Spiritual Care Assessment and Intervention (SCAI) for Adult Outpatients With Advanced Cancer and Caregivers: A Pilot Trial to Assess Feasibility, Acceptability, and Preliminary Effects.

Background: Although religion and spirituality are important to adults with cancer and their family caregivers, few studies have tested spiritual care interventions in the outpatient setting.

Aim: To determine the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effects of chaplain-delivered, semi-structured spiritual care to adult outpatients with advanced cancer and their caregivers.

Design: In this pre/post pilot intervention study, board-certified chaplains utilized the Spiritual Care Assessment and Intervention (SCAI) framework during 4 individual sessions.

Short-term heritable variation overwhelms 200 generations of mutational variance for metabolic traits in Caenorhabditis elegans.

Metabolic disorders have a large heritable component, and have increased markedly in human populations over the past few generations. Genome-wide association studies of metabolic traits typically find a substantial unexplained fraction of total heritability, suggesting an important role of spontaneous mutation. An alternative explanation is that epigenetic effects contribute significantly to the heritable variation.