Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Plant Ionome Coming Into Focus, Lorraine Williams, David Salt

Cyber Center Publications

92 elements have been identified on earth and 17 of these are known to be essential to all plants. The essential elements required in relatively large amounts (>0.1% of dry mass) are called macronutrients and include C, H, O, N, S, P, Ca, K, Mg. Those required in much smaller amounts (<0.01% of dry mass) are referred to as micronutrients or trace elements and include Ni, Mo, Cu, Zn, Mn, B, Fe, and Cl. Plant growth and development depends on a balanced supply of these essential elements and thus the plant has a range of homeostatic mechanisms operating to ensure that this is maintained. Beneficial elements which promote growth and may be essential to some taxa, include Na, Co, Al, Se and Si. Elements such as the heavy metal Cd and the metalloid As have no demonstrated biological function in plants, but are nevertheless taken up and cause severe toxicity in most plant species. The concept for this special issue is the plant ionome, a word coined to encompass all these elements and allow focussed discussion and investigations on the mechanisms that co-ordinately regulate these elements in response to genetic and environmental factors reviewed in Salt et al., 2008).

Beyond K-Anonymity: A Decision Theoretic Framework For Assessing Privacy Risk, Guy Lebanon, Monica Scannapieco, Mohamed Fouad, Elisa Bertino

Cyber Center Publications

An important issue any organization or individual has to face when managing data containing sensitive information, is the risk that can be incurred when releasing such data. Even though data may be sanitized before being released, it is still possible for an adversary to reconstruct the original data using additional information thus resulting in privacy violations. To date, however, a systematic approach to quantify such risks is not available. In this paper we develop a framework, based on statistical decision theory, that assesses the relationship between the disclosed data and the resulting privacy risk. We model the problem of deciding …

Human Cytomegalovirus Us28: A Functionally Selective Chemokine Binding Receptor, Jennifer Totonchy, Jay A. Nelson, Daniel N. Streblow

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

The Human Cytomegalovirus (HCMV)-encoded chemokine receptor US28 is the most well-characterized of the four chemokine receptor-like molecules found in the HCMV genome. US28 been studied as an important virulence factor for HCMV-mediated vascular disease and, more recently, in models of HCMV-associated malignancy. US28 is a rare multi-chemokine family binding receptor with the ability to bind ligands from two distinct chemokine classes. Ligand binding to US28 activates cell-type and ligand-specific signaling pathways leading to cellular migration, an example receptor functional selectivity. Additionally, US28 has been demonstrated to constitutively activate PLC and NFkB. Understanding the structure/function relationships between US28, its ligands and …

Isoniazid Completion Rates For Latent Tuberculosis Infection Among College Students Managed By A Community Pharmacist, Karl M. Hess, Jeffery A. Goad, Joanne Wu, Kathleen Johnson

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Objective: The authors' objective was to document 9-month and previously recommended 6-month treatment completion rates for latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) in a pharmacist-managed LTBI clinic in a community pharmacy oil a college Campus. and to describe patient characteristics. Participants: Participants were university Students diagnosed with LTBI. Methods: The authors conducted a retrospective review, of pharmacy records from 2000 to 2006. Main outcome measures included 6-month and 9-month LTBI treatment completion rates, total isoniazid (INH) tablets taken. characteristics of completers versus noncompleters. average time to treatment completion, and reported adverse drug events. Results: The 9-month completion rate was 59%, and the …

Health Belief Model Of Breast Cancer Screening For Female College Students, Kirsten M. Frankenfield

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Self-Mutilation : A Growing Concern, Sarah M. Meiners

Graduate Research Papers

According to an article by Nock and Prinstein, "Self-mutilation behavior is a pervasive public health problem occurring at a rate of 40% in the general adult population and 21 % in adult clinical populations. Adolescence is a period of significantly increased risk for self-mutilation behavior, as evidenced by rates of 14%-39% in adolescent community samples" (Nock & Prinstein, 2005, p.140). Raising awareness about the behaviors and emotions involved with individuals who self-mutilate may help counselors and school administrators understand better methods of treatment for adolescents. The following is a review of current research and literature regarding the nature of adolescents …

Macular Pigment And Its Contribution To Spatial Vision, James Loughman, Peter Davison, Grainne Scanlon, Veronica O'Dwyer

Conference Papers

Purpose:The optical properties and anatomic distribution of macular pigment (MP) are such that it may theoretically contribute to visual performance by attenuating the effects of chromatic aberration and light scatter. The Collaborative Optical Macular Pigment Assessment (COMPASS) study is a placebo-controlled, randomized and double-blind clinical trial designed to assess whether MP optical density (MPOD) influences spatial vision by attenuating short wavelength light. Preliminary analysis of baseline findings, prior to supplementation, is presented here. Methods:119 young (mean=29+/-6 years) healthy subjects were recruited. The spatial profile of MPOD was assessed by customized heterochromatic flicker photometry. Visual performance was assessed by psychophysical tests …

Changes In Immunization Practices, Knowledge And Beliefs Of Michigan Obstetrician-Gynecologists Since 2000, Meaghan A. Leddy, Bernard Gonik, Stanley A. Gall, Britta A. Anderson, Jay Schulkin

Michigan Journal of Public Health

No abstract provided.

