Impact of marketing to improve patient access to care and clinic utilization for clinical pharmacy specialists.

Introduction: This quality improvement initiative aimed to implement a strategy to increase access to care with clinical pharmacy specialists (CPSs), optimize CPS direct patient care activities, and promote clinical pharmacy services. The primary objective was to assess the impact of patient marketing on expanding access to care and clinic utilization in a CPS clinic.

Methods: A marketing technique was applied by a mental health (MH) CPS to expand clinical pharmacy services.

Psychopharmacology and pharmacokinetics.

The overall physiologic changes associated with aging lead to changes in both pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic actions of many medications. This, in turn, leads to changes in the impact that a wide variety of medications have on older adults when compared to younger, healthy individuals. These pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic variations can cause either lesser or greater than expected responses to medication.

Pharmacy resident publication success: factors of success based on abstracts from a regional meeting.

Objective: To determine the publication rate among pharmacy resident research projects in a region of the United States and to compare characteristics of published and unpublished projects.

Methods: Research project abstracts from the Great Lakes Pharmacy Residency Conference in 2003, 2005, and 2007 were reviewed. Two independent investigators collected all study data.

Drosha promotes splicing of a pre-microRNA-like alternative exon.

The ribonuclease III enzyme Drosha has a central role in the biogenesis of microRNA (miRNA) by binding and cleaving hairpin structures in primary RNA transcripts into precursor miRNAs (pre-miRNAs). Many miRNA genes are located within protein-coding host genes and cleaved by Drosha in a manner that is coincident with splicing of introns by the spliceosome. The close proximity of splicing and pre-miRNA biogenesis suggests a potential for co-regulation of miRNA and host gene expression, though this relationship is not completely understood.

Biogenesis of mammalian microRNAs by a non-canonical processing pathway.

Canonical microRNA biogenesis requires the Microprocessor components, Drosha and DGCR8, to generate precursor-miRNA, and Dicer to form mature miRNA. The Microprocessor is not required for processing of some miRNAs, including mirtrons, in which spliceosome-excised introns are direct Dicer substrates. In this study, we examine the processing of putative human mirtrons and demonstrate that although some are splicing-dependent, as expected, the predicted mirtrons, miR-1225 and miR-1228, are produced in the absence of splicing.