David Morton Low

David Morton Low
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston · Division of Management, Policy and Community Health

MD, CM, MSc (Med), PhD, FRCPC

About

79
Publications
8,999
Reads
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2,277
Citations
Introduction
Have had three careers: first working on human electrophysiology/cognitive neuroscience, then University administration at senior levels (VP equivalent) in Canada and the USA (President). During the 11 years of my presidency and until now, I studied and conducted research in Public Health, focused on the social determinants of health, and in particular, the relationships between education and health
Additional affiliations
June 1965 - July 1968
Houston Methodist Hospital
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
September 1985 - October 1989
University of British Columbia
Position
  • Coordinator of Health Sciences (VP Equivalent)
July 1966 - July 1968
The Methodist Hospital System
Position
  • Research Assistant
Education
June 1963 - June 1966
Baylor College of Medicine
Field of study
  • Clinical Neurophysiology
September 1954 - June 1962
Queen's University
Field of study
  • Medicine, Neurophysiology

Publications

Publications (79)
Article
Full-text available
Research on the social determinants of health has demonstrated robust correlations between several social factors, health status, and life expectancy. Some of these factors could be modified through policy intervention. National-level public policies explicitly based on population health research are in various stages of development in many Western...
Presentation
Full-text available
Presentation to School of Public Health Houston TX
Presentation
Full-text available
History of Neurosurgery
Presentation
Full-text available
Presentation to School of Public Health, Houston TX
Preprint
Full-text available
REVIEW OF THE DETERMINANTS OF HUMAN HEALTH
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Objective: To assess the social and fiscal policies related to social determinants of health at the federal level in Canada. Methods: An extensive review of grey literature was carried out to obtain information about policies and programs that address socio-economic factors influencing population health. Publications and reports on government websi...
Article
Full-text available
This paper provides an assessment of the social and fiscal policies related to social determinants of health at the federal level in Canada. An extensive review of grey literature was carried out to obtain information about policies and programs that address socioeconomic factors influencing population health. Publications and reports on government...
Article
Objective. To conduct a review of the policies and programs targeting the nonmedical determinants of health inequalities implemented at a national level in the United Kingdom. Methods. Two U.K. Department of Health reports were used to identify policies/programs that were solely targeted toward alleviating the nonmedical causes of health inequaliti...
Article
Technological Medicine: The Changing World of Doctors and Patients. By Reiser Stanley Joel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009; 229 pp. 24 halftones. $30. - Volume 25 Issue 4 - M. David Low
Article
The association between education and health is one of the most robust empiric findings over the past several decades. At each higher level of education, prevalence of most types of chronic disease decreases. However, understanding of the mechanisms through which education is related to chronic disease is limited. Specifically, the literature provi...
Article
Full-text available
This study evaluated whether expressive writing (EW) was an effective stress management intervention for breast cancer patients. Women were recruited at the end of neoadjuvant chemotherapy and assigned to write about their cancer experience (EW group; n = 24) or neutral topics (neutral writing [NW] group; n = 25). Women were asked to write for 20 m...
Article
Full-text available
Little is known about the influence of psychosocial factors on diabetes mellitus. The aim of this study was to improve understanding of the association between two psychosocial factors- sense of control and social support- and diabetes mellitus. The authors analyzed data from 2,592 U.S. households in the 1995 survey of the Aging, Status, and the Se...
Article
To review the scientific evidence behind the traditional view that prenatal care improves pregnancy outcomes. The literature published in English between 1965 and 2002 was searched for relevant studies and opinions on prenatal care outcomes. As search engine we used the MEDLINE bibliographic database, employing a combination of keywords, including...
Presentation
Full-text available
Pediatrics In statistical terms, the health of the American people has improved dramatically since the beginning of the 20 th century. The age adjusted death rate has declined by 74% and life expectancy has increased by 56%, a gain of about 27 years across the entire population. More than half of the mortality reduction was due to lower death rates...
Article
Although the total costs of graduate medical education are difficult to quantify, this information is of great importance in planning over the next decade. A cost construction model was used to quantify the costs of teaching faculty, cardiology fellows' salaries and benefits, overhead (physical plant, equipment, and support staff), and other costs...
