WITHDRAWN: Interventions for ear discharge associated with grommets (ventilation tubes).

Background: The insertion of grommets (also known as ventilation or tympanostomy tubes) is one of the most common surgical procedures performed on children. Postoperative otorrhoea (discharge) is the most common complication with a reported incidence ranging from 10% to 50%. In the UK, many ENT surgeons treat with topical antibiotics/steroid combinations, but general practitioners, mainly through fears of ototoxicity, are unlikely to prescribe these and choose systemic broad-spectrum antibiotics.

Stoichiometries and affinities of interacting proteins from concentration series of solution scattering data: decomposition by least squares and quadratic optimization.

In studying interacting proteins, complementary insights are provided by analyzing both the association model (the stoichiometry and affinity constants of the intermediate and final complexes) and the quaternary structure of the resulting complexes. Many current methods for analyzing protein interactions either give a binary answer to the question of association and no information about quaternary structure or at best provide only part of the complete picture. Presented here is a method to extract both types of information from X-ray or neutron scattering data for a series of equilibrium mixtures containing the initial components at different concentrations.

Reduction of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in hospitalized patients: aligning continuing education with interprofessional team-based quality improvement in an academic medical center.

Problem: Despite clear prophylactic guidelines and national quality emphasis, a minority of hospitalized patients receive appropriate prophylaxis for venous thromboembolism (VTE). Data from the University of Kansas Hospital (KUH) revealed an unacceptably high incidence of VTE.

Approach: The authors aligned continuing education with quality improvement through formation of an interprofessional, multidisciplinary team to develop strategic educational and system operational plans to decrease VTE incidence.

Quantifying emergency department admission rates for people with a learning disability.

No data is routinely collected by emergency departments (ED) in the UK to identify people who attend and who have a learning disability. This group have numerous additional needs in their healthcare management and a lack of support could be detrimental to their care. F800 codes from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) that identify disorders of psychological development are often used to categorise specific disorders once admitted to hospital.

A report of the medical team activity at the 2009 Special Olympics GB.

Objective: To quantify and categorise medical workload from the 2009 Special Olympics GB (SOL GB) which involved 2500 athletes with learning disabilities across 21 different sports supported by nearly 9000 family members, volunteers and staff over a 7-day period.

Design And Participants: Prospective survey of all medical contacts that took place at the 2009 SOL GB with subsequent analysis of consultation rates, medical problems and medical activity.

Results: 581 medical consultations occurred during the 2009 SOL GB, with 95% of these for athletes.

Modulation of polyglutamine conformations and dimer formation by the N-terminus of huntingtin.

Polyglutamine expansions within different proteins are associated with nine different neurodegenerative diseases. There is growing interest in understanding the roles of flanking sequences from disease-relevant proteins in the intrinsic conformational and aggregation properties of polyglutamine. We report results from atomistic simulations and circular dichroism experiments that quantify the effect of the N-terminal 17-residue (Nt17) segment of the huntingtin protein on polyglutamine conformations and intermolecular interactions.

Analysis of self-associating proteins by singular value decomposition of solution scattering data.

We describe a method by which a single experiment can reveal both association model (pathway and constants) and low-resolution structures of a self-associating system. Small-angle scattering data are collected from solutions at a range of concentrations. These scattering data curves are mass-weighted linear combinations of the scattering from each oligomer.