Identification of Racial Inequities in Access to Specialized Inpatient Heart Failure Care at an Academic Medical Center.

Background: Racial inequities for patients with heart failure (HF) have been widely documented. HF patients who receive cardiology care during a hospital admission have better outcomes. It is unknown whether there are differences in admission to a cardiology or general medicine service by race.

Compassion focused therapy: Exploring the effectiveness with a transdiagnostic group and potential processes of change.

Objectives: This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of a compassion focused therapy (CFT) group with a transdiagnostic population, as compared to treatment as usual (TAU). A secondary aim was to explore the potential processes of change within the treatment.

Design: A non-randomized control trial was used.

Analysis of Gender Differences in Knowledge of Stroke Warning Signs.

Background: The impact of gender on knowledge of stroke warning signs and preparedness is poorly understood, and gender-specific factors associated with poor knowledge of stroke warning signs have not been identified.

Methods: This was a cross-sectional study of 132,604 participants in the 2009 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey, a national telephone survey. Adults aged 18 years or older who lived in one of 19 states that administered an optional stroke module asking them to correctly identify stroke symptoms and the correct action to take were included.

Trf1 is not required for proliferation or functional telomere maintenance in chicken DT40 cells.

The telomere end-protection complex prevents the ends of linear eukaryotic chromosomes from degradation or inappropriate DNA repair. The homodimeric double-stranded DNA-binding protein, Trf1, is a component of this complex and is essential for mouse embryonic development. To define the requirement for Trf1 in somatic cells, we deleted Trf1 in chicken DT40 cells by gene targeting.

MMASS: an optimized array-based method for assessing CpG island methylation.

We describe an optimized microarray method for identifying genome-wide CpG island methylation called microarray-based methylation assessment of single samples (MMASS) which directly compares methylated to unmethylated sequences within a single sample. To improve previous methods we used bioinformatic analysis to predict an optimized combination of methylation-sensitive enzymes that had the highest utility for CpG-island probes and different methods to produce unmethylated representations of test DNA for more sensitive detection of differential methylation by hybridization. Subtraction or methylation-dependent digestion with McrBC was used with optimized (MMASS-v2) or previously described (MMASS-v1, MMASS-sub) methylation-sensitive enzyme combinations and compared with a published McrBC method.