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The aim of the study is to investigate if German children with hearing loss (HL) display persisting problems in comprehending complex sentences and to find out whether these problems can be linked to limitations in phonological short-term memory (PSTM). A who-question comprehension test (picture pointing) and a nonword repetition (NWR) task were conducted with 21 German children with bilateral sensorineural HL (ages 3-4) and with age-matched 19 normal hearing (NH) children. Follow-up data (ages 6-8) are reported for 10 of the children with HL. The data reveal that the comprehension of who-questions as well as PSTM was significantly more impaired in children with HL than in children with NH. For both groups of participants, there were no correlations between question comprehension scores and performance in the NWR test. Syntactic complexity (subject vs. object question) affected question comprehension in children with HL, however, these problems were overcome at school age. In conclusion, the data indicate that a hearing loss affects the comprehension of complex sentences. The observed problems did, however, not persist and were, therefore, unlikely to be caused by a genuine syntactic deficit. For the tested wh-questions, there is no indication that syntactic comprehension problems of children with HL are due to limitations in PSTM.

Im Frühjahr 2020 verbreitete sich das Coronavirus, weshalb die österreichische Bundesregierung einen sogenannten Lockdown verhängte, was Umstellungen an der Ambulanz der Sigmund Freud PrivatUniversität (SFU) in Wien erforderte. Psychotherapeut*innen wechselten das Setting und führten die Behandlungen in Form einer Onlinebzw. Telepsychotherapie fort. Ein Forschungsteam fragte nach den Auswirkungen des Lockdown bedingten Settingwechsels hin zur Fernbehandlung und nach Ende des Lockdowns wieder auf das traditionelle Setting zurück auf die Behandelnden und die Klient*innen der SFU-Ambulanz. Zur Beantwortung der Frage wurden Online-Befragungen mit Klient*innen und Psychotherapeut*innen der SFU-Ambulanz durchführte und mittels zusammenfassender Inhaltsanalyse ausgewertet. Die Flexibilität des Ortes und die Distanz wurden durchaus positiv beschrieben, andererseits führte gerade letztere bei Klient*innen zu verstärkten Gefühlen der Einsamkeit und Isolierung, zusätzlich konnten sich Patient*innen emotional weniger auf die Psychotherapie einlassen. Nach der Rückkehr in das Präsenz-Setting berichteten die Beteiligten mehrheitlich, dass dieses angenehmer sei, meinten aber, es sei nun schwerer, den erhöhten Zeitaufwand durch Anfahrt, Wartezeit und Heimweg im Vergleich zum Online-Setting zu akzeptieren. Insgesamt lässt sich resümieren, dass die Ergebnisse der Befragung bestätigen, dass die Onlinebzw. Telepsychotherapie für manche Klient*innen durchaus Vorteile hat und es daher sinnvoll sein kann, wenn Psychotherapeut*innen diese Optionen auch nach der Pandemie offensteht.

BACKGROUND Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is considered to be a progressive disease resulting from alterations in multiple genes regulating cell proliferation and differentiation like receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) and members of the fibroblast growth factor receptors (FGFR)-family. Single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) Arg388 of the FGFR4 is associated with a reduced overall survival in patients with cancers of various types. We speculate that FGFR4 expression and SNP is associated with worse survival in patients with HSNCC. AIM To investigate the potential clinical significance of FGFR4 Arg388 in the context of tumors arising in HNSCC, a comprehensive analysis of FGFR4 receptor expression and genotype in tumor tissues and correlated results with patients’ clinical data in a large cohort of patients with HNSCC was conducted. METHODS Surgical specimens from 284 patients with HNSCC were retrieved from the Institute of Pathology at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Germany. Specimens were analyzed using immunohistochemistry and polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP). The expression of FGFR4 was analyzed in 284 surgical specimens of HNSCC using immunohistochemstry. FGFR4 polymorphism was detected by PCR-RFLP. Patients’ clinical data with a minimum follow-up of 5 years were statistically evaluated with a special emphasis on survival analysis employing Kaplan-Meier estimator and Cox regression analysis. RESULTS Concerning the invasive tumor areas the intensity of the FGFR4 expression was evaluated in a four-grade system: no expression, low expression, intermediate and high expression. FGFR4 expression was scored as “high” (+++) in 74 (26%), “intermediate” (++) in 103 (36.3%), and “low” (+) in 107 (36.7%) cases. Analyzing the FGFR4 mutation it was found in 96 tumors (33.8%), 84 of them (29.6%) having a heterozygous and 12 (4.2%) homozygous mutated Arg388 allele. The overall frequency concerning the mutant alleles demonstrated 65% vs 34% mutated alleles in general. FGFR4 Arg388 was significantly associated with advanced tumor stage ( P < 0.004), local metastasis ( P < 0.0001) and reduced disease-free survival ( P < 0.01). Furthermore, increased expression of FGFR4 correlated significantly with worse overall survival ( P < 0.003). CONCLUSION In conclusion, the FGFR4 Arg388 genotype and protein expression of FGFR4 impacts tumor progression in patients with HNSCC and may present a useful target within a multimodal therapeutic intervention.

In individuals with Down syndrome (DS) deficits in verbal short-term memory (VSTM) and deficits in sentence comprehension co-occur, suggesting that deficits in VSTM might be causal for the deficits in sentence comprehension. The present study aims to explore the presumed relationship between VSTM and sentence comprehension in individuals with DS by specifically targeting the influence of task demands. The authors assessed VSTM skills in 18 German-speaking children/adolescents with DS by a nonword repetition (NWR) test and elicited data from three different tasks on the comprehension of complex sentence structures: two sentence-picture-matching tasks (TROG-D and a passive test) and one picture-pointing task on object wh-questions. Whereas performance in NWR yielded a significant degree of prediction for scores obtained in the TROG-D and in passive comprehension, no significant degree of prediction was found for NWR and object wh-question comprehension. Moreover, implicational scaling analyses indicated that mental-age adequate performance in sentence comprehension did not imply adequate performance in NWR. Research is needed that specifies the relation between memory systems and sentence comprehension while considering the influence of task demands.