Evaluation of a screening and counseling tool for alcohol misuse: a Virginia Practice Support and Research Network (VaPSRN) trial.

Background: Surveys reveal limited screening and counseling for alcohol misuse by primary care physicians despite evidence-based recommendations. We developed and evaluated an alcohol screening and misuse counseling tool designed to assist clinicians at the point of care (POC).

Methods: This was a mixed methods, prospective cohort study conducted with licensed clinicians in a practice-based research network.

Development and evaluation of an instrument for assessing brief behavioral change interventions.

Objective: To develop an observational coding instrument for evaluating the fidelity and quality of brief behavioral change interventions based on the behavioral theories of the 5 A's, Stages of Change and Motivational Interviewing.

Methods: Content and face validity were assessed prior to an intervention where psychometric properties were evaluated with a prospective cohort of 116 medical students. Properties assessed included the inter-rater reliability of the instrument, internal consistency of the full scale and sub-scales and descriptive statistics of the instrument.

A PDA-based counseling tool for improving medical student smoking cessation counseling.

Background And Objectives: There is little research on training medical students in smoking cessation counseling (SCC). This study aimed to determine if a personal digital assistant (PDA)-based SCC tool can improve medical student SCC.

Methods: We conducted a randomized, controlled trial with third-year medical students.

Comparing cDNA and oligonucleotide array data: concordance of gene expression across platforms for the NCI-60 cancer cells.

Microarray gene-expression profiles are generally validated one gene at a time by real-time RT-PCR. We describe here a different approach based on simultaneous mutual validation of large numbers of genes using two different expression-profiling platforms. The result described here for the NCI-60 cancer cell lines is a consensus set of genes that give similar profiles on spotted cDNA arrays and Affymetrix oligonucleotide chips.