Providers, insurers, churches, schools prop up safety net . The assessment of motor and process skills applied cross-culturally to the Japanese. Six trained raters from diverse cultural backgrounds scored 10 Japanese subjects' performances on familiar and culturally relevant tasks of their own choosing. The Japanese rater and one of the three American raters varied significantly in severity between their scoring of Japanese subjects versus European subjects. The results support the hypothesis that the AMPS can be used as a cross cultural instrumental activities of daily living assessment.
Further study is needed to clarify the issue of possible cultural bias in rater severity.
Effects range from fatalities and severe neurological disorders in toluene abuse situations to deficits in neurobehavioral function in occupational populations. The RfC was derived from results of an occupational study involving Asian workers who developed neurobehavioral deficits at a mean toluene exposure level at the time of the study of 88 ppm. The derivation incorporated several uncertainty factors, one of which was a factor of 10 to account for sensitive subpopulations. Recent evidence indicates that some Japanese and possibly other Asian populations harbor a defective gene for aldehyde dehydrogenase, and thus exhibit a decreased rate of toluene metabolism. Although it is not known if reduced metabolism by aldehyde dehydrogenase also was a factor in the occupational study, preshift blood levels of toluene were considerably higher than preshift levels from non-Asian workers exposed to similar air levels of toluene.