Kindness Isn't Just about Being Nice: The Value Proposition of Kindness as Viewed through the Lens of Incivility in the Healthcare Workplace.

The healthcare workplace is a high-stress environment. All stakeholders, including patients and providers, display evidence of that stress. High stress has several effects.

Kindness as a Stress Reduction-Health Promotion Intervention: A Review of the Psychobiology of Caring.

Chronic stress is a ubiquitous problem shouldered by many people worldwide. Although the stressors are myriad (eg, loneliness, finances, health, discrimination), the corporal response to them either causes or exacerbates mental and physical illness, including depression, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease. Identifying efficient ways to help people buffer their response and promote resilience and wellness is critical to improving overall health.

What's Playing in Your Waiting Room? Patient and Provider Stress and the Impact of Waiting Room Media.

Patients enter the healthcare space shouldering a lot of personal stress. Concurrently, health care providers and staff are managing their own personalstressors as well as workplace stressors. As stress can negatively affect the patient-provider experience and cognitive function of both individuals, it is imperative to try to uplift the health care environment for all.

Kindness Media Rapidly Inspires Viewers and Increases Happiness, Calm, Gratitude, and Generosity in a Healthcare Setting.

: Stress is a ubiquitous aspect of modern life that affects both mental and physical health. Clinical care settings can be particularly stressful for both patients and providers. Kindness and compassion are buffers for the negative effects of stress, likely through strengthening positive interpersonal connection.

Mixed Meal and Intravenous L-Arginine Tests Both Stimulate Incretin Release Across Glucose Tolerance in Man: Lack of Correlation with β Cell Function.

Background: The aims of this study were to 1. define the responses of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP), glucagon, and peptide YY (PYY) to an oral meal and to intravenous L-arginine; and 2. examine correlation of enteroendocrine hormones with insulin secretion.

Outpatient versus inpatient mixed meal tolerance and arginine stimulation testing yields comparable measures of variability for assessment of beta cell function.

Unlabelled: Standard practice to minimize variability in beta cell function (BCF) measurement is to test in inpatient (IP) settings. IP testing strains trial subjects, investigators, and budgets. Outpatient (OP) testing may be a solution although there are few reports on OP BCF testing variability.

Standardized Mixed-Meal Tolerance and Arginine Stimulation Tests Provide Reproducible and Complementary Measures of β-Cell Function: Results From the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health Biomarkers Consortium Investigative Series.

Objective: Standardized, reproducible, and feasible quantification of β-cell function (BCF) is necessary for the evaluation of interventions to improve insulin secretion and important for comparison across studies. We therefore characterized the responses to, and reproducibility of, standardized methods of in vivo BCF across different glucose tolerance states.

Research Design And Methods: Participants classified as having normal glucose tolerance (NGT; n = 23), prediabetes (PDM; n = 17), and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM; n = 22) underwent two standardized mixed-meal tolerance tests (MMTT) and two standardized arginine stimulation tests (AST) in a test-retest paradigm and one frequently sampled intravenous glucose tolerance test (FSIGT).

Blood-based identification of non-responders to anti-TNF therapy in rheumatoid arthritis.

Background: Faced with an increasing number of choices for biologic therapies, rheumatologists have a critical need for better tools to inform rheumatoid arthritis (RA) disease management. The ability to identify patients who are unlikely to respond to first-line biologic anti-TNF therapies prior to their treatment would allow these patients to seek alternative therapies, providing faster relief and avoiding complications of disease.

Methods: We identified a gene expression classifier to predict, pre-treatment, which RA patients are unlikely to respond to the anti-TNF infliximab.

Arginine is preferred to glucagon for stimulation testing of β-cell function.

A key aspect of research into the prevention and treatment of type 2 diabetes is the availability of reproducible clinical research methodology to assess β-cell function. One commonly used method employs nonglycemic secretagogues like arginine (arg) or glucagon (glgn). This study was designed to quantify the insulin response to arg and glgn and determine test repeatability and tolerability.

Systems diagnostics: anticipating the next generation of diagnostic tests based on mechanistic insight into disease.

Societal demand for faster and more accurate assignment of treatments is based in both patient care needs and in health economics. From a patient care standpoint, there needs to be a transformation from the empiric method of therapeutic decision making to avoid unwanted side effects from inefficacious treatments. For health economics, the delay in effective therapy and expenditures for ineffective therapies add to the burden of care.

Company Profile: Selventa, Inc.

Selventa, Inc. (MA, USA) is a biomarker discovery company that enables personalized healthcare. Originally founded as Genstruct, Inc.

