Mild traumatic brain injury in a gymnast.

Primary care providers often are responsible for the initial evaluation and management plan of young patients with mild traumatic brain injury (mild TBI, also called concussion), and need to be familiar with new protocols and how to incorporate them into a patient's treatment plan. This article describes a patient who suffered a mild TBI and returned to sports too early, and discusses the appropriate protocols for managing concussion in children.

Predicting physician assistant students' professionalism by personality attributes.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine whether personality characteristics, both positive and negative, predict the level of professionalism in physician assistant (PA) students.

Methods: Both the Millon College Counseling Inventory (MCCI) and a physician assistant professionalism scale (PA Professional Scale) were administered to 82 PA students in 5 multiple years at University of Detroit Mercy, a private-university PA program with an end point of a master's degree. Cluster analysis determined natural groupings of healthy and unhealthy personality characteristics, and the two personality clusters were compared to each of 15 professionalism parameters.

Admission variables as predictors of PANCE scores in physician assistant programs: a comparison study across universities.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to create a model of cognitive and noncognitive measures that could estimate the probability of achieving a given level of performance on the Physician Assistant National Certifying Examination (PANCE).

Methods: A retrospective records review of admissions information used by six universities was conducted to discover which factor had the most impact on the dependent variable of the PANCE score. Multiple predictors were measured: undergraduate grade point average (uGPA), graduate GPA, prerequisite grades, Graduate Record Exam (GRE)-verbal, GRE-quantitative, GRE combined, interview scores, years of health care experience, age, gender, and first-year scores on the Physician Assistant Clinical Knowledge Rating and Assessment Tool (PACKRAT).