Nurses' role in promoting medication adherence.

A patient's willingness and desire to adhere to their medication plan are affected by their beliefs about taking medications, their self-efficacy, health literacy level, ability to afford prescription drug costs, and relationship with their clinicians. This article details strategies for creating a collaborative relationship with the patient, developing trust, and nurturing medication adherence.

Homogeneous polymerase chain reaction nucleobase quenching assay to detect the 1-kbp deletion in CLN3 that causes Batten disease.

Batten disease is an autosomal recessive disorder also known as juvenile neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis. The most common mutation for this disease is an approximately 1-kbp deletion in the CLN3 gene, which accounts for about 80 to 85% of the mutation load. We developed a rapid assay for this mutation using the PCR to produce amplicons that are detected by nucleobase quenching of the fluorescent signal from a probe labeled with a fluorescent dye.