Early patient stratification and predictive biomarkers in drug discovery and development: a case study of ulcerative colitis anti-TNF therapy.

The current drug discovery paradigm is long, costly, and prone to failure. For projects in early development, lack of efficacy in Phase II is a major contributor to the overall failure rate. Efficacy failures often occur from one of two major reasons: either the investigational agent did not achieve the required pharmacology or the mechanism targeted by the investigational agent did not significantly contribute to the disease in the tested patient population.

Atherosclerosis drug development in jeopardy: the need for predictive biomarkers of treatment response.

The limited predictability of phase II biomarkers for atherosclerosis outcomes in phase III studies stands in contrast to the number and varied types of biomarkers--soluble, imaging, and functional--that have been used in a diverse array of trials. Although collectively abundant, these biomarker data exist in a fragmented state. Most biomarkers are studied one at a time, only measure a specific aspect of atherosclerosis, are not integrated in a substantive way, and compete with one another for validation; in the end, progress is slow.

Do technical and commercial biases contribute to the pharmaceutical industry's productivity problems? An analysis of how reordering priorities can improve productivity.

Of the many issues that contribute to the pharmaceutical industry's productivity problems, biases in the drug discovery and development (DDD) process should be included on the list. The dominant bias pervading the early DDD process is the requirement to identify and develop a commercializable molecule, long before the importance of the target in human disease is understood. That requirement filters out many potentially valuable projects.

Increased food intake and energy expenditure following administration of olanzapine to healthy men.

Atypical antipsychotic medications like olanzapine (OLZ) induce weight gain and increase the risk of diabetes in patients with schizophrenia. The goal of this study was to assess potential mechanisms of OLZ-induced weight gain and accompanying metabolic effects. Healthy, lean, male volunteers received OLZ and placebo (PBO) in a randomized, double-blind, crossover study.

Potential implications of matrix metalloproteinase-9 in assessment and treatment of coronary artery disease.

Background: Matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-9, a member of the MMP superfamily is consistently implicated in the pathophysiology of atherosclerosis and plaque rupture, the most common mechanism responsible for acute coronary syndrome (ACS).

Aim: To summarize the role of MMP-9 in atherosclerosis and its potential implications in assessment and treatment of coronary artery disease (CAD).

Methods: We reviewed the PubMed database for relevant data regarding the role of MMP-9 in the pathophysiology of atherosclerosis.

Non-traditional biomarkers of atherosclerosis in stable and unstable coronary artery disease, do they differ?

Background: Biomarkers of atherosclerosis are emerging as a potential tool for assessment of coronary artery disease (CAD) patients. As acute coronary syndrome (ACS), and stable CAD are distinguished in their pathophysiology it is conceivable that they are also characterized by different biomarkers of atherosclerosis.

Methods: We systematically reviewed the literature for clinical studies of several non-traditional biomarkers of atherosclerosis reflecting various pathophysiological processes, namely macrophage-activity, oxidative-stress, tissue remodeling, and thrombosis in ACS and stable CAD to determine whether circulating biomarkers are differently expressed/predict outcome in these two clinical conditions.

The regulation of body and skeletal muscle protein metabolism by hormones and amino acids.

For many decades, it has been recognized that insulin, growth hormone, glucocorticoids, insulin-like growth factor 1, thyroid hormones, and other hormones regulate body protein metabolism. It has been more recently recognized, but not understood, that humor factors present in states of acute and chronic inflammation could have a strong impact on protein turnover. Most recently, the role of amino acids, acting as signaling molecules, has become increasingly clarified.

Thermal biofeedback and lower extremity blood flow in adults with diabetes: is neuropathy a limiting factor?

Thermal biofeedback may be a useful adjunctive technique for enhancing cutaneous blood flow in patients with lower-extremity vascular complications of diabetes. However, autonomic, sensory, and/or motor neuropathies may impair vasomotion and limit the ability to alter blood flow and achieve significant foot warming with thermal biofeedback. We examined nerve function associated with four common types of diabetic neuropathy (sympathetic-autonomic, vagal-autonomic, sensory, and motor), hypothesizing that both sympathetic-autonomic and sensory neuropathies would limit the acquisition of biofeedback-mediated foot warming.

Single and combined effects of growth hormone and testosterone administration on measures of body composition, physical performance, mood, sexual function, bone turnover, and muscle gene expression in healthy older men.

We examined the effects of GH and/or testosterone (T) administration on body composition, performance, mood, sexual function, bone turnover, and muscle-gene expression in healthy older men. Ten men [mean (SEM) age, 68 (2.5) yr; height, 171.