Advocating For a Culture of Support for Lactating Medical Residents in Hawai'i.

Lactating medical residents face unique barriers due to intense clinical work schedules, limited support in the clinic and hospital workspaces, and competing pressures between career development and childcare. The objective of this project was to explore the perceived culture of breastfeeding support among medical trainees and design an action plan to improve support for lactating residents in Hawai'i. Resident and faculty representatives from the Hawai'i Residency Programs and the University of Hawai'i John A Burns School of Medicine participated in an 8 month national learning collaborative to review the existing resident lactation policy and resident perception of lactation support.

IDH mutation status and role of WHO grade and mitotic index in overall survival in grade II-III diffuse gliomas.

Diffuse gliomas are up till now graded based upon morphology. Recent findings indicate that isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) mutation status defines biologically distinct groups of tumors. The role of tumor grade and mitotic index in patient outcome has not been evaluated following stratification by IDH mutation status.

Mesenchymal differentiation mediated by NF-κB promotes radiation resistance in glioblastoma.

Despite extensive study, few therapeutic targets have been identified for glioblastoma (GBM). Here we show that patient-derived glioma sphere cultures (GSCs) that resemble either the proneural (PN) or mesenchymal (MES) transcriptomal subtypes differ significantly in their biological characteristics. Moreover, we found that a subset of the PN GSCs undergoes differentiation to a MES state in a TNF-α/NF-κB-dependent manner with an associated enrichment of CD44 subpopulations and radioresistant phenotypes.

A survey of intragenic breakpoints in glioblastoma identifies a distinct subset associated with poor survival.

With the advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies, much progress has been made in the identification of somatic structural rearrangements in cancer genomes. However, characterization of the complex alterations and their associated mechanisms remains inadequate. Here, we report a comprehensive analysis of whole-genome sequencing and DNA copy number data sets from The Cancer Genome Atlas to relate chromosomal alterations to imbalances in DNA dosage and describe the landscape of intragenic breakpoints in glioblastoma multiforme (GBM).

Significance of complete 1p/19q co-deletion, IDH1 mutation and MGMT promoter methylation in gliomas: use with caution.

The histopathological diagnosis of diffuse gliomas often lacks the precision that is needed for tailored treatment of individual patients. Assessment of the molecular aberrations will probably allow more robust and prognostically relevant classification of these tumors. Markers that have gained a lot of interest in this respect are co-deletion of complete chromosome arms 1p and 19q, (hyper)methylation of the MGMT promoter and IDH1 mutations.

The transcriptional coactivator TAZ regulates mesenchymal differentiation in malignant glioma.

Recent molecular classification of glioblastoma (GBM) has shown that patients with a mesenchymal (MES) gene expression signature exhibit poor overall survival and treatment resistance. Using regulatory network analysis of available expression microarray data sets of GBM, including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), we identified the transcriptional coactivator with PDZ-binding motif (TAZ), to be highly associated with the MES network. TAZ expression was lower in proneural (PN) GBMs and lower-grade gliomas, which correlated with CpG island hypermethylation of the TAZ promoter compared with MES GBMs.