To determine the effects of carprofen and etodolac on renal function in euvolemic dogs and dogs with extracellular fluid volume depletion induced via administration of furosemide.
12 female Beagles.
...Dogs received a placebo, furosemide, carprofen, etodolac, furosemide and carprofen, and furosemide and etodolac. The order in which dogs received treatments was determined via a randomization procedure. Values of urine specific gravity, various plasma biochemical variables, glomerular filtration rate (GFR urinary clearance of creatinine), and renal plasma flow (urinary clearance of para-aminohippuric acid) were determined before and after 8 days of drug administration. A washout time of approximately 12 days was allowed between treatment periods.
Administration of furosemide, furosemide and carprofen, and furosemide and etodolac caused changes in urine specific gravity and values of plasma biochemical variables. Administration of carprofen or etodolac alone did not have a significant effect on renal plasma flow or GFR. Concurrent administration of furosemide and carprofen or furosemide and etodolac caused a significant decrease in GFR. After 12-day washout periods, mean values of GFR were similar to values before drug administration for all treatments.
Results indicated GFR decreased after 8 days of concurrent administration of furosemide and carprofen or furosemide and etodolac to dogs. Administration of preferential cyclooxygenase-2 inhibitors to dogs with extracellular fluid volume depletion or to dogs treated with diuretics may transiently impair renal function.
Preventable harms from medications are significant threats to patient safety in community settings, especially among ambulatory older adults on multiple prescription medications. Patients may partner ...with primary care professionals by taking on active roles in decisions, learning the basics of medication self-management, and working with community resources.
This study aims to assess the impact of a set of patient partnership tools that redesign primary care encounters to encourage and empower patients to make more effective use of those encounters to improve medication safety.
The study is a nonrandomized, cross-sectional stepped wedge cluster-controlled trial with 1 private family medicine clinic and 2 public safety-net primary care clinics each composing their own cluster. There are 2 intervention sequences with 1 cluster per sequence and 1 control sequence with 1 cluster. Cross-sectional surveys will be taken immediately at the conclusion of visits to the clinics during 6 time periods of 6 weeks each, with a transition period of no data collection during intervention implementation. The number of visits to be surveyed will vary by period and cluster. We plan to recruit patients and professionals for surveys during 405 visits. In the experimental periods, visits will be conducted with two partnership tools and associated clinic process changes: (1) a 1-page visit preparation guide given to relevant patients by clinic staff before seeing the provider, with the intention to improve communication and shared decision-making, and (2) a library of short educational videos that clinic staff encourage patients to watch on medication safety. In the control periods, visits will be conducted with usual care. The primary outcome will be patients' self-efficacy in medication use. The secondary outcomes are medication-related issues such as duplicate therapies identified by primary care providers and assessment of collaborative work during visits.
The study was funded in September 2019. Data collection started in April 2023 and ended in December 2023. Data was collected for 405 primary care encounters during that period. As of February 15, 2024, initial descriptive statistics were calculated. Full data analysis is expected to be completed and published in the summer of 2024.
This study will assess the impact of patient partnership tools and associated process changes in primary care on medication use self-efficacy and medication-related issues. The study is powered to identify types of patients who may benefit most from patient engagement tools in primary care visits.
ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05880368; https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05880368.
DERR1-10.2196/57878.
Complex diseases such as lung cancer are most commonly the result of environmental variables acting on an individual’s genetic background. Those environmental variables may be found in the external ...environment, such as exposures to carcinogenic materials at work or the result of personal behaviors such as smoking or nutrition. The interaction between genetics, personal and external environment constitute the triangle of human ecology. In this work, bladder and lung cancer are examined using genetic data as well as multiple types of environmental data within two different New Hampshire (NH) sample populations. Initially, a review of spatial methods that may be employed in investigations of gene-environment interaction is presented including the call for a new paradigm of study called “ecogeographic genetic epidemiology”. Subsequently, an analysis of genetic substructure in NH showing six distinct subpopulations also shows that eastern European populations are still genetically discernible within this ancestrally mixed Caucasian population. These results are further explored with an association analysis of ancestry and genetic markers in relation to bladder cancer. Environmental variables are then explored spatially using lung cancer data from Vermont and New Hampshire, and finally combined with air pollution maps to investigate spatial variation in models of gene-environment interaction. Conclusions suggest that the ecogeographic genetic epidemiology approach can give more in-depth perspectives into complex disease etiology than traditional approaches.
The advent of sociolinguistics has engendered a change in the
general attitude towards linguistic evolution. Once seen as
evidence of the erosion of a language, linguistic variation is now
understood ...to be essential to the survival of a language. Those
languages which can adapt to a wide range of ever-changing social
contexts are best suited to thrive in today's technologically based
societies. In other words, it is not historical "purity" but
rather sociolinguistic diversity which best predicts a idiom's
chances for survival.
It is these social criteria that we used in our investigation
into the state of the French language in Quebec. Our aim was to
challenge the long standing belief that since the British Conquest
of 1760, the sociolinguistic climate of North America is such that
the variety of French spoken in Quebec is merely a "popular"
version of European French that has as
a result of years of
isolation from France evolved
into an independent and
impoverished language.
After examining, in each of the preliminary chapters of the
present study, two sociolinguistic issues that have greatly
affected linguistic evolution in Quebec - namely the evolution of
the linguistic consciousness of Quebecers and the evolution of the
concept of "standard language" - we hypothesised that because
today's generation of Quebecers tend to have a more acute
linguistic consciousness than did their predecessors, they are
better prepared to defend their language by extending its uses and
thus ensuring that Canadian French continues to meet the
sociolinguistic demands of modern society.
