Advance Care Planning Among Patients With Advanced Cancer.

Purpose: Advance directives (AD) have been heralded as vehicles to promote patient autonomy and have been decried as ineffective. Efforts to improve advance care planning (ACP) and AD documents are wide ranging but have not been prospectively studied.

Materials And Methods: In an institutional review board-approved, single-blind, randomized, controlled trial, we compared an interactive, educational ACP decision aid to standard ACP among patients with advanced cancer.

Advance care planning for patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Purpose: To determine whether an advance care planning (ACP) decision-aid could improve communication about end-of-life treatment wishes between patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and their clinicians.

Methods: Forty-four patients with ALS (>21, English-speaking, without dementia) engaged in ACP using an interactive computer based decision-aid. Before participants completed the intervention, and again three months later, their clinicians reviewed three clinical vignettes, and made treatment decisions (n = 18) for patients.

Restraint stress affects hippocampal cell proliferation differently in rats and mice.

Granule cell neurogenesis occurs in the dentate gyrus of the mammalian hippocampus throughout adult life, and incorporation of bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) into DNA can serve as a marker of cell division associated with such neurogenesis. We examined the effects of a stressor (3h of restraint) on hippocampal cell proliferation in Sprague-Dawley rats and C57BL/6J mice. Animals were killed immediately following restraint stress and their brains were prepared for immunohistochemical studies.