Opioid Prescribing and Use Patterns in Postsurgical Facial Trauma Patients.

Background: Facial fractures are painful injuries routinely managed by opioids after surgical repair. Studies have identified patient risk factors and prescribing patterns associated with opioid use in medicine and general surgery; however, little is known about these entities in the facial trauma population.

Methods: A retrospective cohort study of opioid-naive patients undergoing surgical repair of facial fractures was conducted using the Truven Health MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters (2006 to 2015) and Medicaid Multi-State Databases (2011 to 2015).

Recalcitrant Invasive Skin Cancer of the Scalp: Combined Extirpation and Microsurgical Reconstruction Without Cranioplasty.

Background: Recurrent invasive skin cancer of the scalp and calvarium is a difficult problem for which universally accepted treatment protocols have not been established. The authors present their 10-year experience with treatment of this specific subset of scalp reconstruction patients and present a successful treatment algorithm that is well suited to this patient population.

Methods: The authors retrospectively reviewed all patients of microsurgical scalp reconstruction performed from 2005 to 2015 that involved invasive cutaneous malignancies of the scalp and calvarium.

Nasal Bone Osteotomies with Nonpowered Tools.

Controlling the shape of the nasal bones has long been a frustrating problem. Conventional osteotomies are associated with bleeding, loss of reduction, inability to achieve the desired alignment, improperly placed osteotomy sites, and spicule formation. A nonpowered osteotomy method empirically provided the safest and most controlled technique to achieve the desired anatomic result.

Factors influencing the titer and infectivity of lentiviral vectors.

Lentiviral vectors have undergone several generations of design improvement to enhance their biosafety and expression characteristics, and have been approved for use in human clinical studies. Most preclinical studies with these vectors have employed easily assayed marker genes for the purpose of determining vector titers and transduction efficiencies. Naturally, the adaptation of these vector systems to clinical use will increasingly involve the transfer of genes whose products may not be easily measured, meaning that the determination of vector titer will be more complicated.

The Moloney murine leukemia virus repressor binding site represses expression in murine and human hematopoietic stem cells.

The Moloney murine leukemia virus (MLV) repressor binding site (RBS) is a major determinant of restricted expression of MLV in undifferentiated mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells and mouse embryonal carcinoma (EC) lines. We show here that the RBS repressed expression when placed outside of its normal MLV genome context in a self-inactivating (SIN) lentiviral vector. In the lentiviral vector genome context, the RBS repressed expression of a modified MLV long terminal repeat (MNDU3) promoter, a simian virus 40 promoter, and three cellular promoters: ubiquitin C, mPGK, and hEF-1a.