Assessment instruments.

Assessment is the undergirding of palliative care and of geriatrics care. Both disciplines insist on a comprehensive assessment that includes personal and social aspects of the patient's illness experience. At the same time, both face challenges due to the amount of time and skill needed to encompass such a broad scope and the often heavy illness burden of the patients, which makes interaction stressful or difficult.

Proteolysis of the mismatch repair protein MLH1 by caspase-3 promotes DNA damage-induced apoptosis.

Caspases are critical proapoptotic proteases that execute cell death signals by selectively cleaving proteins at Asp residues to alter their function. Caspases trigger apoptotic chromatin degradation by activating caspase-activated DNase and by inactivating a number of enzymes that sense or repair DNA damage. We have identified the mismatch repair protein MLH1 as a novel caspase-3 substrate by screening small pools of a human prostate adenocarcinoma cDNA library for cDNAs encoding caspase substrates.

Men with acquired hypogonadotropic hypogonadism treated with testosterone may be fertile.

Men with acquired hypogonadotropic hypogonadism treated with testosterone are generally assumed to be infertile. The finding of two such patients with unexpected fertility and normal sperm counts prompted an evaluation of spermatogenesis in additional men with this condition. Case records were initially searched and one similar case with fertility was found.

Cloning of the cat TSH receptor and evidence against an autoimmune etiology of feline hyperthyroidism.

Cats are the only nonhuman mammalian species with a high incidence of hyperthyroidism, and a better understanding of the pathogenesis of feline hyperthyroidism is of clinical relevance for veterinary medicine. The etiology of this disease in cats remains controversial. Both an intrinsic autonomy of growth and function of follicular cells as well as an autoimmune-related mechanism have been proposed.