Increased insulin-like growth factor 1 concentrations in a retrospective population of non-diabetic cats diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

Objectives: The aim of the study was to document whether a proportion of non-diabetic cats with left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) previously diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) have elevated circulating insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) concentrations.

Methods: A retrospective analysis of residual blood samples obtained at the time of echocardiographic diagnosis of HCM from a population of 60 non-diabetic cats were analysed for circulating IGF-1 concentrations using a validated radioimmunoassay and compared with a control group of 16 apparently healthy cats without LVH. Clinical and echocardiographic data for cats with an IGF-1 level >1000 ng/ml were compared with those with an IGF-1 level <800 ng/ml.

Characterizing Students' Ideas about the Effects of a Mutation in a Noncoding Region of DNA.

Understanding student ideas in large-enrollment biology courses can be challenging, because easy-to-administer multiple-choice questions frequently do not fully capture the diversity of student ideas. As part of the Automated Analysis of Constructed Responses (AACR) project, we designed a question prompting students to describe the possible effects of a mutation in a noncoding region of DNA. We characterized answers from 1127 students enrolled in eight different large-enrollment introductory biology courses at three different institutions over five semesters and generated an analytic scoring system containing three categories of correct ideas and five categories of incorrect ideas.