Background: Concern exists that living wills are misinterpreted and may result in compromised patient safety.
Objective: To determine whether adding code status to a living will improves understanding and treatment decisions.
Methods: An Internet survey was conducted of General Surgery, and Family, Internal, and Emergency Medicine residencies between May and December 2009.
Background: Depression is associated with elevated levels of the inflammation marker C-reactive protein (CRP); yet, the direction of this association remains unclear. This study tested bi-directional longitudinal associations between CRP and depression in a sample of adolescents and young adults. The study compared the effect of current depression with the effect of cumulative episodes of depression over time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: New biomarkers of liver injury are required in the clinic and in preclinical pharmaceutical evaluation. Previous studies demonstrate that two liver-enriched microRNAs (miR-122 and miR-192) are promising biomarkers of acetaminophen-induced acute liver injury (APAP-ALI) in mice. We have examined these molecules, for the first time, in humans with APAP poisoning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The US Surgeon General has called for new approaches to close the mental health services gap for the large proportion of US children with significant mental health needs who have not received evaluation or services within the previous 6 to 12 months. In response, investigators sought to develop brief, easily understood, scientifically derived "warning signs" to help parents, teachers, and the lay public to more easily recognize children with unmet mental health needs and bring these children to health care providers' attention for evaluation and possible services.
Method: Analyses of epidemiologic data sets from >6000 children and parents were conducted to (1) determine the frequency of common but severely impairing symptom profiles, (2) examine symptom profile frequencies according to age and gender, (3) evaluate positive predictive values of symptom profiles relative to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders diagnoses, and (4) examine whether children with 1 or more symptom profiles receive mental health services.
Background And Purpose: Regular physical activity (PA) plays an important role in improving and maintaining one's health, especially as one ages. Although many older Americans are aware of the benefits of regular PA, the majority do not participate in regular PA that meets recommended guidelines. The purpose of this study was to gain insight into the motivators, barriers, and beliefs regarding PA of independent-living older adults with easy access to fitness facilities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Little is known about changes in the prevalence of psychiatric disorders between childhood and adolescence, and adolescence and adulthood.
Methods: We reviewed papers reporting prevalence rates of psychiatric disorders separately for childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Both longitudinal and cross-sectional papers published in the past 15 years were included.
Appl Environ Microbiol
September 2011
Bacteria are abundant in the atmosphere, where they often represent a major portion of the organic aerosols. Potential pathogens of plants and livestock are commonly dispersed through the atmosphere, and airborne bacteria can have important effects on human health as pathogens or triggers of allergic asthma and seasonal allergies. Despite their importance, the diversity and biogeography of airborne microorganisms remain poorly understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Understanding the normal temporal variation in the human microbiome is critical to developing treatments for putative microbiome-related afflictions such as obesity, Crohn’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease and malnutrition. Sequencing and computational technologies, however, have been a limiting factor in performing dense time series analysis of the human microbiome. Here, we present the largest human microbiota time series analysis to date, covering two individuals at four body sites over 396 timepoints.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInfect Genet Evol
August 2011
We have identified a globally important clonal complex of Mycobacterium bovis by deletion analysis of over one thousand strains from over 30 countries. We initially show that over 99% of the strains of M. bovis, the cause of bovine tuberculosis, isolated from cattle in the Republic of Ireland and the UK are closely related and are members of a single clonal complex marked by the deletion of chromosomal region RDEu1 and we named this clonal complex European 1 (Eu1).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Previous research reported that childhood adversity predicts juvenile- onset but not adult-onset depression, but studies confounded potentially genuine differences in adversity with differences in the recency with which adversity was experienced. The current study paper took into account the recency of risk when testing for differences among child-, adolescent- and young adult-onset depressions.
Method: Up to nine waves of data were used per subject from two cohorts of the Great Smoky Mountains Study (GSMS; n=1004), covering children in the community aged 9-16, 19 and 21 years.
Here we present a standard developed by the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) for reporting marker gene sequences--the minimum information about a marker gene sequence (MIMARKS). We also introduce a system for describing the environment from which a biological sample originates. The 'environmental packages' apply to any genome sequence of known origin and can be used in combination with MIMARKS and other GSC checklists.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: To establish stable tetracycline-inducible pancreatic cancer cell lines.
