Problem: Equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) efforts have accelerated over the past several years, without a traditional guidebook that other missions often have. To evaluate progress over time, departments of family medicine are seeking ways to measure their current EDI state. Across the specialty, unity regarding which EDI metrics are meaningful is absent, and discordance even exists about what should be measured.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: With growing emphasis on palliative care for neurodegenerative conditions, understanding trends in place of death helps improve quality of end-of-life care for people with Parkinson's disease and related disorders (PDRDs), focusing allocation of resources and training and identifying inequalities.
Objectives: Review national and regional place of death trends for people with PDRD including pre- and post-pandemic trends.
Methods: Mortality data for England and Wales (March 2018 and July 2022) were analysed with summary statistics and interrupted time series, exploring place of death for those who died with PDRD, with and without coexisting dementia, with reference to all deaths in England and Wales.
BMJ Support Palliat Care
January 2024
Objectives: People with Parkinson's disease (PwP) have a high palliative symptom burden throughout their disease course, equivalent to advanced malignancy. We aim to establish trends in symptom frequency and prescribing in the 72 hours prior to death for PwP.
Methods: Retrospective case note review of PwP who died between February 2019 and September 2020.
J Pain Symptom Manage
October 2023
Background: Detection of measurable residual disease detection (MRD) by flow cytometry after the first course of chemotherapy is a standard measure of early response in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Myeloid leukemia associated with Down Syndrome (ML-DS) is a distinct form of AML. Differences in steady-state and regenerating hematopoiesis between patients with or without DS are not well understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: As part of the implementation of Family First Preservation Services Act, and to meet legal requirements set by the Indiana State Legislature in 2019, Indiana Department of Child Services (DCS) implemented Indiana Family Preservation Services (INFPS) to maintain children in the home when it is deemed safe to do so.
Objective: This paper explores the effects of INFPS on child removal episodes and repeat maltreatment.
Participants And Setting: This study compares all children and families receiving INFPS between January 1, 2021 to March 31, 2021 to a similar cohort of in-home cases that opened between January 1, 2019 and March 31, 2019.
T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) is an aggressive hematopoietic neoplasm resulting from the malignant transformation of T-cell progenitors. While activating NOTCH1 mutations are the dominant genetic drivers of T-ALL, epigenetic dysfunction plays a central role in the pathology of T-ALL and can provide alternative mechanisms to oncogenesis in lieu of or in combination with genetic mutations. The histone demethylase enzyme KDM6A (UTX) is also recurrently mutated in T-ALL patients and functions as a tumor suppressor.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objectives: Diversity, inclusion, and health equity (DIHE) are integral to the practice of family medicine. Academic family medicine has been grappling with these issues in recent years, particularly with a focus on racism and health inequity. We studied the current state of DIHE activities in academic family medicine departments and suggest a framework for departments to become more diverse, inclusive, antiracist, and focused on health equity and racial justice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMegachile rotundata exhibits a facultative prepupal diapause but the cues regulating diapause initiation are not well understood. Possible cues include daylength and temperature. Megachile rotundata females experience changing daylengths over the nesting season that may influence diapause incidence in their offspring through a maternal effect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTranscriptional regulation of the HOXA genes is thought to involve CTCF-mediated chromatin loops and the opposing actions of the COMPASS and Polycomb epigenetic complexes. We investigated the role of these mechanisms at the HOXA cluster in AML cells with the common NPM1c mutation, which express both HOXA and HOXB genes. CTCF binding at the HOXA locus is conserved across primary AML samples, regardless of HOXA gene expression, and defines a continuous chromatin domain marked by COMPASS-associated histone H3 trimethylation in NPM1-mutant primary AML samples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe temperature of the nest influences fitness in cavity-nesting bees. Females may choose nest cavities that mitigate their offspring's exposure to stressful temperatures. This study aims to understand how cavity temperature impacts the nesting preference of the solitary bee Megachile rotundata (Fabricius) under field conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), CD56 expression has been associated with adverse clinical outcome. We reported on a phenotype associated with very poor prognosis (RAM) in children enrolled in the Children's Oncology Group trial AAML0531 (Brodersen et al. Leukemia 30 (2016) 2077-2080).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTRIOBP remodels the cytoskeleton by forming unusually dense F-actin bundles and is implicated in human cancer, schizophrenia, and deafness. Mutations ablating human and mouse TRIOBP-4 and TRIOBP-5 isoforms are associated with profound deafness, as inner ear mechanosensory hair cells degenerate after stereocilia rootlets fail to develop. However, the mechanisms regulating formation of stereocilia rootlets by each TRIOBP isoform remain unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPollination services provided by the honey bee, Apis mellifera (Hymenoptera: Apidae, Linnaeus, 1758) have broad economic impacts and are necessary for production of a diversity of important crops. Hives may be transported multiple times per year to provide pollination. To test how temperature may contribute to transportation stress, temperature sensors were placed in hives in different locations and orientations on the trailer during shipping.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStructures such as nests and burrows are an essential component of many organisms' life-cycle and require a complex sequence of behaviours. Because behaviours can vary consistently among individuals and be correlated with one another, we hypothesized that these structures would (1) show evidence of among-individual variation, (2) be organized into distinct functional modules and (3) show evidence of trade-offs among functional modules due to limits on energy budgets. We tested these hypotheses using the alfalfa leafcutting bee, Megachile rotundata, a solitary bee and important crop pollinator.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiagnostic biomarkers can be used to determine relapse risk in acute myeloid leukemia, and certain genetic aberrancies have prognostic relevance. A diagnostic immunophenotypic expression profile, which quantifies the amounts of distinct gene products, not just their presence or absence, was established in order to improve outcome prediction for patients with acute myeloid leukemia. The immunophenotypic expression profile, which defines each patient's leukemia as a location in 15-dimensional space, was generated for 769 patients enrolled in the Children's Oncology Group AAML0531 protocol.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Stemming from an initiative launched at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine's retreat in 2014, a group of 15 senior faculty and administrators convened to explicitly discuss strategies for creating an institutional culture of leadership. The group agreed to focus on improving a foundational skill involved in almost all leadership activities: running effective meetings. Meetings are necessary to advance institutional vision and growth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: To investigate the longer-term career outcomes, such as specialty choice and practice location, of underrepresented minority and disadvantaged students who finished a University of California postbaccalaureate (UCPB) premedical program.
Method: The authors compared 303 UCPB alumni from the 1986-1987 to 2001-2002 cohorts who matriculated into medical school and could be matched to the 2008 American Medical Association Physician Masterfile with 586 randomly selected control physicians who graduated from the same medical schools in the same years as the UCPB alumni. Outcome variables included specialty, practice in a Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) or Medically Underserved Area (MUA), and practice in a California community with high concentrations of African American, Latino, or low-income residents.
Purpose: To examine the perceptions and experiences of ethnic minority faculty at University of California-San Francisco regarding racial and ethnic diversity in academic medicine, in light of a constitutional measure outlawing race- and gender-based affirmative action programs by public universities in California.
Method: In 2005, underrepresented minority faculty in the School of Medicine at University of California-San Francisco were individually interviewed to explore three topics: participants' experiences as minorities, perspectives on diversity and discrimination in academic medicine, and recommendations for improvement. Interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and subsequently coded using principles of qualitative, text-based analysis in a four-stage review process.