Resident workload, pager communications, and quality of care.

With the recent regulations limiting resident work hours, it has become more important to understand how residents spend their time. The volume and content of the pages they receive provide a valuable source of information that give insight into their workload and help identify inefficiencies in hospital communication. We hypothesized that above a certain workload threshold, paging data would suggest breakdowns in communication and implications for quality of care.

Targeted disruption of beta-catenin in Sf1-expressing cells impairs development and maintenance of the adrenal cortex.

The nuclear receptor steroidogenic factor 1 (Sf1, Nr5a1) is essential for adrenal development and regulates genes that specify differentiated adrenocortical function. The transcriptional coactivator beta-catenin reportedly synergizes with Sf1 to regulate a subset of these target genes; moreover, Wnt family members, signaling via beta-catenin, are also implicated in adrenocortical development. To investigate the role of beta-catenin in the adrenal cortex, we used two Sf1/Cre transgenes to inactivate conditional beta-catenin alleles.