Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation: Attitudes of Matriculating First-Year Pharmacy Students Toward a Mandatory, Random Drug-Screening Program.

Attitudes of matriculating first-year pharmacy students toward a mandatory, random drug-screening program.

Filed under: Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation

Am J Pharm Educ. 2012 Nov 12; 76(9): 171
Oliver M, Cates ME, Hogue MD, Alverson SP, Woolley TW

Objective. To determine the attitudes of incoming pharmacy students toward a mandatory, random urine drug-screening program.Methods. This was an anonymous, voluntary survey of students at the McWhorter School of Pharmacy (MSOP) using an instrument composed of 40 items. The instrument was administered during orientation week prior to the session during which the policies and procedures of MSOP’s drug-screening program were to be discussed.Results. The survey instrument was completed by all 129 (100%) students in the class. Two-thirds of the students were aware of MSOP’s drug-screening program prior to applying, but only a few felt uneasy about applying to the school because of the program. The greatest concerns expressed by the students included what would happen if a student unintentionally missed a drug screen or was busy with other matters when called for screening, how much time a drug-screening would take, and the possibility of false-positive drug screen results. The vast majority of students agreed with statements regarding the potential benefits of drug testing. Students who consumed alcohol in a typical week and those with current or past use of an illegal substance held less favorable attitudes toward MSOP’s mandatory drug-screening program compared with students who did not share those characteristics.Conclusion. Although there were definite concerns expressed regarding pragmatic issues surrounding drug screening, the first-year pharmacy students held generally favorable opinions about the school’s mandatory drug-screening program.
HubMed – drug

Quantitative Analysis of Locomotive Behavior of Human Sperm Head and Tail.

Filed under: Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation

IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2012 Nov 15;
Liu J, Leung C, Lu Z, Sun Y

Sperm selection plays a significant role in in vitro fertilization (IVF). Approaches for assessing sperm quality include non-invasive techniques based on sperm morphology and motility as well as invasive techniques for checking DNA integrity. In 2006, a new device using hyaluronic acid (HA) coated dish for sperm selection was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and entered IVF clinics. In this technique, only sperms with DNA integrity bind to the HA droplet, after which these bound sperm stop revealing head motion and their tail movement becomes more vigorous. However, selecting a single sperm cell from among HA-bound sperms is ad hoc in IVF clinics. Different from existing sperm tracking algorithms that are largely limited to tracking sperm head only and are only able to track one sperm at a time, this paper presents a multi-sperm tracking algorithm that tracks both sperm heads and low-contrast sperm tails. The tracking results confirm a significant correlation between sperm head velocity and tail beating amplitude; demonstrate that sperms bound to HA generally have a higher velocity (before binding) than those sperms that are not able to bind to HA microdots; and quantitatively reveal that HA-bound sperms tail beating amplitudes are different among HA-bound sperms.
HubMed – drug

ViralZone: recent updates to the virus knowledge resource.

Filed under: Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation

Nucleic Acids Res. 2012 Nov 28;
Masson P, Hulo C, De Castro E, Bitter H, Gruenbaum L, Essioux L, Bougueleret L, Xenarios I, Le Mercier P

ViralZone (http://viralzone.expasy.org) is a knowledge repository that allows users to learn about viruses including their virion structure, replication cycle and host-virus interactions. The information is divided into viral fact sheets that describe virion shape, molecular biology and epidemiology for each viral genus, with links to the corresponding annotated proteomes of UniProtKB. Each viral genus page contains detailed illustrations, text and PubMed references. This new update provides a linked view of viral molecular biology through 133 new viral ontology pages that describe common steps of viral replication cycles shared by several viral genera. This viral cell-cycle ontology is also represented in UniProtKB in the form of annotated keywords. In this way, users can navigate from the description of a replication-cycle event, to the viral genus concerned, and the associated UniProtKB protein records.
HubMed – drug

Assessing the Effects of Pharmacological Agents on Respiratory Dynamics Using Time-Series Modeling.

Filed under: Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation

IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2012 Oct 25;
Wong K, Gong J, Cotten J, Solt K, Brown E

Developing quantitative descriptions of how stimulant and depressant drugs affect the respiratory system is an important focus in medical research. Respiratory variables respiratory rate, tidal volume and end tidal carbon dioxide have prominent temporal dynamics that make it inappropriate to use standard hypothesis-testing methods that assume independent observations to assess the effects of these pharmacological agents. We present a polynomial signal plus autoregressive noise model for analysis of continuously recorded respiratory variables. We use a cyclic descent algorithm to maximize the conditional log likelihood of the parameters and the corrected Akaikes Information Criterion to choose simultaneously the orders of the polynomial and the autoregressive models. In an analysis of respiratory rates recorded from anesthetized rats before and after administration of the respiratory stimulant methylphenidate we use the model to construct within-animal z-tests of the drug effect that take account of the time-varying nature of the mean respiratory and the serial dependence in rate measurements. We correct for the effect of model lack-of-fit on our inferences by also computing bootstrap confidence intervals for the average difference in respiratory rate pre- and post-methylphenidate treatment. Our time-series modeling quantifies within each animal the substantial increase in mean respiratory rate and respiratory dynamics following methylphenidate administration. This paradigm can be readily adapted to analyze the dynamics of other respiratory variables before and after pharmacologic treatments.
HubMed – drug

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