Ultrasound-guided phlebotomy in primary care for people who inject drugs.

Objectives: Persons who inject drugs (PWID) commonly experience venous degradation as a complication of prolonged injection, which makes routine phlebotomy difficult. Clients may decline care due to the perceived lack of skilled phlebotomy services, and this contributes to significant delays in infectious disease screening and treatment. In this study, we investigated ultrasound-guided phlebotomy in clients with difficult venous access receiving care at two low-threshold buprenorphine clinics.

Community Wound Care Program Within a Syringe Exchange Program: Chicago, 2018-2019.

People who inject drugs (PWID) are at increased risk for developing wounds in addition to skin and soft tissue infections. The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Nursing, College of Medicine, and School of Public Health collaborated to establish a medical clinic serving PWID attending a Chicago syringe exchange program. A wound care program was implemented to improve clinicians' competence.

Decision support for using mobile Rapid DNA analysis at the crime scene.

Mobile Rapid DNA technology is close to being incorporated into crime scene investigations, with the potential to identify a perpetrator within hours. However, the use of these techniques entails the risk of losing the sample and potential evidence, because the device not only consumes the inserted sample, it is also is less sensitive than traditional technologies used in forensic laboratories. Scene of Crime Officers (SoCOs) therefore will face a 'time/success rate trade-off' issue when making a decision to apply this technology.

ADAGE signature analysis: differential expression analysis with data-defined gene sets.

Background: Gene set enrichment analysis and overrepresentation analyses are commonly used methods to determine the biological processes affected by a differential expression experiment. This approach requires biologically relevant gene sets, which are currently curated manually, limiting their availability and accuracy in many organisms without extensively curated resources. New feature learning approaches can now be paired with existing data collections to directly extract functional gene sets from big data.

Perspectives of optic nerve prostheses.

A number of projects exist that are investigating the ability to restore visual percepts for individuals who are blind through a visual prosthesis. While many projects have reported the results from a technical basis, very little exists in the professional literature on the human experience of visual implant technology. The current study uses an ethnographic methodological approach to document the experiences of the research participants and study personnel of a optic nerve vision prosthesis project in Brussels, Belgium.

David L. Gutmann (1925-2013).

David L. Gutmann, a pioneer in geropsychology and professor emeritus at Northwestern University, died on November 3, 2013, at the age of 88. A student of Bernice Neugarten, Bruno Bettelheim, and Erik Erikson, Gutmann discovered changes in adult psychological development related to parenting styles that held across diverse cultures.

Responses of potential users to the intracortical visual prosthesis: final themes from the analysis of focus group data.

Although visual implant prosthesis projects are advancing, little exists in the literature on the factors that would lead an individual to volunteer for such an experimental procedure. Many ethical issues are raised in recruiting and involving individuals in experimental implant procedures, most involving autonomy and informed consent. This report provides perspectives of 30 totally or legally blind older individuals on their expectations about a potential visual implant, their motivations for volunteering, and the processes they would use for decision making.

Looking ahead: planning for the first human intracortical visual prosthesis by using pilot data from focus groups of potential users.

In planning for our research team's first human implant of a technologically advanced intracortical visual prosthesis we have conducted three focus groups with blind persons from a pool of likely participants. Guided by the principles of the Independent Living movement and Participatory Action Research (PAR), we asked the participants to share their thoughts and concerns about the procedure. The preliminary results reveal that achievement of the desired highest ethical of informed consent will require extensive pre-operative learning opportunities, such as those provided by these focus groups.

VisANT 3.5: multi-scale network visualization, analysis and inference based on the gene ontology.

Despite its wide usage in biological databases and applications, the role of the gene ontology (GO) in network analysis is usually limited to functional annotation of genes or gene sets with auxiliary information on correlations ignored. Here, we report on new capabilities of VisANT--an integrative software platform for the visualization, mining, analysis and modeling of the biological networks--which extend the application of GO in network visualization, analysis and inference. The new VisANT functions can be classified into three categories.

