BACKGROUND Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) or Parkinsonian syndromes often report excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS). The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of the psychostimulant modafinil on elderly, institutionalized, severely impaired PD patients with EDS. METHOD A three-week open study on ten institutionalized PD patients scoring >10 points on the Epworth Sleepiness Sca...

Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned birth control and abortion in 1966 to increase Romania’s population. Overwhelmed, parents left children by the thousands in state institutions. Romanian officials, in trying later to make up for these abuses, agreed to a study by U.S. investigators to determine the inimical effects of early life in an orphanage on the still large numbers of instituti...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relation between functional mobility and dynapenia in institutionalized frail elderly. METHODS A descriptive, correlational study involving 26 institutionalized elderly men and women, mean age 82.3±6 years. The instruments employed were the Mini Mental State Examination, the Geriatric Depression Scale, the International Physical Activity Questionnaire, the Timed U...

BACKGROUND We examined the effects of a foster care intervention on attention and emotion expression in socially deprived children in Romanian institutions. METHODS Institutionalized children were randomized to enter foster care or to remain under institutional care. Subsequently, the institutionalized and foster care groups, along with a community-based comparison group, were evaluated on em...

To examine the neurobiological consequences of early institutionalization, the authors recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 3 groups of Romanian children--currently institutionalized, previously institutionalized but randomly assigned to foster care, and family-reared children--in response to pictures of happy, angry, fearful, and sad facial expressions of emotion. At 3 assessments (ba...

Socially disinhibited or indiscriminate behavior (IB) has traditionally been investigated using caregiver reports. More recently, an observational measure based on the Strange Situation Procedure (M. Ainsworth, M. Blehar, E. Waters, & S. Wall, 1978), the Rating of Infant and Stranger Engagement (RISE; C. Riley, A. Atlas-Corbett, & K. Lyons-Ruth, 2005), was validated in home-reared at-risk child...

BACKGROUND High dietary sugar intake may compromise protein and micronutrient intakes in people with low energy intakes. The results of micronutrient dilution studies in older people have been few and conflicting. We examined the nutritional status and nutrient intakes associated with nonmilk extrinsic sugars (NMES) intakes in older people representing a broad spectrum of both healthy and vulne...

PURPOSE To provide the first detailed information about native language abilities of children who are or had been institutionalized. METHOD The language of ten 30-month-old children raised in Romanian orphanages was compared with that of 30 chronological-age-matched peers: 10 children who had moved recently from orphanages to foster care, 10 children in foster families for at least 1 year, an...