Clinical trials

As the U.S. population ages, future physicians must be prepared to care for older adults with multiple health conditions and complex needs. This study will test whether cinematic virtual reality (VR)-an immersive, interactive learning tool-is more effective than traditional lectures in helping medical students learn about geriatric care. Students who complete the VR training will experience realistic patient scenarios that show what can go wrong in medical care and learn how to apply osteopathic principles to improve outcomes. Researchers will compare students' performance on a clinical skills assessment and explore their experiences with the VR training. The goal is to determine whether cinematic virtual reality can better prepare students for residency and improve their ability to provide compassionate, high-quality care for older adults.

This study promotes greater understanding of factors impacting balance and how neck strength alters specific aspects of impaired balance. This study will help physical therapist protocols target a wholistic approach to treat fall risk individuals.

The goal of this project is to compare the relative effectiveness of two novel treatments to improve the knowledge of the passive sentence structure of school-age (8-11-year-old) children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Treatment 1 is an implicit approach to promoting children's automatic grammar learning and Treatment 2 is a more conventional explicit approach in which participants are taught the rules underlying the grammar. Treatment 1 involves children listening to an examiner produce a target sentence 20 times during each training session while describing a picture. The children will then see a picture and be asked to describe the action taking place. Treatment 2 involves children listening to an examiner describe the action occurring in a picture using a sentence pattern targeted to the child's deficit. The child will then be asked who did the action in the sentence and who received the action, after which the examiner will provide specific feedback about why the child's response was correct or incorrect. The expectation is that over a short period children will begin to use their targeted sentence pattern after hearing the examiner produce it many times. Children will complete four outcome measures (syntactic knowledge, sentence comprehension, sentence chunking, narrative comprehension/ production) prior to treatment, immediately after treatment, and five weeks after treatment. Children will be randomly assigned to one of the two treatments. Both treatments will be delivered 20 times over 10 weeks. The investigators anticipate that the children receiving Treatment 1 will show stronger gains in knowledge across the four outcome measures.

The goal of this project is to compare the relative effectiveness of two novel treatments to improve the complex grammar knowledge of school-age (8-11-year-old) children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Treatment 1 is an implicit approach to promoting children's automatic grammar learning and Treatment 2 is a more conventional explicit approach in which participants are taught the rules underlying the grammar. Treatment 1 involves children listening to an examiner produce a target sentence 20 times during each training session while describing a picture. The children will then see a picture and be asked to describe the action taking place. Treatment 2 involves children listening to an examiner describe the action occurring in a picture using a sentence pattern targeted to the child's deficit. The child will then be asked who did the action in the sentence and who received the action, after which the examiner will provide specific feedback about why the child's response was correct or incorrect. The expectation is that over a short period children will begin to use their targeted sentence pattern after hearing the examiner produce it many times. Children will complete four outcome measures (syntactic knowledge, sentence comprehension, sentence chunking, narrative comprehension/ production) prior to treatment, immediately after treatment, and five weeks after treatment. Children will be randomly assigned to one of the two treatments. Both treatments will be delivered 20 times over 10 weeks. The investigators anticipate that the children receiving Treatment 1 will show stronger gains in knowledge across the four outcome measures.

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) in older adults is linked to muscle loss (sarcopenia) and can lead to dementia, with pain further impacting cognitive and physical performance. Tai Chi, a mind-body exercise, is recommended for managing MCI as it supports cognitive function, mood, and physical health. The investigators' first goal is to characterize the correlation of heart rate variability and cortical activity on cognitive function and the psychosocial correlates of pain interference and social isolation on cognitive function at baseline and post-intervention (8 weeks of Tai Chi). The second goal is to explain the role of sarcopenia and obesity in the relationship between pain interference and cognitive function. The investigators also want to examine the index of the predictive capacity regarding sarcopenia and obesity on cognitive function outcomes.