Applying to medical school with undiagnosed dyslexia: a collaborative autoethnography.

Recent statistics found the prevalence of dyslexia in UK medical schools to be 7%, sitting below the national prevalence of 10%. The factors contributing to this discrepancy are currently unknown, but may result from an interplay of individual and systemic barriers to entering medicine. This collaborative, analytic autoethnography aimed to use the experiences of 'Meg', a fourth-year medical student who was diagnosed as dyslexic whilst at medical school, to explore how the lack of a diagnosis during the admissions process may have impacted her journey into medicine.

Sequence analysis of the whole mitochondrial genome and nuclear genes causing mitochondrial disorders.

The diagnosis of mitochondrial disorders has increased considerably over the past few years. However, the genetics are complex, as the causative mutations can be in either the mitochondrial or the nuclear genome. Identification of the molecular defects in the causative genes is the key to a definitive diagnosis of the disease.

Precise microinjection into skin using hollow microneedles.

Hollow needles of micron dimensions have previously been fabricated and envisioned for use with transdermal patches or infusion pumps to achieve painless delivery of drugs to the skin for local and systemic effects without the need for hypodermic needles. However, little work has been carried out to identify methods to effectively use hollow microneedles for drug delivery. To address this need, we inserted hollow, glass microneedles into hairless rat skin in vivo and human cadaver skin in vitro and then imaged infusion of dye molecules, insulin, polymer microparticles, and cells into the skin by brightfield and fluorescence microscopy.

Minimally invasive extraction of dermal interstitial fluid for glucose monitoring using microneedles.

Background: Compliance with glucose monitoring by patients with diabetes is poor because of the pain and inconvenience of conventional blood collection using lancets. To improve compliance, and thereby reduce morbidity and mortality associated with poor glucose control, this study sought to develop and test minimally invasive microneedles to extract dermal interstitial fluid (ISF) for glucose monitoring.

Methods: We used a thermal puller to fabricate individual or multi-needle arrays of glass microneedles with tip radii of 15-40 microm to penetrate 700-1,500 microm deep into the skin of anesthetized hairless rats or conscious, normal, adult, human subjects.