In the third chapter, we attempted to gather empirical
linguistic data to support this hypothesis. Because we were
endeavouring to determine the state of Quebec French, that is,
whether or not the variety of French spoken by Quebecers is
sociolinguistically divers enough to survive in modern society, we
chose to examine speech registers as they are represented in two
modern French dictionaries published in 1988 - one European, the
Petit Robert (henceforth the PR); and one French-Canadian, the
Dictionnaire du français plus (henceforth the Plus). After
analyzing the data we reached three principle conclusions.
Firstly, since, as a whole, the four "familiar" speech registers
that we studied, namely "familier", "populaire", "vulgaire" and
"argotique", constitute only 4% of the total nomenclature of the
Plus, it is unjustified to say that "Quebec French" is synonymous
with familiar speech. Secondly, the fact that approximately 70% of
the French-Canadian words in each of the four registers can also be
found in France, proves that the language spoken in Quebec is a
dialect of French and not an autonomous language. Finally, in each
of the four registers studied, there were found to exist words
which are classified in a "higher" speech register in France than
in Quebec. From this we concluded that it is Quebecers, and not
the French who are the true linguistic "purists".
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1992.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-199).
by Kelly Dawn Sloan.
Ph.D.
Abstract
Background
High-level lower extremity amputation (HLLEA) has significant impact on an individual's ability to ambulate and maintain cardiovascular fitness for extended periods of time.
...Objective
The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether body weight support (BWS) would improve energy efficiency in an individual with HLLEA to achieve appropriate target cardiovascular intensity for aerobic training.
Design
This was an exploratory single-subject study.
Methods
The participant was a 45-year-old woman, 4.5 years after left hip disarticulation secondary to necrotizing fasciitis with resultant organ failure and cardiomyopathy. She was wearing a well-fitted prosthesis and had a goal of ambulating in the community with less fatigue. Vital signs and expiratory gases were recorded, and oxygen uptake efficiency slope was calculated during treadmill walking at 0%, 20%, and 40% unweighting. An age-matched control completed 0% unweighting baseline testing.
Results
Under all conditions of treadmill walking, the participant's heart rate, blood pressure, and rate of perceived exertion consistently increased as speed and time increased. The participant's oxygen uptake efficiency slope was most efficient at 20% unweighting, and the economy of movement improved as the percentage of BWS increased, bringing values closer to the age-matched control. The participant reported only minimal pain immediately following 20% unweighting.
Limitations
The primary limitation of this study is generalizability of findings because of minimal information for comparing the effects of BWS on aerobic capacity in individuals with HLLEA. Additionally, the percentages of unweighting using BWS were extrapolated based on corollary preexisting research; thus, there were no set parameters defined for this specific population.
Conclusions
BWS allowed the participant to work more efficiently, which suggests that if used during an intervention, BWS might enable individuals with HLLEA to achieve recommended levels of training for aerobic conditioning. In future studies, it is recommended that 20% BWS be used at a speed that results in moderate-intensity exercise for individuals with HLLEA as determined by 50% to 70% of maximum heart rate for 20 to 30 minutes.
Abstract
Far-ultraviolet (FUV; ∼1200–2000 Å) spectra are fundamental to our understanding of star-forming galaxies, providing a unique window on massive stellar populations, chemical evolution, ...feedback processes, and reionization. The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope will soon usher in a new era, pushing the UV spectroscopic frontier to higher redshifts than ever before; however, its success hinges on a comprehensive understanding of the massive star populations and gas conditions that power the observed UV spectral features. This requires a level of detail that is only possible with a combination of ample wavelength coverage, signal-to-noise, spectral-resolution, and sample diversity that has not yet been achieved by any FUV spectral database. We present the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph Legacy Spectroscopic Survey (CLASSY) treasury and its first high-level science product, the CLASSY atlas. CLASSY builds on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) archive to construct the first high-quality (S/N
1500 Å
≳ 5/resel), high-resolution (
R
∼ 15,000) FUV spectral database of 45 nearby (0.002 <
z
< 0.182) star-forming galaxies. The CLASSY atlas, available to the public via the CLASSY website, is the result of optimally extracting and coadding 170 archival+new spectra from 312 orbits of HST observations. The CLASSY sample covers a broad range of properties including stellar mass (6.2 < log
M
⋆
(
M
⊙
) < 10.1), star formation rate (−2.0 < log SFR (
M
⊙
yr
−1
) < +1.6), direct gas-phase metallicity (7.0 < 12+log(O/H) < 8.8), ionization (0.5 < O
32
< 38.0), reddening (0.02 <
E
(
B
−
V
) < 0.67), and nebular density (10 <
n
e
(cm
−3
) < 1120). CLASSY is biased to UV-bright star-forming galaxies, resulting in a sample that is consistent with the
z
∼ 0 mass–metallicity relationship, but is offset to higher star formation rates by roughly 2 dex, similar to
z
≳ 2 galaxies. This unique set of properties makes the CLASSY atlas the benchmark training set for star-forming galaxies across cosmic time.
Among individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS), mental health comorbidities play a significant role in contributing to secondary disability and detracting from quality of life. This review examines ...current evidence surrounding three mental health issues of particular relevance to MS: depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. We review what is known of the prevalence, correlates, screening mechanisms, and current treatment of each issue and provide recommendations for future areas of research.
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