In children with acute Kawasaki disease, a single large dose of intravenous gamma globulin is more effective than the conventional regimen of four smaller daily doses and is equally safe.

We compared the efficacy of intravenous gamma globulin plus aspirin with that of aspirin alone in reducing the frequency of coronary-artery abnormalities in children with acute Kawasaki syndrome in a multicenter, randomized trial. Children randomly assigned to the gamma globulin group received intravenous gamma globulin, 400 mg per kilogram of body weight per day, for four consecutive days; both treatment groups received aspirin, 100 mg per kilogram per day, through the 14th day of illness, then 3 to 5 mg per kilogram per day. Two-dimensional echocardiograms were interpreted blindly and independently by two or more readers. Two weeks after enrollment, coronary-artery abnormalities were present in 18 of 78 children (23 percent) in the aspirin group, as compared with 6 of 75 (8 percent) in the gamma globulin group (P = 0.01). Seven weeks after enrollment, abnormalities were present in 14 of 79 children (18 percent) in the aspirin group and in 3 of 79 (4 percent) in the gamma globulin group (P = 0.005). No child had serious adverse effects from receiving gamma globulin. We conclude that high-dose intravenous gamma globulin is safe and effective in reducing the prevalence of coronary-artery abnormalities when administered early in the course of Kawasaki syndrome.

The contributions of six important reading-related skills (phonological awareness, rapid naming, orthographic skills, morphological awareness, listening comprehension, and syntactic skills) to Chinese word and text reading were examined among 290 Chinese first graders in Hong Kong. Rapid naming, but not phonological awareness, was a significant predictor of Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) in the context of orthographic skills and morphological awareness. Commonality analyses suggested that orthographic skills and morphological awareness each contributed significant amount of unique variance to Chinese word reading Correspondence should be sent to

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This study examined temporal processing in relation to Chinese reading acquisition and impairment. The performances of 26 Chinese primary school children with developmental dyslexia on tasks of visual and auditory temporal order judgement, rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge, morphological, and phonological awareness were compared with those of 26 reading level ability controls (RL) and 26 chronological age controls (CA). Dyslexic children performed worse than the CA group but similar to the RL group on measures of accurate processing of auditory and visual-order stimuli, rapid naming, morphological awareness, and phonological awareness and a minority performed worse on the two temporal processing tasks. However, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that visual but not auditory temporal processing contributed unique variance to Chinese character recognition even with other cognitive measures controlled, suggesting it may be as important a correlate of reading ability in Chinese as in alphabetic scripts.