Article
Full-text available
This study uses a cost construction approach to evaluate the cost of training family practice residents in a university-based residency program. The approach calculates the cost of the educational program from a global institutional perspective, including all monetary and nonmonetary costs, independently of how they are financed. Cost construction...
Article
To assess the cost of educating undergraduate medical students at the University of Texas-Houston Medical School (UT-Houston) in 1994-95 through the use of a cost-construction model developed elsewhere and adapted for UT-Houston. The cost-construction model identified the cost of the entire program as well as instructional costs (the cost of activi...
Article
We compared the diagnostic capabilities of MRI to CT, evoked potentials (EP), and CSF oligoclonal banding analysis in a prospective evaluation of 200 patients with suspected multiple sclerosis (MS). MRI was the best method for demonstrating dissemination in space. An abnormal appropriate EP in monosymptomatic disease was usually supported by MRI an...
Article
Cognitive and neurophysiological correlates of arithmetic calculation, concepts, and applications were examined in 41 adolescents, ages 12-15 years. Psychological and task-related EEG measures which correctly distinguished children who scored low vs. high (using a median split) in each arithmetic subarea were interpreted as indicative of processes...
Article
Digital bandpass filtering (300-2500 Hz) designed for zero phase shift was applied to somato-sensory evoked potentials recorded with cephalic bipolar montages. Four consistent negative and corresponding positive peaks with latencies of about 16, 18, 19, and 20 msec were elicited with median nerve stimulation. Peroneal nerve stimulation also elicite...
Article
A preliminary report is given of a study in 10 normal subjects comparing the laterality of the P90 component of the PVEP as elicited by pattern reversal and pattern appearance stimuli delivered monocularly and binocularly in the central and peripheral portions of one-life field. P90 was shown often to appear maximally over the hemisphere ipsilatera...
Article
Multimodality evoked potentials testing including PVEPs, SEPs and BAEPs was done in 112 patients who were known or suspected to have multiple sclerosis. The incidence of abnormal evoked potential findings in each of these systems was considered in patients in the different diagnostic categories of M.S. Results were also evaluated with respect to th...
Article
Task-related EEG measures and psychological assessments were evaluated as a means of identifying academic aptitudes in adolescents. The addition of measures derived from power spectral analysis of EEG recording during verbal and perceptual tasks to the psychological testing results greatly improved identification of the children's level of visuospa...
Article
A new methodology, a Kullback Leibler-nearest neighbor (KL-NN) rule method is introduced for the EEG population screening problem. It is applied to the classification of anesthesia levels of humans in surgery by the analysis of EEGs alone. Stationary epoch multichannel EEGs are considered. In the EEG population screening problem, the category or st...
Article
An analysis of four cases of lipomas of the corpus callosum with epilepsy, and a review of the literature, have led to the following conclusions: (1) Epilepsy as an almost constant feature is often severe, nearly always partial, and begins before the age of 15. (2) Pathophysiology of the seizures appears to be essentially an interhemispheric discon...
Article
A prototypic problem in screening of electroencephalograms in the automatic classification of stationary electroencephalogram time series is treated here by the Kullback-Leibler nearest neighbor rule approach. In that problem, the category or state of an individual is classified by comparison of his or her electroencephalogram with those taken from...
Article
Clobazam is a benzodiazepine with special molecular structure (its nitrogen radicals are in positions 1 and 5, rather than 1 and 4 as in all other antiepileptic benzodiazepines), and it is rapidly effective–in a matter of hours or within a few days–against all varieties of epileptic seizures in 52% of subjects treated with it. Its side effects are...
Chapter
One of the major theoretical constructs in the field of cognitive science holds that higher order cerebral tasks are performed in so-called association areas of the cortex, or at least in brain regions different from those serving primary sensorimotor functions. An important element in this concept is that these higher order tasks may also be perfo...
Article
Visual evoked responses (VER) to four geometric shapes (a square, circle, el and omega) were recorded from multiple scalp locations in twelve subjects. Significant differences were found between the occipital VERs to the square and el and between the VERs to the circle and omega. Consistent differences could not be demonstrated between the response...
Article
Full-text available