Methods: Suit-2, MiaPaca-2, and Panc-1 cells were transfected with a second generation reverse tetracycline-controlled transactivator protein (rtTA2S-M2), under the control of either a cytomegalovirus (CMV) or a chicken β-actin promoter, and the resulting clones were characterised.
Results: Use of the chicken (β-actin) promoter proved superior for both the production and maintenance of doxycycline-inducible cell lines.
Background: Nrf2 is a key transcriptional regulator of a battery of genes that facilitate phase II/III drug metabolism and defence against oxidative stress. Nrf2 is largely regulated by Keap1, which directs Nrf2 for proteasomal degradation. The Nrf2/Keap1 system is dysregulated in lung, head and neck, and breast cancers and this affects cellular proliferation and response to therapy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Ireland badgers are removed in response to tuberculosis (TB) breakdowns in cattle herds (focal culling). Prevalence studies, conducted using a detailed post mortem and bacteriological examination, showed that 36-50% of badgers were infected with Mycobacterium bovis. Focal culling forms part of the medium term national strategy for the control of bovine TB in cattle and is based on the premise that badgers in areas with herd breakdowns have a higher prevalence of infection than the badger population at large.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn national bovine tuberculosis (BTB) control programmes, testing is generally conducted using a single source of bovine purified protein derivative (PPD) tuberculin. Alternative tuberculin sources should be identified as part of a broad risk management strategy as problems of supply or quality cannot be discounted. This study was conducted to compare the impact of different potencies of a single bovine PPD tuberculin on the field performance of the single intradermal comparative tuberculin test (SICTT) and single intradermal test (SIT).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry
March 2011
Objective: No longitudinal studies beginning in childhood have estimated the cumulative prevalence of psychiatric illness from childhood into young adulthood. The objective of this study was to estimate the cumulative prevalence of psychiatric disorders by young adulthood and to assess how inclusion of not otherwise specified diagnoses affects cumulative prevalence estimates.
Method: The prospective, population-based Great Smoky Mountains Study assessed 1,420 participants up to nine times from 9 through 21 years of age from 11 counties in the southeastern United States.
Neuropsychopharmacology
May 2011
Variation in the μ-opioid receptor gene has been associated with early social behavior in mice and rhesus macaques. The current study tested whether the functional OPRM1 A118G predicted various indices of social relations in children. The sample included 226 subjects of self-reported European ancestry (44% female; mean age 13.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Rev Gastroenterol Hepatol
February 2011
Pancreatic cancer is usually detected at an advanced stage and responds poorly to treatment. In 2010 new insights were gained into understanding the complex biology of pancreatic cancer. Importantly, these insights offer novel opportunities for early diagnosis and treatment of this disease.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBacteria control major nutrient cycles and directly influence plant, animal and human health. However, we know relatively little about the forces shaping their large-scale ecological ranges. Here, we reveal patterns in the distribution of individual bacterial taxa at multiple levels of phylogenetic resolution within and between Earth's major habitat types.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe intestinal microbiome is a critical determinant of human health. Alterations in its composition have been correlated with chronic disorders, such as obesity and inflammatory bowel disease in adults, and may be associated with neonatal necrotizing enterocolitis in premature infants. Increasing evidence suggests that strain-level genomic variation may underpin distinct ecological trajectories within mixed populations, yet there have been few strain-resolved analyses of genotype-phenotype connections in the context of the human ecosystem.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) specifies a developmental relationship between oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and conduct disorder (CD). Evidence for this link is mixed, however, and recent studies suggest that different symptom dimensions in ODD may have different outcomes. The authors examined links between ODD, CD, and their young adult outcomes in the Great Smoky Mountains Study (E.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrian is a 15-year-old boy who has been just changed to your practice because of a change in insurance plans. When taking the social history, his parents note that he has "the hardest time relating to other kids." Sometimes he will be in the middle of a conversation with a friend and then discuss tangential topics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent advances in DNA sequencing technology have allowed the collection of high-dimensional data from human-associated microbial communities on an unprecedented scale. A major goal of these studies is the identification of important groups of microorganisms that vary according to physiological or disease states in the host, but the incidence of rare taxa and the large numbers of taxa observed make that goal difficult to obtain using traditional approaches. Fortunately, similar problems have been addressed by the machine learning community in other fields of study such as microarray analysis and text classification.
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