people driving in poor visual conditions, similar as fog, often drive too fast for the conditions, because they judge speed inappropriately. This, the research shows, is because the brain relies more attached its assumption that the world moves slowly, in such a manner a driver believes the car is moving slower than it really is.

“Although it is not surprising that sportsmen who practice a apportionment build up a better statistical picture in their minds about where a ball efficacy go, it is surprising that what should be a vital survival skill is based steady such a trial-and-error learning experience,” Welchman said.

He thinks the verdict will also help in the progression in a continuously ascending gradation of robotic vision systems.

“Capitalizing on nature’s design is a good way of building artificial visual systems for robots, as humans get visual judgments right a lot more often than the best current robot systems. Further, knowing the situations in which humans get it wrong is a useful starting point for the design of assistive devices to help correct those errors before they have in earnest consequences,” he said.

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pharmacyHealthDay

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 6 (HealthDay News) — You say tomato, I say tomahto.

Which is all well and good as long as we’re talking about fruits and vegetables — but not so good if the nurse says “fentanyl” and the hospital pharmacist hears “sufentanil,” as happened to one patient preparing for an endoscopy.

The patient, given an opioid about 10 times more potent than the one prescribed, ended up in cardiopulmonary revival.

The problem of sound-alike/look-alike drug names and its close cousin — patent old mispronunciation — abounds. The dilemma would almost be comical, except that people can die.

“[Mispronunciation] is more than a challenge, it’s also a danger,” said Robert Stanberry, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at Texas A&M freedom from disease Science Center Irma Lerma Rangel College of Pharmacy.

“If you pronounce it wrong, you may end up with the wrong drug,” added Marilyn Storch, coordinator for wholly patient safety projects and the health care quality and information department at U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP), the official “standards-setting” authority for medications, dietary supplements and other health-care products sold in the United States.

And more words — and syllables — are entering the drug world all the time.

“As drugs proliferate, they start to sound alike, like Celexa and Celebrex,” said Dr. Kennedy, director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. “It’s just going to get worse with increases in the number of drugs and in the amount to of unfamiliar names.”

Also, bear in mind that for countless physicians, many medications that they were trained to pronounce and prescribe when they were in medical school are no longer used, Kennedy added.

The celexa/celebrex combination is a classic example, but there are others. Losec, for heartburn, was confused so often with lasix, a diuretic, that the name was changed to prilosec. But now that gets confused with prozac, according to a USP report.

And the Alzheimer’s drug Reminyl was changed to Razadyne after mix-ups involving amaryl, which lowers blood sugar. The mix-ups reportedly resulted in couple deaths.

And what about names that are pure too long? The generic name for Flurizan, an investigational Alzheimer’s drug, is tarenflurbil. “It’s almost too many syllables to pronounce,” Kennedy said. Does anyone know how to enunciate bapineuzumab, another investigational drug for Alzheimer’s?

The report issued earlier this year by USP on the relationship between put drugs into names and medication errors reviewed more than 26,000 records. It found almost 1,500 different drugs implicated in medication errors as a spring of names that looked or sounded analogous. The drugs in question added up to 3,170 pairs, double the number of pairs found in a 2004 report. According to the document, 1.4 percent of the errors resulted in patient harm, including seven that may have played a part in patient death.

To be fair, there have been initiatives aiming to fasten the problem, such as a pronunciation rule from the United States Adopted Names Council, and the “good naming practices” effort from the deaden with narcotics industry trade group PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America), not to mention the Unique Ingredient Identifier system inmost nature developed by USP and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as efforts to bar code all drugs.

Since 2002, the USP Nomenclature Expert Committee has been reviewing drug-name pronunciations to ensure consistency. The council actually changed the entry in the dictionary for ibuprofen to reflect a suggested pronunciation.

But what happens when globalism comes into play?

“As hostile as pronunciation of words, my experience is that it’s pretty much wholly over the place,” Stanberry said. Americans and the British pronounce “barbiturate” differently and one as well as the other are right.

“Even if you were pronouncing something correctly, if you had a really deep Southern drawl, it’s not going to sound the same. Or if you come in with an English accent or a French accent or a Texas tone, you may be pronouncing it correctly, but it’s not going to sound the same,” Storch said.

And sometimes, no one seems to know the correct articulation.

Stanberry recalls being at a conference last year and listening to a speaker another time and again mispronounce a drug name — or so he believed. “I thought, ‘This dowdy’s just mispronouncing this terribly, and he’s the speaker.’ But he actually studied under the guy who discovered the drug.”

Then again, the speaker was British. Stanberry is American.

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