Books published by Nova Science Publishers Inc

Stroke is a leading cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide. Just a decade ago, stroke management was simple. Apart from secondary prevention, and education, there was not much a clinician could do that would significantly change outcomes. There were no acute interventions, no tPA, and no endovascular therapies. Stroke was thus not an emergency. Today, we live in a different world. With the advent of tPA and endovascular intervention, acute stroke is an emergency of epic proportions. Time literally is brain and the clinician has to be acutely aware of the advances in stroke in order to maximize the therapeutic impact. Many books have been written about stroke. The authors and editors envisioned a succinct, yet comprehensive guide for the clinician in the management of stroke. From the medical management of stroke, to neuroimaging, thrombolysis, endovascular therapies, and rehabilitation, this book guides the novice clinician as well as the seasoned vascular neurologist to be able to recognize, manage, and treat acute stroke to the best of medical science''s guidelines.

The parent-child relationship has been extensively researched over a long period of time. In this relationship, a perspective is explored of the behaviour of the parent and how this affects the development of the child. Added to this relationship are the effects of the environment on the relationship between the parent and the child. The well-adjusted, independent, social adult is often an indication that the parent-child relationship provided the grounding and the origins for how the adult interacts with life and others. Due to the complexities of journeying through establishing and solidifying the parent-child relationship from the stage of pregnancy, through early childhood development, to school-going age, adolescence and adulthood, understanding this relationship and the effects on the health and wellbeing of the child, has been ongoing. In this book the intention is to present various perspectives and insights into specific approaches to parenting in various environments and contexts. These contexts provide the cultural support to explore the phenomenon of parenting styles and practices providing insights from South Africa, Japan, China, the USA, Argentina, Portugal, Israel, Spain and Canada. A Closer Look at Parenting Styles and Practices zones into exploring and understanding the parent-child relationship globally.

Terms such as shyness, logophobia and mutism overlap, and boundaries between them are unfixed and blurred. Until now they have, for the most part, been described separately; in our book, we point out the relationship among them. There are many individuals who are shy, and some of them experience communication anxiety, which is present with individuals diagnosed with mutism. It is easier to understand mutism when shyness and logophobia have been explained first. Such an approach has influenced the structure of our monograph. We begin this treatise with the definition of shyness and an attempt to distinguish it from similar phenomena, which is not an easy task. The task resembles forcing one''s way through a densely tangled underbrush of terminology. We focus on the development of shyness, especially in children, and on the social and communicative functioning of shy individuals. We also wonder if, and to what extent, shyness can constitute a criterion for diagnosis of mental disorders. In our monograph, we recall the old definition of logophobia because of its relevance and high usability. We describe it in the context of similar emotions, such as social anxiety, communication anxiety and stage fright and make an attempt to systematize these definitions. We also present our own concept of logophobia being an important element of voice and speech disorders (aphasia, psychogenic aphonia, stuttering). The fundamental part of our monograph concerns mutism. We start from an analysis of the nature and role of its basic symptom, which is muteness. We draw on the opinions of representatives of different fields, who have still not decided which is gold and which is silver: silence or speech. Both phenomena occur in different combinations in selective mutism, about which is decidedly more written than about total mutism. It is to be kept in mind that the latter type of disorder does also occur. We are nonetheless focusing on selective mutism, which comes in distinctive types (situational, anxiety-based, traumatic, oppositional). We provide an overview of various treatment strategies (behavioral approach, behavioral-cognitive approach, family approach, pharmacological approach, mixed approach) and we present our own therapeutic method. It is adjusted to the type of selective mutism and implemented in different conditions (office, therapeutic facility, a child''s family home, kindergarten, school). We also present a model for evaluating therapy effectiveness of mutism and summarize the results of research conducted in this field up to the present time. The monograph closes with a presentation of case studies of selective mutism prepared by Polish therapists.

This book is an attempt to analyse the unfavourable developments in the dynamics of mortality and life expectancy in post- communist countries in the global context. It appears that this mortality crisis in post-communist countries has a lot of similarities with the recent unfavourable developments in health status in developed countries and many developing countries. Such unfavourable trends have been caused by socio-economic, ''non-material'' factors, namely by a loss of social dynamism and/or stress, associated with economic restructuring and social adjustments. First, the stagnation of life expectancy in the former Soviet Union in 1965-90, after the rapid increase in 1920-65, is an important, under-researched phenomenon that enables study of the impact of the loss of social dynamism on health status. Second, the decline in life expectancy in the 1990s enables study of the impact of social stress on health status. Simplifying things, one can say that in the first case, life expectancy did not improve because there were too few changes in life, whereas in the second case, it declined due to excess changes that created stress. In both cases, however, the problem is that of finding an optimal measure of social changes that are beneficial to the quality of life and its longevity. The main goal of this book is to analyse common reasons for these developments in order to derive lessons from the experiences of particular countries.