A case of probable sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease in a tertiary care hospital in Malaysia.

The diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) can be challenging as findings are non-specific and there is low awareness of the disease. We present a case of an 83-yearold man with a two months history of rapidly progressive dementia. After a series of extensive diagnostic examinations, he was diagnosed with probable sporadic CJD with key findings of rapidly progressive dementia, myoclonus, pyramidal signs, abnormal hyperintensity signals on diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) and typical electroencephalograph (EEG).

Improving the ward-based care of patients post-thyroidectomy.

Nursing staff play a crucial role in managing surgical patients in the postoperative period. However, with an increasing risk of subspecialty wards facing closure as a result of financial pressures within the NHS, the knowledge base and expertise of ward-based nursing staff of surgical subspecialties is becoming increasingly limited. Using patients undergoing thyroidectomy as an example, a quality improvement multidisciplinary audit is presented, which shows how simple targeted interventions through a multidisciplinary approach can help maintain high standards of patient care in a secondary care setting.

Oral and maxillofacial surgery in medical schools in the United Kingdom.

It has been suggested that oral and maxillofacial surgery (OMFS) is better established in dental schools than in medical schools, and as a result, dental students have a greater insight into the scope of the specialty. We explore how much time is allocated to OMFS in the undergraduate curriculum in medical schools in the UK, and the students' perceptions of the specialty. A total of 186 final year students from 5 medical schools were recruited in a questionnaire-based survey.

Generation of deviation parameters for amino acid singlets, doublets and triplets from three-dimentional structures of proteins and its implications for secondary structure prediction from amino acid sequences.

We present a new method, secondary structure prediction by deviation parameter (SSPDP) for predicting the secondary structure of proteins from amino acid sequence. Deviation parameters (DP) for amino acid singlets, doublets and triplets were computed with respect to secondary structural elements of proteins based on the dictionary of secondary structure prediction (DSSP)-generated secondary structure for 408 selected non-homologous proteins. To the amino acid triplets which are not found in the selected dataset, a DP value of zero is assigned with respect to the secondary structural elements of proteins.