Background: With the opioid crisis, surging methamphetamine use, and healthcare disruptions due to SARS-CoV-2, serious injection related infections (SIRIs), like endocarditis, have increased significantly. Hospitalizations for SIRI provide a unique opportunity for persons who inject drugs (PWID) to engage in addiction treatment and infection prevention, yet many providers miss opportunities for evidence-based care due to busy inpatient services and lack of awareness. To improve hospital care, we developed a 5-item SIRI Checklist for providers as a standardized reminder to offer medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD), HIV and HCV screening, harm reduction counseling, and referral to community-based care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis qualitative study evaluates physician training and experience with treatment and prevention services for people who inject drugs (PWID) including medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) and HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). The Behavioral Model of Healthcare Utilization for Vulnerable Populations was applied as a framework for data analysis and interpretation. Two focus groups were conducted, one with early career physicians (n = 6) and one with mid- to late career physicians (n = 3).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Increasingly, injection opioid use and opioid use disorder (OUD) are complicated by methamphetamine use, but the impact of stimulant use on the care of people who inject drugs (PWID) with serious injection-related infections (SIRIs) is unknown. The objective of this study was to explore hospital outcomes and postdischarge trends for a cohort of hospitalized PWID to identify opportunities for intervention.
Methods: We queried the electronic medical record for patients hospitalized at the University of Alabama at Birmingham with injection drug use-related infections between 1/11/2016 and 4/24/2021.
Amidst the increasing clinical demands and social distancing constraints of COVID-19, Twitter-based, resident-driven education offers adaptability for the current predicament faced by residency programs and sparks curiosity that will outlast this pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the renal collecting duct, binding of AVP to the V2 receptor triggers signaling changes that regulate osmotic water transport. Short-term regulation of water transport is dependent on vasopressin-induced phosphorylation of aquaporin-2 (AQP2) at Ser256. The protein kinase that phosphorylates this site is not known.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Physiol Cell Physiol
October 2012
A general question in molecular physiology is how to identify candidate protein kinases corresponding to a known or hypothetical phosphorylation site in a protein of interest. It is generally recognized that the amino acid sequence surrounding the phosphorylation site provides information that is relevant to identification of the cognate protein kinase. Here, we present a mass spectrometry-based method for profiling the target specificity of a given protein kinase as well as a computational tool for the calculation and visualization of the target preferences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis atlas of diatomic-molecular vibration frequencies parallels the previously offered Atlas of Internuclear Separations. The Atlas was produced by mining the data from Huber and Herzberg and training neural network software to forecast new data. New protocols were employed with the powerful software, which was originally designed for forecasting the financial markets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeeded spectroscopic data on diatomic molecules can often be found in the superb critical tables of Huber and Herzberg or in the literature published since 1979. Unfortunately, these sources apply to only a fraction of the diatomic species that can exist and so investigators have had to rely on interpolation, additivity, or ad hoc rules to estimate needed values, all of which require other information that is often lacking. This Atlas presents 1001 additional internuclear separations for use until critical tables are available to fill the needs more precisely.
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