Collaborating With Businesses to Support and Sustain Research.

Financial assistance is necessary for sustaining research at universities. Business collaborations are a potential means for obtaining these funds. To secure funding, understanding the process for obtaining these business funds is important for nursing faculty members.

Embedding Research in Undergraduate Learning Opportunities.

As a means of promoting scholarship, faculty are increasingly including undergraduate nursing students as team members in faculty-led research projects. Research involvement is a high-impact educational practice that enhances student engagement and retention rates and enables the reflection and integration of learning. The purpose of this article is to describe the benefits and innovative ways of directly involving undergraduate nursing students in faculty-guided research projects.

Sexually transmitted infections and prostatic inflammation/cell damage as measured by serum prostate specific antigen concentration.

Purpose: Although inflammation and cell damage due to STIs are hypothesized to contribute to the later development of prostate disease, few clinical studies have been done to investigate the extent to which sexually transmitted agents infect and induce an inflammatory immune response in the prostate. We indirectly investigated this question by measuring serum PSA, a possible marker of prostatic inflammation and cell damage, in men with documented STIs.

Materials And Methods: Archived serum specimens from young men with laboratory confirmed exudative STIs, including gonorrhea, chlamydia and trichomonosis, and young men with no STI diagnoses were identified in 2 prospective studies of patients at Baltimore City STI clinics, that is 84 in the STI Transmission and Acquisition Study, and 61 in the Mucosal Immunity Study.

Polymerase chain reaction detection of Y-chromosome sequences in vaginal fluid of women accessing a sexually transmitted disease clinic.

Background: Reporting bias and validity estimation of self-reports in clinical settings is a major problem in sexual behavior research.

Objective: The objective of this study was to determine if a newly described biomarker tool helps clarify sensitivity issues related to condom use self-report.

Methods: A polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay to detect Y-chromosome (Yc) fragments was used to assess detectability and longevity of YcDNA in vaginal swabs collected from 141 women seeking care for sexually transmitted disease (STD)-related symptoms or as a reported sexual contact to STD.