A first-year community-based service learning elective: design, implementation, and reflection.

Background: Medical schools have increasingly begun to incorporate service learning practices into their curricula.

Description: As part of a community-based service learning elective, 7 first-year medical students designed and implemented a health behavior education program for residents of a women's substance abuse recovery facility. The resulting program, Start Small, Feel Better, emphasized setting and accomplishing small goals to promote healthy lifestyle modifications.

Ultrasonography by emergency physicians in patients with suspected cholecystitis.

This article investigates the use of bedside abdominal ultrasonography (BAU) performed by emergency physicians (EPs) to screen patients for cholelithiasis and cholecystitis. In this prospective study EPs performed BAU on 116 patients. Agreement between BAU and formal abdominal ultrasound (FUS) performed in the radiology department for detecting cholelithiasis and cholecystitis was determined using Kappa statistics.

Cardiovascular responses to nonrespiratory and respiratory arousals in a porcine model.

Spontaneous and provoked nonrespiratory arousals can be accompanied by a patterned hemodynamic response. To investigate whether a patterned response is also elicited by respiratory arousals, we compared nonrespiratory arousals (NRA) to respiratory arousals (RA) induced by airway occlusion during non-rapid eye movement sleep. We monitored mean arterial blood pressure (MAP), heart rate, iliac and renal blood flow, and sleep stage in 7 pigs during natural sleep.

Spontaneous autoimmune diabetes in monoclonal T cell nonobese diabetic mice.

It has been established that insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) in nonobese diabetic (NOD) mice results from a CD4+ and CD8+ T cell-dependent autoimmune process directed against the pancreatic beta cells. The precise roles that beta cell-reactive CD8+ and CD4+ T cells play in the disease process, however, remain ill defined. Here we have investigated whether naive beta cell-specific CD8+ and CD4+ T cells can spontaneously accumulate in pancreatic islets, differentiate into effector cells, and destroy beta cells in the absence of other T cell specificities.

A mechanism for the major histocompatibility complex-linked resistance to autoimmunity.

Certain major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II haplotypes encode elements providing either susceptibility or dominant resistance to the development of spontaneous autoimmune diseases via mechanisms that remain undefined. Here we show that a pancreatic beta cell-reactive, I-Ag7-restricted, transgenic TCR that is highly diabetogenic in nonobese diabetic mice (H-2(g7)) undergoes thymocyte negative selection in diabetes-resistant H-2(g7/b), H-2(g7/k), H-2(g7/q), and H-2(g7/nb1) NOD mice by engaging antidiabetogenic MHC class II molecules on thymic bone marrow-derived cells, independently of endogenous superantigens. Thymocyte deletion is complete in the presence of I-Ab, I-Ak + I-Ek or I-Anb1 + I-Enb1 molecules, partial in the presence of I-Aq or I-Ak molecules alone, and absent in the presence of I-As molecules.