Cholesterol Review: A Metabolically Important Molecule.

Objective: Cholesterol is an important molecule in humans and both its excess and its deficiency cause disease. Most clinicians appreciate its role in stabilizing cellular plasma membranes but are unaware of its myriad other functions.

Methods: This review highlights cholesterol's newly recognized important roles in human physiology and pathophysiology.

Evaluating the Potential for Unintentional Occupational Exposure to Fentanyl and Fentanyl Analogues Among Medicolegal Death Investigators and Autopsy Technicians.

Recent increases in deaths in the United States from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and fentanyl analogues (fentanyls) have raised concerns about possible occupational exposures to these potent agents. Medicolegal death investigators and autopsy suite staff might perform job tasks involving exposure to fentanyls. The potential for exposure to fentanyls among medicolegal death investigators and autopsy technicians at a state medical examiner's office was evaluated through review of caseload characteristics, injury and illness logs, and procedures and policies and discussions with management and employee representatives.

Models of Outpatient Palliative Care Clinics for Patients With Cancer.

Purpose: Early integration of outpatient palliative care (OPC) benefits patients with advanced cancer and also the health care systems in which these patients are seen. Successful development and implementation of models of OPC require attention to the needs and values of both the patients being served and the institution providing service.

Summary: In the 2016 clinical guideline, ASCO recommended integrating palliative care early in the disease trajectory alongside cancer-directed treatment.

Is the masked continuous glucose monitoring system clinically useful for predicting hemoglobin A1C in type 1 diabetes?

Background: The masked continuous glucose monitoring system (Masked-CGMS) differs from standard CGMSs in three ways: (1) there is no feedback to the user so that no immediate regimen changes can be made; (2) it can only be worn for up to 5 days; and (3) there are no alarms to warn of hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia. Since 2008 masked-CGMS has become popular for identifying reasons that a patient's hemoglobin A1C does not correlate closely with his or her capillary blood glucose measurements. To date only one study addressing the clinical utility of Masked-CGMS for improving A1C in diabetes has been published.

School daze: why are teachers and schools missing the boat on media?

Most American schools are 50 years behind in incorporating new technology into the classroom and using media wisely. Some experts estimate that 65% of today's grade-school students may end up doing jobs that have not even been invented yet. Abundant evidence now exists that children and teens learn preferentially from the media, yet the media are often frowned on as too distracting for students or too distant from the basic 3 Rs.

Altered resting and exercise respiratory physiology in obesity.

Obesity, particularly severe obesity, affects resting and exercise-related respiratory physiology. Severe obesity classically produces a restrictive ventilatory abnormality characterized by reduced expiratory reserve volume. Obstructive ventilatory abnormality may also be associated with abdominal obesity.

Growth and neurodevelopmental outcomes after early low-dose hydrocortisone treatment in extremely low birth weight infants.

Background: Low cortisol concentrations in premature infants have been correlated with increased severity of illness, hypotension, mortality, and development of bronchopulmonary dysplasia. A total of 360 mechanically ventilated infants with a birth weight of 500 to 999 g were enrolled in a randomized, multicenter trial of prophylaxis of early adrenal insufficiency to prevent bronchopulmonary dysplasia. Mortality and bronchopulmonary dysplasia were decreased in the hydrocortisone-treated patients exposed to chorioamnionitis.

Risky business: what primary care practitioners need to know about the influence of the media on adolescents.

Media can be powerfully prosocial, educational, and entertaining. Negative effects do exist, however, and they have been well documented. Despite the power of the new multinational media conglomerates and the intransigence of the entertainment industry,practitioners can make a difference in the future.

Recursive artifact windowed-single tone extraction method (RAW-STEM) as periodic noise filter for electrophysiological signals with interfering transients.

The single tone extraction method (STEM) is a well developed algorithm for estimating the frequency, amplitude, and phase of one periodic signal or a single tone in complex temporal signals. This method is useful in neuroscience research since it provides an efficient simple means to remove line frequency noise present in many types of signal measurements. However, the method encounters problems when the signal contains transients such as a stimulus artifact which distort the estimation of power line parameters.

Apolipoprotein l6, a novel proapoptotic Bcl-2 homology 3-only protein, induces mitochondria-mediated apoptosis in cancer cells.

Cancer cells frequently possess defects in the genetic and biochemical pathways of apoptosis. Members of the Bcl-2 family play pivotal roles in regulating apoptosis and possess at least one of four Bcl-2 homology (BH) domains, designated BH1 to BH4. The BH3 domain is the only one conserved in proapoptotic BH3-only proteins and plays an important role in protein-protein interactions in apoptosis by regulating homodimerization and heterodimerization of the Bcl-2 family members.

Plasma and urinary free amino acid concentrations in preeclamptic women in northern Nigeria.

Background: Preeclampsia/eclampsia is one of the major causes of maternal and fetal mortality in Nigeria and many other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. We determined if serum and urine concentrations of amino acids were abnormal in women with this disorder of pregnancy in Gombe, Nigeria.

Methods: Free amino acids were measured in serum and urine of women (ages, 15 to 40 years) with preeclampsia/eclampsia (n=37) and their pregnant age and gestational age matched controls (n=16).

Recovery from DNA damage-induced G2 arrest requires actin-binding protein filamin-A/actin-binding protein 280.

Filamin-A (filamin-1) is an actin-binding protein involved in the organization of actin networks. Our previous study shows that filamin-A interacts with BRCA2, and lack of filamin-A expression results in increased cellular sensitivity to several DNA damaging agents in melanoma cells (Yuan, Y., and Shen, Z.