Effect of Prescription Size on Opioid Use and Patient Satisfaction After Minor Hand Surgery: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Objective: To determine the influence of initial prescription size on opioid consumption after minor hand surgeries. Secondary outcomes include efficacy of pain control, patient satisfaction, and refill requests.

Background: Retrospective studies have shown that opioid prescriptions for acute pain after surgical procedures are often excessive in size, which encourages misuse.

Increased complication rate in obese patients undergoing laparoscopic adrenalectomy.

Objectives: Laparoscopic adrenalectomy has become the standard of care for resection of adrenal masses, with extremely low morbidity and mortality. This study investigates the difference in outcomes in patients who underwent laparoscopic adrenalectomy, comparing obese with healthy weight patients.

Methods: A retrospective chart review was performed on patients undergoing laparoscopic adrenalectomy between January 2000 and February 2010.

Role of Radiation-induced TGF-beta Signaling in Cancer Therapy.

TGF-β signaling regulates several different biological processes involving cell-growth, differentiation, apoptosis, motility, angiogenesis, epithelial mesenchymal transition and extracellular matrix production that affects embryonic development and pathogenesis of various diseases, including cancer, its effects depending on the cellular context and physiological environment. Growth suppression mediated by TGF-β signaling often associated with inhibition of c-myc, cdks and induction of p15, p27, Bax and p21. Despite its growth inhibitory effect, in certain conditions TGF-β may act as a promoter of cell proliferation and invasion.

A noncommercial polymerase chain reaction-based method to approach one hundred percent recombinant clone selection efficiency.

Molecular cloning is an important procedure in molecular biology, but this is often a rate-limiting step and can be very time-consuming, possibly due to low ligation efficiency. Here, we describe a simple polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based strategy to approach 100% selection efficiency. The post-ligation mixture containing the recombinant was subjected to insert-specific primer-mediated PCR amplification using a high-fidelity DNA Pfu polymerase generating a plasmid containing staggered nicks.