Ethical Considerations About Spirituality in Social Work: Insights From a National Qualitative Survey

Copyright 2004 Alliance for Children and FamiliesA mixed methods national survey of 2,069 National Association of Social Workers members examined ethical concerns regarding religious and nonreligious spiritual issues in clinical practice settings. This qualitative study focuses on responses to open-ended survey questions and relates them to quantitative findings. Practitioners' insights provide a basis to extend ethical guidelines in practice and education. The findings indicate that most respondents deal with spirituality in practice, and many use general ethical principles and situational considerations. However, they likely lack guidelines for systematic ethical decision making about the use of spiritually oriented activities in practice. The authors suggest ways that social work educators and supervisors should provide ethical guidelines and case examples for spiritually oriented activities in both educational and direct practice contexts

A type of familial cleft of the soft palate maps to 2p24.2–p24.1 or 2p21–p12

Cleft of the soft palate (CSP) and the hard palate are subtypes of cleft palate. Patients with either condition often have difficulty with speech and swallowing. Nonsyndromic, cleft palate isolated has been reported to be associated with several genes, but to our knowledge, there have been no detailed genetic investigations of CSP. We performed a genome-wide linkage analysis using a single-nucleotide polymorphism-based microarray platform and successively using microsatellite markers in a family in which six members, across three successive generations, had CSP. A maximum LOD score of 2.408 was obtained at 2p24.2-24.1 and 2p21-p12, assuming autosomal dominant inheritance. Our results suggest that either of these regions is responsible for this type of CSP

A Genome-wide Linkage Analysis and Mutation Analysis of Hereditary Congenital Blepharoptosis in a Japanese Family

Hereditary congenital ptosis (PTOS) is defined as drooping of the upper eyelid without any other accompanying symptoms and distinguished from syndromic blepharoptosis.Two previous linkage analyses assigned a PTOS locus (PTOS1) to 1p32-p34.1 and another (PTOS2) to Xq24-q27.1. In addition, in a sporadic case with a balanced chromosomal translocation t(1;8)(p34.3;q21.12), the ZFHX4 (zinc finger homeodomain 4) gene was found to be disrupted at the 8q21.12 breakpoint, but there was no gene at the 1p34.3 breakpoint, suggesting the existence of the third PTOS locus (PTOS1) at 8q21.12. We carried out a genome-wide linkage analysis in a Japanese PTOS family and calculated two-point and multipoint LOD scores with reduced penetrance. Haplotype analysis gave three candidate disease-responsible regions, i.e., 8q21.11-q22.1, 12q24.32-q24.33 and 14q21.1-q23.2. Although the family size is too small to define one of them, 8q21.11-q22.1 is a likely candidate region, because it contains the previously reported translocation breakpoint above. We thus performed mutation, Southern-blot and methylation analyses of ZFHX4, but could not find any disease specific change in the family. Nevertheless, our data may support the localization of PTOS1.長崎大学学位論文 学位記番号:博（医歯薬）甲第153号 博士（医学）学位授与年月日:平成20年3月19