A five year follow-up study was conducted with two groups of head-injuried children. 131 younger than 9 years old at time of injury and 100 older than 9 years. The four aspects studied were neuropsychological function, neurological status, EEG status, and school progress. There was an extended recovery process over time, as well as evidence of a di...
Article
Recent advances in the fields of automatic EEG analysis and pattern recognition provide a valuable new perspective for reconsidering the question of whether or not the level of anesthesia can be reliably estimated by analyzing spontaneous EEG activity. The feasibility of developing a computer-based EEG pattern recognition system capable of continuo...
Article
This paper is concerned with the psychiatric evaluation of 81 volunteers in a marihuana project. The psychiatric status has been evaluated in a standard manner and the drug history, both prescribed and non-prescribed, has been determined. A method of classification of the non-adverse and adverse drug effects is suggested. Observations are made with...
Article
The language system in the brain of man is presumed to reside primarily in the left hemisphere, and Broca's area is presumed to function as a coding unit for articulation. These presumptions are based on considerable clinical lesion data and much indirect evidence. However, the question of the specific relationship of handedness to speech lateraliz...
Article
Full-text available
Experiments were done with 75 healthy young adults to explore the neurophysiological basis of the acute marijuana intoxication state. Tests included recording the scalp EEG, visual and auditory cerebral evoked-potentials, the CNV, cerebral slow potentials related to certainty of response correctness in auditory discrimination tasks, heart rate, res...
Article
Full-text available
This study assigned 81 non-naïve subjects, divided into low- and high-dose groups, to four experimental conditions (marijuana/marijuana, marijuana/placebo, placebo/marijuana and placebo/placebo) for two sessions separated by about one week. The low dose was 4.8 mg. Delta(9)-THC followed by 2.4 mg. one hour later. The high dose was 9.1 mg. followed...
Article
Full-text available
A study of 170 patients with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and a review of the literature indicate that this disease can significantly affect the central nervous system. Signs of CNS dysfunction were observed in 13 children. During the acute toxic stages the EEG is abnormal in many cases. Other manifestations of toxic encephalopathy such as irritab...
Article
This paper describes a complete electroencephalographic acquisition and transmission system, designed to meet the needs of a large hospital with multiple critical care patient monitoring units. The system provides rapid and prolonged access to a centralized recording and computing area from remote locations within the hospital complex, and from loc...
Article
The usual contingent negative variation (CNV) paradigm S1S2R was modified by requiring a discrimination at S2 and by adding a feedback stimulus: S1SdΔR.....FB. It was demonstrated that as the discrimination task became more difficult and therefore the feedback (FB) more important informationally, the CNV became prolonged until the FB signal and the...
Article
The contingent negative variation, or CNV, a slow, surface negative potential which appears maximally in frontal regions of the brain of man during psychophysiological states of preparation set or expectancy, is shown in a non-patient population (a) to be smaller in amplitude in high anxiety S's than in low anxiety S's in a moderately stressful exp...
Article
Used discriminant analysis of variance to determine the relationships between neuropsychological status, neurological-minimal cerebral dysfunction (MCD) ratings, and EEG ratings. In a comparison of acute head-injured, chronic brain-damaged, MCD, and normal children, a high degree of success was achieved in predicting neurological, MCD, and EEG rati...
Article
Experiments were done in man in an attempt to define more extensively the psychological factors involved in contingent or conative negative variation (CNV) genesis. Conditioning, recording and averaging techniques were similar to those previously described. Two experimental designs were used. In the first, S1 was a picture of a number, S2 was a ton...
Article
The CNV of W. Grey Walter, a slow, surface-negative potential which appears maximally in frontal regions of the brain of man during psychophysiological states of “preparation set”, is shown, in a non-patient population (a) to have no consistent relation to subject scores on an objective measure of manifest anxiety (IPAT) in a non-stressful experime...
Article
A method is described for determining stimulus-locked changes in single unit firing rate using an integration circuit with an electronic averager.RésuméLes auteurs décrivent une méthode pour déterminer les variations liées au stimulus du taux de décharge d'une cellule isolée, en utilisant un circuit d'intégration couplé avec un moyenneur électroniq...
Article
Utilizing long time-constant EEG recording techniques, magnetic tape storage, and electronic averaging, the phenomenon designated as the "contingent negative variation" or "expectancy wave" was studied in 3 rhesus monkeys. 3 basic conditioning paradigms were used: escape conditioning with a warning cue, discrimination task with aversive reinforceme...

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