Where in the World? Creating a Map Application to Support Nursing Students.

Successful completion of professional experience placement is a key factor for student progress through pre-licensure nursing programmes and subsequent registration as a nurse. Professional experience placement can be a time when students feel the impact of intersectional challenges, and is a point in which attrition occurs. A regional university partnered with their spatial analysis unit to create a customised, interactive, digital map application to support students undertaking professional experience placement.

Questionnaire format of modified frailty index as a predictor for 30-day readmission and length of stay in elderly patients undergoing multi-level lumbar interbody fusion.

Background: Frailty is a spectrum describing a demographic more likely to experience adverse events such as falls, disability, and hospital admission which can be quantified by the modified frailty index (mFI). Several studies have associated increased mFI score with higher rates of hospital readmission and length of stay (LOS). This study tests the predictive value of a frailty questionnaire based on the mFI on LOS and 30-day readmission rates.

The ZFHX3 GGC Repeat Expansion Underlying Spinocerebellar Ataxia Type 4 has a Common Ancestral Founder.

Background: The identification of a heterozygous exonic GGC repeat expansion in ZFHX3 underlying spinocerebellar ataxia type 4 (SCA4) has solved a 25-year diagnostic conundrum. We used adaptive long-read sequencing to decipher the pathogenic expansion in the index Utah family and an unrelated family from Iowa of Swedish ancestry. Contemporaneous to our discovery, other groups identified the same repeat expansion in affected individuals from Utah, Sweden, and Germany, highlighting the current pivotal time for detection of novel repeat expansion disorders.