Kenya's Fertility Transition: Trends, Determinants And Implications For Policy And Programmes, Ian Askew, Alex C. Ezeh, John Bongaarts, John Townsend

Reproductive Health

In Africa, fertility rates in the 1990s declined less rapidly than had been projected, and in a few cases the fertility transition appears to have stalled. This development has serious implications for future population growth because projected population size is sensitive to minor variations in current fertility trends. The 16 countries with three DHS surveys in sub-Saharan Africa can be divided into three subgroups: stalled transitions, insignificant declines, and significant declines. Half of the 16 countries experienced a stall, and an additional two experienced insignificant declines. The Population Council prepared a series of demographic and policy analyses that drew from …

Kwazulu-Natal Department Of Health Policy And Guidelines For Integrated Ante And Postnatal Care At District Hospital Community Health Centre And Clinic Level, Population Council

Reproductive Health

A 2006 baseline survey conducted by CARE Kenya indicated that sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is widespread throughout Kenya’s North Eastern Province. Other findings revealed that high levels of stigma and gender imbalances are associated with sexual violence and female genital mutilation (FGM) and that a coordinated approach to responding to the service needs of survivors is missing. As noted in this report, there is limited awareness of the legal mechanisms available to survivors. The Population Council’s study in Wajir District ascertained the need for and possible components of an integrated and comprehensive services model that could meet the needs …

A Matter Of Life And Death: A Medical Student's Perspective On Organ Procurement, Sue Chang

Quill & Scope

Transplantation surgeries require an intricate dance between logistical, ethical, and medical boundaries. This is the story of one medical student's first-hand experience at an organ procurement surgery in which the realities of how a donated organ becomes "donated" are confronted.

My First Patient - Before I Was A Doctor, Lea Alfi

Quill & Scope

A 58-year-old Caucasian male is admitted for shortness of breath of one week's duration. He has a 40 pack-year smoking history and was diagnosed with COPD one year you manage his care? Though evidence highlights the rising prevalence of such a clinical presentation, this case brings to light the difficulty in treating one of our most common diagnoses.

Alchemical Efficiency, Andrei Kreutzberg

Quill & Scope

A brief poem describing the far reaching impact of body bequeathal.

Sitting Down With Dr. Shinjiro Hirose: The Ins And Outs Of Fetal Surgery, Christine Capone, Sean Kivlehan

Quill & Scope

Few areas of medicine are on the cutting edge more than fetal surgery. Operations on babies still attached to their mothers seems like science fiction. But that is what Dr. Shinjiro Hirose of UCSF does. The editors of Quill & Scope sat down with Dr. Hirose to discuss his unusual specialty. Hirose, a graduate of New York Medical College, talks about what drew him to the field, the logistical difficulties of doing such precise operations and the ethical issues that often arise when considering his surgeries.

The Problems With Physician Profiling: What Have We Learned?, Heidi Charvet

Quill & Scope

Physician profiling has emerged as an effort to satisfy increased demand for information about the cost and quality of health care. Health plans, physicians and consumers all have distinctive purposes and methods for reviewing physician profiles, but they share several concerns about the data itself and the interpretation of this data. These problems have been so severe that physician profiling has not been widely accepted as an appropriate tool for quality improvement and cost control. However, through the use of improved data, more informed interpretation, and involvement of key stakeholders, physician profiling may one day be considered an effective and …

Colors, Mike Platt

Quill & Scope

Colors is a story likely familiar to many medical students; the anxiety, panic and fear associated with our first clinical exposure. It tells the story of a college senior's experience as a volunteer at a Chicago children's hospital, and traces it to a discussion of our sources of motivation for becoming a doctor.

The Reason, Stephanie Lei

Quill & Scope

Despite not having written any poetry since high school, my roommate convinced me to enter a medical student poetry contest with her. What emerged was this largely autobiographical poem which I think NYMC's many out-of-state students can relate to. It also serves as a reminder of the goals that brought us here to NYMC.

