Promoting Professional Development for Physical Therapists in Early Intervention

Early intervention (EI) service providers are expected to form cohesive teams to build the capacity of a family to promote their child’s development. Given the differences in personnel preparation across disciplines of service providers, the Early Childhood Personnel Center (ECPC) is creating integrated and comprehensive professional development models for those who provide services for young children with disabilities and their families. To help guide this process it is important to identify inter-disciplinary competencies as well as the unique knowledge and skills that each discipline contributes to the development and implementation of effective intervention plans. This paper describes personnel preparation of pediatric physical therapists from entry-level to ongoing professional development. Topics include licensure requirements, specialist certification, and EI competencies. This paper explains the unique knowledge and skills that pediatric physical therapists offer to the team as movement specialists. It also highlights particular challenges to professional development faced by novice and experienced physical therapists who work in natural environments. Finally, recommendations for personnel development including structured mentorship, interdisciplinary and team based learning, and strategies for knowledge translation are suggested

Discovery of Stable and Selective Antibody Mimetics from Combinatorial Libraries of Polyvalent, Loop-Functionalized Peptoid Nanosheets.

The ability of antibodies to bind a wide variety of analytes with high specificity and high affinity makes them ideal candidates for therapeutic and diagnostic applications. However, the poor stability and high production cost of antibodies have prompted exploration of a variety of synthetic materials capable of specific molecular recognition. Unfortunately, it remains a fundamental challenge to create a chemically diverse population of protein-like, folded synthetic nanostructures with defined molecular conformations in water. Here we report the synthesis and screening of combinatorial libraries of sequence-defined peptoid polymers engineered to fold into ordered, supramolecular nanosheets displaying a high spatial density of diverse, conformationally constrained peptoid loops on their surface. These polyvalent, loop-functionalized nanosheets were screened using a homogeneous Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) assay for binding to a variety of protein targets. Peptoid sequences were identified that bound to the heptameric protein, anthrax protective antigen, with high avidity and selectivity. These nanosheets were shown to be resistant to proteolytic degradation, and the binding was shown to be dependent on the loop display density. This work demonstrates that key aspects of antibody structure and function-the creation of multivalent, combinatorial chemical diversity within a well-defined folded structure-can be realized with completely synthetic materials. This approach enables the rapid discovery of biomimetic affinity reagents that combine the durability of synthetic materials with the specificity of biomolecular materials

How early can myocardial iron overload occur in Beta thalassemia major?

BACKGROUND: Myocardial siderosis is the most common cause of death in patients with beta thalassemia major(TM). This study aimed at investigating the occurrence, prevalence and severity of cardiac iron overload in a young Chinese population with beta TM. METHODS AND RESULTS: We analyzed T2* cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) and serum ferritin (SF) in 201 beta TM patients. The median age was 9 years old. Patients received an average of 13 units of blood per year. The median SF level was 4536 ng/ml and 165 patients (82.1%) had SF>2500 ng/ml. Myocardial iron overload was detected in 68 patients (33.8%) and severe myocardial iron overload was detected in 26 patients (12.6%). Twenty-two patients ≤10 years old had myocardial iron overload, three of whom were only 6 years old. No myocardial iron overload was detected under the age of 6 years. Median LVEF was 64% (measured by CMR in 175 patients). Five of 6 patients with a LVEF<56% and 8 of 10 patients with cardiac disease had myocardial iron overload. CONCLUSIONS: The TM patients under follow-up at this regional centre in China patients are younger than other reported cohorts, more poorly-chelated, and have a high burden of iron overload. Myocardial siderosis occurred in patients younger than previously reported, and was strongly associated with impaired LVEF and cardiac disease. For such poorly-chelated TM patients, our data shows that the first assessment of cardiac T2* should be performed as early as 6 years old

An Analysis of Private School Closings

We add to the small literature on private school supply by exploring exits of K-12 private schools. We find that the closure of private schools is not an infrequent event, and use national survey data from the National Center for Education Statistics to study closures of private schools. We assume that the probability of an exit is a function of excess supply of private schools over the demand, as well as the school's characteristics such as age, size, and religious affiliation. Our empirical results generally support the implications of the model. Working Paper 07-0

The Association between Diabetes, Insulin Use, and Colorectal Cancer among Whites and African Americans

Colorectal cancer and diabetes are common diseases that share many risk factors. It has been hypothesized that diabetes is a risk factor for colorectal cancer. We used two large population-based case-control studies from North Carolina to determine whether diabetes and/or insulin therapy were associated with colon cancer and/or rectal cancer (defined as cancer of the sigmoid colon, rectosigmoid, or rectum) and whether this association differed by race. Cases and matched controls from the North Carolina Colon Cancer Studies I and II were interviewed about demographics, dietary factors, diagnosis of diabetes, and use of medications to treat diabetes. Odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals were estimated using unconditional logistic regression. Colon and rectal cancer cases reported a higher prevalence of diabetes than their respective control groups. Compared to Whites without diabetes, Whites with diabetes had an adjusted odds ratio of 1.40 (95%CI 0.93, 2.12) for colon cancer and 1.38 (95%CI 1.00, 1.90) for rectal cancer. Diabetes was not associated with colon or rectal cancer among African Americans [OR 1.17 (95%CI 0.81, 1.70) and OR 0.75 (95%CI 0.44, 1.28), respectively]. Among Whites with diabetes, insulin use was positively associated with rectal cancer. The same association was not seen for African American diabetics using insulin however the number of African Americans using insulin was small. In sum, diabetes was positively associated with rectal cancer and approached a positive association with colon cancer among Whites. No association was present among African Americans. Insulin use was also positively associated with rectal cancer among Whites

Experimental Probes of the Randall-Sundrum Infinite Extra Dimension

The phenomenological possibilities of the Randall-Sundrum non-compact extra dimension scenario with the AdS horizon increased to approximately a millimeter length, corresponding to an effective brane tension of TeV^4, are investigated. The corrections to the Newtonian potential are found to be the only observationally accessible probe of this scenario, as previously suggested in the literature. In particular, the presence of the continuum of KK modes does not lead to any observable collider signatures. The extent to which experimental tests of Newtonian gravity can distinguish this scenario from the scenario of Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos, and Dvali with one and two millimeter size extra dimensions is explicitly demonstrated.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figures, references adde