Exploring the Factors that Influence Ethical Spanish Use among Medical Students and Solutions for Improvement.

IssueThere is a need for greater access to Spanish language services in United States healthcare. One approach to increasing language concordant care is the use of second language skills by healthcare staff. The desire to use second language skills may have unintended consequences when individuals step beyond their language abilities and can cause more harm than do good for limited-English proficiency patients.

N- and O-linked glycosylation of total plasma glycoproteins in galactosemia.

Classic galactosemia is a potentially lethal metabolic disorder that results from profound impairment of the enzyme galactose-1-phosphate uridylyltransferase (GALT); despite decades of research, the underlying mechanism of pathophysiology remains unclear. Previous studies of plasma and tissue samples from patients with classic galactosemia have revealed defects of protein and lipid glycosylation, however, the underlying bases for these defects and their clinical significance, if any, has remained unclear. As a step toward addressing these questions we characterized both the N- and O-linked glycomes of plasma proteins from neonates, infants, children, and adults with galactosemia using mass spectrometry and asked (1) whether similar or disparate defects exist for N-linked and O-linked modifications, (2) what factors correlate with the severity of these defects in different patients, and perhaps most important, (3) whether there is any apparent relationship between chronic glycosylation defects and long-term outcome in patients.

Ovarian function in Duarte galactosemia.

Objective: To determine if girls with Duarte variant galactosemia (DG) have an increased risk of developing premature ovarian insufficiency based on prepubertal anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) levels.

Design: Cross-sectional study.

Setting: University research laboratory.