The Best Patients In The World: A Commentary On Military Medicine, Joseph D. Schwartz

Quill & Scope

It was a sunny day last August and he had not been in Afghanistan more than a few months when my patient's platoon came under RPG fire from a Taliban group. That same day I was in the middle of an Orthopaedics rotation in New York. After two months of Navy surgical training for me and a painful recovery process in Germany for him, our paths crossed at the National Navy Medical Center in Bethesda, MD. The ensuing interaction inspired this reflection on my time with military medicine thus far, and my career as a Navy physician ahead.

Care For The Uninsured: A Year Of Review For La Casita De La Salud, Jennifer M. Thomas, Gordon M. Burke

Quill & Scope

As the academic year ends, the former directors of La Casita de la Salud share a memorable clinical experience and the impact it has made on the student volunteers. La Casita not only provides health care to the underserved, but it also shows students the impact that they may have in the life of their patients. the clinic has progressed monumentally in the past year after a committee executive board strove to better the clinic's operation. This article highlights the numerous developments as well as some obstacles the clinic will have to face in the near future.

Nursing Staff Compliance With Hand Hygiene Protocol In Nicu In A Regional Perinatal Center, Xiaoping Wu

Quill & Scope

Proper hand hygiene protocols are a way to prevent infections in neonates admitted to the NICU. A total of 771 observations on hand sanitizer use before and after patient contact and 208 observations for level of touch were made. Adherence increased significantly since the introduction of waterless individual bedside hand sanitizers: 73% vs. 80% before and 83% vs. 90% after patient contact. The suboptimal adherence to the hand hygiene protocol could not be fully explained by the emergency nature of patient contact, suggesting that time and convenience are not the main concerns that infection control needs to address. The system …

Bush's Legacy, April Tantillo

Quill & Scope

While former President George W. Bush's historical legacy is still being hotly debated, a clear bright spot is often overlooked. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) paid for antiretroviral medications for 1.4 million patients in Africa and the Caribbean compared to only 50,000 before the program. The program is far from perfect. An important criticism of PEPFAR is that the program is too restrictive. For example, one third of the money for prevention must go to abstinence only sexual education. The harm that is done to women and children by suggesting that they have the autonomy to insist …

Code Red, White And Blue; Doctor, You're Needed On The Hill: Healthy Policy And You Redux, Joseph D. Schwartz

Quill & Scope

As this administration and congress hopefully move efficiently from rhetoric to revamping, we have the duty as stakeholders and consumers of our American health care system to be there. One of our most powerful tools is the grassroots lobby. The government is more receptive than ever and a new commitment to changing our system will be affecting us all. This is a review of what has happened in the AMA's lobbying agenda over the last year and what to expect ahead.

A Genome-Wide Association Study In Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (Copd): Identification Of Two Major Susceptibility Loci, Sreekumar G. Pillai, Dongliang Ge, Guohua Zhu, Xiangyang Kong, Kevin V. Shianna, Anna C. Need, Sheng Feng, Craig P. Hersh, Per Bakke, Amund Gulsvik, Andreas Ruppert, Karin C. Lødrup Carlsen, Allen Roses, Wayne Anderson, Stephen I. Rennard, David A. Lomas, Edwin K. Silverman, David B. Goldstein, Icgn Investigators

Journal Articles: Pulmonary & Critical Care Med

There is considerable variability in the susceptibility of smokers to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The only known genetic risk factor is severe deficiency of alpha(1)-antitrypsin, which is present in 1-2% of individuals with COPD. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in a homogenous case-control cohort from Bergen, Norway (823 COPD cases and 810 smoking controls) and evaluated the top 100 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the family-based International COPD Genetics Network (ICGN; 1891 Caucasian individuals from 606 pedigrees) study. The polymorphisms that showed replication were further evaluated in 389 subjects from the US National Emphysema Treatment Trial …

College Student Risk Behavior: Implications Of Religiosity And Impulsivity, Mary Cazzell

Nursing Dissertations - Archive

College student risk-taking among 18 to 21 years olds includes smoking cigarettes, binge drinking, casual sex with multiple partners, automobile accidents due to risky driving or driving under the influence, and substance use. Among 10 to 24 year olds, 72% of all fatalities result from automobile accidents, unintended injuries, homicide, and suicide. Since not all college students participate in risk behaviors, protective factors such as religiosity may be a protective social or psychological buffer that supports positive relationships and moral order. Impulsivity, an inability to squelch inappropriate thoughts or actions, is associated with the later development (in the mid-twenties) of …

The Mysterious Unfoldome: Structureless, Underappreciated, Yet Vital Part Of Any Given Proteome, Vladimir N. Uversky

