, an iconic marine taxon with a tropical and subtropical worldwide distribution, face an uncertain future. All species are designated 'Vulnerable' to extinction by the IUCN. Nonetheless, a comprehensive understanding of geographic structuring across the global range is lacking, impeding our ability to highlight particularly vulnerable populations for conservation priority.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPediatr Rheumatol Online J
June 2022
Background: Juvenile idiopathic arthritis is the most common chronic rheumatic disease of childhood. The term JIA encompasses a heterogenous group of diseases. The variability in phenotype of patients affected by the disease means it is not uncommon for mimics of JIA to be misdiagnosed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present the updated British Association for Sexual Health and HIV (BASHH) guidelines for post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) to HIV following sexual exposures, occupational exposures and other nonoccupational exposures in the community. This serves as an update to the 2015 BASHH guideline on PEP following sexual exposures and the 2008 Expert Advisory Group on AIDS guidelines on HIV PEP. We aim to provide evidence-based guidance on best clinical practice in the provision, monitoring and support of PEP for the prevention of HIV acquisition following sexual, occupational and other nonoccupational exposures in the community.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Clinical placements in rural locations are perceived by students to provide positive learning experiences to support their transition to practice. This study explores how clinical placements in a rural health setting might influence students and new graduates to think, feel and act as a health professional.
Design: A qualitative study comprising focus group discussions was conducted.
The high abundance and low cost of aluminum and sulfur make the Al-S battery an attractive combination. However, significant improvements in performance are required, and increasing the thickness and sulfur content of the sulfur electrodes is critical for the development of batteries with competitive specific energies. This work concerns the development of sulfur electrodes with the highest sulfur content (60 wt %) reported to date for an Al-S battery system and a systematic study of the effect of the sulfur electrode thickness on battery performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Clinical placements in rural locations provide student health professionals with diverse learning opportunities. Engaging in clinical work and learning from role models and peers in the workplace are primary ways students develop professional skills, behaviour and identities as a health professional. The purpose of this study was to examine the influences supporting allied health students undertaking clinical placements in a rural health service to think, feel and act as a health professional from the perspective of allied health staff.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Environmental assessment and modification is an effective approach to reducing falls, particularly when provided by occupational therapists to high risk populations. Environmental assessment and modification has been incorporated into many national and international falls prevention guidelines, however, evidence suggests that it is not being implemented in practice. The aim of this study is to identify factors that support the local adoption of best practice environmental assessment for falls prevention within a rural health service.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAntimicrobial resistance (AMR) represents a serious threat to human health worldwide. We have tested the use of free-living small mammals (mice, voles and shrews) as sentinels of variation in the distribution of AMR in the environment and the potential for transmission from the natural environment to animal hosts. Escherichia coli isolated from the faeces of small mammals trapped at paired coastal and inland sites were tested for resistance to four antibiotics: trimethoprim, ampicillin, ciprofloxacin and cefotaxime.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExpansion of occupational therapy education programs has resulted in increased student numbers and demand on clinicians to host clinical placements while also maintaining the delivery of high-quality, safe clinical services to patients. Much of the research about innovative placement models, including student contributions to service delivery, has been conducted in metropolitan areas. Therefore, there is a need to develop models that are suited to regional settings that face diversity of caseload, more generalised occupational therapy roles and variations in patient flow.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe recently identified 2 siblings afflicted with idiopathic, autosomal recessive aplastic anemia. Whole-exome sequencing identified a novel homozygous missense mutation in thrombopoietin (THPO, c.112C>T) in both affected siblings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe objective of this study was to audit the management of syphilis in our integrated sexual health clinic according to the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV (BASHH) guideline using the 'Treponemal Infection Care' (TIC) audit tool devised by our clinic. The case notes of patients diagnosed with all stages of syphilis during an 18-month period were reviewed. At the time of diagnosis, the departmental TIC proforma was filled in: this proforma details BASHH auditable outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe preparation of a series of amidinato and guanidinato zinc halide complexes incorporating ligands of varying steric bulk is described, and their thermal stabilities compared. Salt elimination reactions between [M(Giso)] (M = K or Li; Giso = [(ArN)(2)CNCy(2)](-), Ar = 2,6-diisopropylphenyl, Cy = cyclohexyl) and ZnX(2) (X = I or Br) have yielded the monomeric complexes [(Giso)ZnI] and [(Giso)Zn(mu-Br)(2)Li(OEt(2))(2)]. Both have been crystallographically characterised and the former shown to slowly decompose in solution at ambient temperature to give the carbodiimide, ArN[double bond, length as m-dash]C[double bond, length as m-dash]NAr.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe links between energy expenditure and ageing are different at different levels of enquiry. When studies have examined the relationships between different species within a given class the association is generally negative--animals with greater metabolism per gram of tissue live shorter lives. Within species, or between classes (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSuccessful drug discovery requires accurate decision making in order to advance the best candidates from initial lead identification to final approval. Chemogenomics, the use of genomic tools in pharmacology and toxicology, offers a promising enhancement to traditional methods of target identification/validation, lead identification, efficacy evaluation, and toxicity assessment. To realize the value of chemogenomics information, a contextual database is needed to relate the physiological outcomes induced by diverse compounds to the gene expression patterns measured in the same animals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurr Opin Drug Discov Devel