Comparative analysis of neurological disorders focuses genome-wide search for autism genes.

The behaviors of autism overlap with a diverse array of other neurological disorders, suggesting common molecular mechanisms. We conducted a large comparative analysis of the network of genes linked to autism with those of 432 other neurological diseases to circumscribe a multi-disorder subcomponent of autism. We leveraged the biological process and interaction properties of these multi-disorder autism genes to overcome the across-the-board multiple hypothesis corrections that a purely data-driven approach requires.

Rapidly retargetable approaches to de-identification in medical records.

Objective: This paper describes a successful approach to de-identification that was developed to participate in a recent AMIA-sponsored challenge evaluation.

Method: Our approach focused on rapid adaptation of existing toolkits for named entity recognition using two existing toolkits, Carafe and LingPipe.

Results: The "out of the box" Carafe system achieved a very good score (phrase F-measure of 0.

Using mixed methods to evaluate the use of a caregiver strain measure to assess outcomes of a caregiver support program for caregivers of older adults.

Purpose: Many assessment tools have been developed for evaluating caregiving programs, but the majority are too cumbersome for ongoing use. This study reports on a brief assessment tool used to monitor strain among family members caring for an impaired elder.

Design And Methods: Participants were enrolled in the SeniorCare program, a program funded by the Administration on Aging to provide care to family caregivers.

Genetic association between endothelial nitric oxide synthase and Alzheimer disease.

Evidence suggests that vascular and inflammatory factors may be important in the etiology of Alzheimer disease (AD). The Glu/Glu genotype at the Glu298Asp variant of the endothelial nitric oxide synthase (NOS3) gene has been tested for association with AD in several Caucasian and Asian populations, with conflicting results. We tested the Glu298Asp variant for association in African American and Caucasian AD patients, unaffected siblings, and unrelated controls from the MIRAGE Study.

Polymorphisms in the PON gene cluster are associated with Alzheimer disease.

Paraoxonase is an arylesterase enzyme that is expressed in the liver and found in the circulation in association with apoA1 and the high-density lipoprotein, and prevents the accumulation of oxidized lipids in low-density lipoproteins in vitro. Common polymorphisms in genes encoding paraoxonase are established risk factors in a variety of vascular disorders including coronary artery disease and carotid artery stenosis, but their association with Alzheimer disease (AD) is controversial. We tested the association of 29 SNPs in PON1, PON2 and PON3 with AD in 730 Caucasian and 467 African American participants of the MIRAGE Study, an ongoing multi-center family-based genetic epidemiology study of AD.

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug use and Alzheimer's disease risk: the MIRAGE Study.

Background: Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) use may protect against Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk. We sought examine the association between NSAID use and risk of AD, and potential effect modification by APOE-epsilon4 carrier status and ethnicity.

Methods: The MIRAGE Study is a multi-center family study of genetic and environmental risk factors for AD.

Differential modulation of endotoxin responsiveness by human caspase-12 polymorphisms.

Caspases mediate essential key proteolytic events in inflammatory cascades and the apoptotic cell death pathway. Human caspases functionally segregate into two distinct subfamilies: those involved in cytokine maturation (caspase-1, -4 and -5) and those involved in cellular apoptosis (caspase-2, -3, -6, -7, -8, -9 and -10). Although caspase-12 is phylogenetically related to the cytokine maturation caspases, in mice it has been proposed as a mediator of apoptosis induced by endoplasmic reticulum stress including amyloid-beta cytotoxicity, suggesting that it might contribute to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease.

Predicates of personal control among middle-aged and young-old men and women in middle America.

These analyses explore relationships between the conscious general sense of control and :1) personal evaluations of major life domains (health, spouse's health, marriage, parenting, work, leisure): and 2) spouse's evaluations of life domains, within groups defined by gender and age. Respondents include 101 men and 127 women; all are Caucasian; they reside in a middle-class community in the midwestern United States; they are aged forty-three to seventy-six (M = 56); they are all in long-term marriages, with an average of 4.4 children; and 73 percent had at least one child living at home.