Molecular Medicine Faculty Publications

Contrarily to the general believe, many biologically active proteins lack stable tertiary and/or secondary structure under physiological conditions in vitro. These intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) are highly abundant in nature and many of them are associated with various human diseases. The functional repertoire of IDPs complements the functions of ordered proteins. Since IDPs constitute a significant portion of any given proteome, they can be combined in an unfoldome; which is a portion of the proteome including all IDPs (also known as natively unfolded proteins, therefore, unfoldome), and describing their functions, structures, interactions, evolution, and so forth. Amino acid sequence and …

Protein Disorder In The Human Diseasome: Unfoldomics Of Human Genetic Diseases, Uros Midic, Christopher J. Oldfield, A. Keith Dunker, Zoran Obradovic, Vladimir N. Uversky

Molecular Medicine Faculty Publications

Background: Intrinsically disordered proteins lack stable structure under physiological conditions, yet carry out many crucial biological functions, especially functions associated with regulation, recognition, signaling and control. Recently, human genetic diseases and related genes were organized into a bipartite graph (Goh KI, Cusick ME, Valle D, Childs B, Vidal M, et al. (2007) The human disease network. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 104: 8685–8690). This diseasome network revealed several significant features such as the common genetic origin of many diseases.

Methods and findings: We analyzed the abundance of intrinsic disorder in these diseasome network proteins by means of several …

Influence Of Sequence Changes And Environment On Intrinsically Disordered Proteins, Amrita Mohan, Vladimir N. Uversky, Predrag Radivojac

Molecular Medicine Faculty Publications

Many large-scale studies on intrinsically disordered proteins are implicitly based on the structural models deposited in the Protein Data Bank. Yet, the static nature of deposited models supplies little insight into variation of protein structure and function under diverse cellular and environmental conditions. While the computational predictability of disordered regions provides practical evidence that disorder is an intrinsic property of proteins, the robustness of disordered regions to changes in sequence or environmental conditions has not been systematically studied. We analyzed intrinsically disordered regions in the same or similar proteins crystallized independently and studied their sensitivity to changes in protein sequence …

Protein Intrinsic Disorder And Influenza Virulence: The 1918 H1n1 And H5n1 Viruses, Gerard Kian-Meng Goh, A. Keith Dunker, Vladimir N. Uversky

Molecular Medicine Faculty Publications

Background: The 1918 H1N1 virus was a highly virulent strain that killed 20–50 million people. The cause of its virulence remains poorly understood.

Methods: Intrinsic disorder predictor PONDR® VLXT was used to compare various influenza subtypes and strains. Three-dimensional models using data from X-ray crystallographic studies annotated with disorder prediction were used to characterize the proteins.

Results: The protein of interest is hemagglutin (HA), which is a surface glycoprotein that plays a vital role in viral entry. Distinct differences between HA proteins of the virulent and non-virulent strains are seen, especially in the region near residues 68–79 of the HA2. …

Primary Cilia: Highly Sophisticated Biological Sensors, Wissam A. Aboualaiwi, Shao T. Lo, Surya M. Nauli

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Primary cilia, thin hair-like structures protruding from the apical surface of most mammalian cells, have gained the attention of many researchers over the past decade. Primary cilia are microtubule-filled sensory organelles that are enclosed within the ciliary membrane. They originate at the cell surface from the mother centriole that becomes the mature basal body. In this review, we will discuss recent literatures on the roles of cilia as sophisticated sensory organelles. With particular emphasis on vascular endothelia and renal epithelia, the mechanosensory role of cilia in sensing fluid shear stress will be discussed. Also highlighted is the ciliary involvement in …

X4 Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Gp120 Down-Modulates Expression And Immunogenicity Of Codelivered Antigens, Avi-Hai Hovav, Michael Santosuosso, Maytal Bivas-Benita, Andre Plair, Alex Cheng, Mazal Elnekave, Elda Righi, Tao Chen, Satoshi Kashiwagi, Michael W. Panas, Shi-Hua Xiang, Karina Furmanov, Norman L. Letvin, Mark C. Poznansky

Nebraska Center for Virology: Faculty Publications

In order to increase the immune breadth of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) vaccines, strategies such

as immunization with several HIV antigens or centralized immunogens have been examined. HIV-1 gp120

protein is a major immunogen of HIV and has been routinely considered for inclusion in both present and

future AIDS vaccines. However, recent studies proposed that gp120 interferes with the generation of immune

response to codelivered antigens. Here, we investigate whether coimmunization with plasmid-encoded gp120

alters the immune response to other coadministered plasmid encoded antigens such as luciferase or ovalbumin

in a mouse model. We found that the presence of gp120 …