State Regulation of Community Paramedicine Programs: A National Analysis.

Background: Community Paramedicine (CP) is a rapidly evolving field within prehospital care where paramedics step outside of their traditional roles of treating acute conditions to provide elements of primary and preventive care. It is unclear if current state oversight regarding the scope of practice (SOP) for paramedics provides clear guidance on the novel functions provided and skills performed by CP programs.

Objective: To determine the process and authority, as currently defined by state laws and regulations in the United States, to expand paramedic SOP in order to perform CP roles and to assess state EMS agencies' interpretation of paramedic SOP as it applies to CP.

Orthopedic uses of stem cell therapy.

The treatment of musculoskeletal disorders is gaining importance as the population ages. In addition to the complications brought on by prolonged life expectancy, the growing epidemic of obesity is contributing to joint degradation. Cell-based tissue engineering has the potential to advance the current treatment for musculoskeletal disorders.

Characterization of a three-drug nonlinear mixture response model.

Our group recently developed a response-surface modeling paradigm (White et al: Curr Drug Metab 2, 399-409, 2003) and tested its application to both mixtures of anticancer agents and antifungals. This new model is a Hill-type equation, with the slope and potency parameters being functions of the normalized drug ratios, using polynomial expressions. Response surface methods allow one to model and interpret all of the information present in the full concentration-effect data set, to visualize local regions of synergy, additivity and antagonism, and even to quantify the degree of synergy or antagonism, both globally, and across local regions of the response surface.

D-optimal designs for parameter estimation for indirect pharmacodynamic response models.

This report generates efficient experimental designs (dose, sampling times) for parameter estimation for four basic physiologic indirect pharmacodynamic response (IDR) models. The principles underlying IDR models and their response patterns have been well described. Each IDR model explicitly contains four parameters, k (in) (production), k (out) (loss), I (max)/S (max) (capacity) and IC (50)/SC (50) (sensitivity).

Extrapolation concepts for dealing with multiple contamination in environmental risk assessment.

Mixture exposure against several stressors is what organisms in the environment typically experience, and combined effects resulting from this are well documented. Risk management often still focuses on the assessment of individual priority compounds. Because of the large number of possible mixtures and their variability in time, experimental investigation of every conceivable mixture for their adverse effects is not a viable option.