Design and implementation of a system-based course in musculoskeletal medicine for medical students.

Background: The amount of time devoted to musculoskeletal medicine in the typical undergraduate curriculum is disproportionately low compared with the frequency of musculoskeletal complaints that occur in a general practice. Consequently, whether because of the quantity or quality of the education, the competence level of graduating physicians regarding musculoskeletal problems is inadequate. Our purposes were to design a self-contained, system-based course in musculoskeletal medicine for medical students in the preclinical years and to measure the level of competence achieved by a class of first-year medical students who took the course.

Effects of maternal ethanol consumption on hematopoietic cells in the rat fetal liver.

During development, there are many factors to be considered in studying the efficacy of the hematopoietic system to provide the immune system with adequate numbers of functional cells within the immune repertoire. Hematopoietic cells must be able to develop, proliferate, and emigrate from the hematopoietic fetal liver to other tissues of the body, such as the thymus and bone marrow. There is evidence that ethanol consumption causes immune deficiencies in adults and that maternal ethanol consumption causes immune deficiencies in children, both with correlative effects on cells and cytokinetic regulators.

Effects on T-cell maturation and proliferation induced by lactational transfer of cyclosporine to nursing pups.

Background: Pregnancy after allotransplantations is becoming a more common occurrence, and the immunosuppressant of choice is cyclosporine (CsA) for these patients. Consequently, the effect of CsA on prenatal and postnatal immune development and function in the infant is an increasingly important clinical issue. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the potential problems of maternal CsA exposure on neonatal T-cell maturation and proliferation after lactational transfer of CsA in an animal model.

A variation in the formation of the median nerve: communicating branch between the musculocutaneous and median nerves in man.

We encountered variation in the formation of the median nerve in a 66-year-old male cadaver during dissection of the upper extremity of 20 adult cadavers. The dissections were made at the Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy, Louisiana State University Medical Center. The median nerve was formed by fusion of four branches, three of them coming from the lateral cord and one from the medial cord.

Arterial, neural and muscular variations in the upper limbs of a single cadaver.

Arterial, neural and muscular variations were observed in both upper limbs of a female adult cadaver during routine student dissection. Two superficial radial arteries were observed, which originated from the brachial and axillary arteries in the left and right upper limbs respectively. In the right upper limb, an ulnar nerve with a lateral root from the lateral cord of the brachial plexus in the axilla and, in the left forearm, an accessory muscle belly inserting into the muscle belly of the flexor digitorum superficialis were also observed.