The laparoscopic approach to secondary lumbar hernia repair is more efficient and more profitable than the traditional open technique.

The attitudes towards sexual relationships among persons with learning disabilities (PLD) of parents of children without disabilities were compared with the attitudes of family caregivers (parents of PLD) and with the attitude of professional caregivers. The importance of different situational factors that may alter acceptability judgments (i.e., gender, etiology of the disability, person's present level of autonomy, use of contraceptive devices, and partner's age and possible handicap) with regards to the sexuality of PLD was examined through the use of concrete cases. All the participants lived in Mexico. The only notable difference in attitude that was observed was between parents of PLD suffering from trisomia 21 and parents of PLD suffering from a neuromotor disorder. As a result, it may be erroneous to consider parents of PLD as a homogeneous group regarding attitudes to sexuality. Three different basic philosophies regarding the expression of sexuality among PLD were observed. They were called Mainly Unacceptable (37% of the sample), Mainly Acceptable (36%), and Depending on Circumstances (27%). In this later philosophy, contraception was by far the major determinant of acceptability.

The respective attitudes of Mexican and French laypeople regarding regular sexual intercourse involving at least one person with learning disabilities were compared. The study was a replication of a study conducted in France in a community sample from Mexico (aged 22-75). Only three of the four factors that were found to have a significant effect among French participants-use of contraceptive devices, level of personal autonomy, and partner's age-were found to be significant among the Mexican participants. The partner's handicap factor was not significant, but the impact of the contraception factor was stronger among the Mexican participants than among the French participants. Contrary to what was observed among the French participants, among the Mexican participants the three factors were combined in a strictly additive way. That is, each factor contributed independently to the acceptability judgments.

Several studies have reported that under varying conditions of training, success in the transfer of learning is higher than the transfer observed under constant training conditions. It is viable to assume that the exposition to two different types of training and two different sequences will produce very different effects compared with those found until now. The present study involved two experimental groups of university students: a constant-variable group (CC-VV) and a variable-constant group (VV-CC). Results show that during the training, regardless of the sequence, higher percentages of correct responses are observed under constant conditions. In transfer tests results show that the transfer of learning is lower when constant condition was the first training received. Finally, in creative behavior tests, no significant differences between groups were found, although a better performance was observed in participants from the VV-CC Group. These results contribute to the findings previously found about the effects of the training variability on the emergence of creative behavior and the reversibility of its effects. It was also demonstrated that there is an effect of different presentation of training (sequence).

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