January 2002
The rapid sequencing of the genomes of a number of organisms, including humans, has led to major changes in the drug industry. The abundance of genome data, and the reagents generated from these genomes, have enabled the study of changes in large numbers of genes and proteins in parallel, using methods such as DNA microarrays to examine gene expression changes, or 2D polyacrylamide electrophoresis (2D-PAGE) to observe changes in the expression of proteins. While these techniques have been in use for several years, their application has primarily focused on the target discovery phase, with some early work carried out on drug- or toxin-induced changes in proteins using 2D-PAGE.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis review aims to outline the primary biological databases that are being generated to understand fundamental biology, identify new drug targets, and to look at compound profiling in a new light. We will give a brief overview of four of the main areas being studied in molecular biology: genomics, pharmacogenomics, pharmacogenetics and proteomics. Looking initially at each data set and some of its potential applications, we will go on to describe some of the potentially enormous advantages gained by fully integrating these data sets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFApoptosis is an area of intense scientific interest, which encompasses the study of and triggers mechanisms involved in mediating the cell biology of programmed cell death. A number of low molecular weight compounds have been used to inhibit or enhance this fundamental cellular process and so apoptosis has now become amenable to pharmacological manipulation. In this review Ross Kinloch, Mark Treherne, Mike Furness and Iradj Hajimohamadreza will focus on the current literature describing the pharmacology of apoptosis, with particular reference to the therapeutic potential that could arise from the development of pro- and anti-apoptotic drugs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOur aim was to evaluate the efficacy of a revised tuberculosis (TB) contact tracing procedure in South Glamorgan whereby routine annual radiological surveillance was abandoned and contacts were either discharged or referred to chest clinic following their initial screening. We reviewed and evaluated data from the TB contact tracing clinic, the Public Health Service Mycobacterium Reference Unit, Cardiff and the Consultant in Communicable Diseases Control, South Glamorgan Health Authority and compared these results with those of our previous study. One hundred and three index cases and 732 contacts were identified.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNew technologies in both combinatorial chemistry and combinatorial biology promise to unlock new opportunities for drug discovery and lead optimisation. Using such genome-based technologies to measure the dynamic properties of pharmacological systems, pharmacogenomics can now provide an objective measure of a drug's biological efficacy, including its potential adverse effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: With the development of pharmacological treatments for Alzheimer's disease there will be an increase in the numbers of patients requiring assessment from specialist services. Could the role of the specialist clinician be supported by other health professionals screening those who might benefit from treatment?
Method: Sixty-four consecutive referrals to the Leicester University Memory Clinic were assessed at home by a community psychiatric nurse using a semi-structured interview. The nurse then reported her findings to a psychiatrist and a diagnosis was agreed.
We have cloned cDNAs encoding three human alpha-1 adrenergic receptor (AR) subtypes and characterized pharmacological properties of the expressed receptor protein. A number of significant sequence corrections have been identified and compared with previously published data, at both nucleotide and amino acid levels; the most major differences occur for the human alpha-1a/dAR. Pharmacological characterization was performed simultaneously using six cloned alpha-1AR subtypes (human and rat alpha-1a/d, human and hamster alpha-1b, human and bovine alpha-1c) stably expressed in rat-1 fibroblasts at approximately equal receptor concentrations (1-2 pmol/mg of total protein).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA variety of experimental manipulations produce enhanced pain responsivity. Recent work has demonstrated that activation of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors in the spinal cord can produce persistent enhancement of pain via production of nitric oxide and/or prostaglandins. To date, the behavioral paradigms used to study NMDA mediated hyperalgesia have all involved direct excitation of spinal cord dorsal horn neurons via activation of primary nociceptive afferents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe spinal cord dorsal horn contains neural mechanisms which can greatly facilitate pain. We have recently shown that 'illness'-inducing agents, such as intraperitoneally administered lipopolysaccharide (LPS; bacterial endotoxin), can produce prolonged hyperalgesia. This hyperalgesic state is mediated at the level of the spinal cord via activation of the NMDA-nitric oxide cascade.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious work has demonstrated that pain facilitation can occur following injection of subcutaneous irritants, such as formalin. Such studies have focused on apparent pain facilitation induced at the site of irritant injection. Changes in processing of incoming pain information have typically been assumed to result from activation of neurocircuitry intrinsic to the spinal cord.
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