Search

Introduction The impact of time to treatment on clinical outcome is an established precept in infectious disease but is not established in peritoneal dialysis–related peritonitis (PDRP). Methods In a prospective multicenter study of PDRP, symptom-to-contact time (SC), contact-to-treatment time (CT), defined as the time from health care presentation to initial antibiotic, and symptom-to-treatment time (ST) were determined. Results One hundred sixteen patients had 159 episodes of PDRP. Median SC for all episodes was 5.0 hours (first to third quartile [Q1–Q3]: 1.3–13.9); CT, 2.3 hours (Q1–Q3: 1.2–4.0); and ST, 9.0 hours (Q1–Q3: 4.7–25.3). Thirty-eight (23.9%) patient episodes (28 catheter removals and 10 deaths) met the primary composite outcome of PD failure at 30 days (PD-fail). The risk of PD-fail increased by 5.5% for each hour of delay of administration of antibiotics (odds ratio [OR] for CT: 1.055; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.005–1.109; P = 0.032). Neither SC (OR: 1.00; 95% CI: 0.99–1.01; P = 0.74) nor ST (OR: 1.00; 95% CI: 0.99–1.01; P = 0.48) was associated with PD-fail. In a multivariable analysis, only CT for presentation to a hospital-based facility compared with a community facility (OR: 1.068; 95% CI: 1.013–1.126; P = 0.015) and female sex (OR: 2.4; 95% CI: 1.1–5.4; P = 0.027) were independently associated with PD-fail. Each hour of delay in administering antibacterial therapy from the time of presentation to a hospital facility increased the risk of PD failure or death by 6.8%. Discussion Strategies targeted to expedited antibiotic treatment should be implemented to improve outcomes from PDRP.

The interaction between perception and action represents one of the pillars of human evolutionary success. Our interactions with the surrounding world involve a variety of behaviors, almost always including movements of the eyes and hands. Such actions rely on neural mechanisms that must process an enormous amount of information in order to generate appropriate motor commands. Yet, compared to the great advancements in the field of perception for cognition, the neural underpinnings of how we control our movements, as well as the interactions between perception and motor control, remain elusive. With this research topic we provide a framework for: (1) the perception of real objects and shapes using visual and haptic information, (2) the reference frames for action and perception, and (3) how perceived target properties are translated into goal-directed actions and object manipulation. The studies in this special issue employ a variety of methodologies that include behavioral kinematics, neuroimaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and patient cases. Here we provide a brief summary and commentary on the articles included in this research topic.

It was recently shown that expert face perception relies on the extraction of horizontally oriented visual cues. Picture-plane inversion was found to eliminate horizontal, suggesting that this tuning contributes to the specificity of face processing. The present experiments sought to determine the spatial frequency (SF) scales supporting the horizontal tuning of face perception. Participants were instructed to match upright and inverted faces that were filtered both in the frequency and orientation domains. Faces in a pair contained horizontal or vertical ranges of information in low, middle, or high SF (LSF, MSF, or HSF). Our findings confirm that upright (but not inverted) face perception is tuned to horizontal orientation. Horizontal tuning was the most robust in the MSF range, next in the HSF range, and absent in the LSF range. Moreover, face inversion selectively disrupted the ability to process horizontal information in MSF and HSF ranges. This finding was replicated even when task difficulty was equated across orientation and SF at upright orientation. Our findings suggest that upright face perception is tuned to horizontally oriented face information carried by intermediate and high SF bands. They further indicate that inversion alters the sampling of face information both in the orientation and SF domains.