Adherence to cardiac rehabilitation guidelines: a survey of rehabilitation programmes in the United Kingdom

Two key recommendations of recent guidelines are that cardiac rehabilitation requires the skills of a range of professionals and that the patient should receive a menu based programme after an individual assess­ ment of needs. A previous survey of 25 cardiac rehabilitation programmes found little congruence with these guidelines and noted that physicians were particularly unlikely to be involved. We extended this inquiry to include all of the discoverable rehabilitation programmes in the United Kingdom

Testing in Mice the Hypothesis That Melanin Is Protective in Malaria Infections

Malaria has had the largest impact of any infectious disease on shaping the human genome, exerting enormous selective pressure on genes that improve survival in severe malaria infections. Modern humans originated in Africa and lost skin melanization as they migrated to temperate regions of the globe. Although it is well documented that loss of melanization improved cutaneous Vitamin D synthesis, melanin plays an evolutionary ancient role in insect immunity to malaria and in some instances melanin has been implicated to play an immunoregulatory role in vertebrates. Thus, we tested the hypothesis that melanization may be protective in malaria infections using mouse models. Congenic C57BL/6 mice that differed only in the gene encoding tyrosinase, a key enzyme in the synthesis of melanin, showed no difference in the clinical course of infection by Plasmodium yoelii 17XL, that causes severe anemia, Plasmodium berghei ANKA, that causes severe cerebral malaria or Plasmodium chabaudi AS that causes uncomplicated chronic disease. Moreover, neither genetic deficiencies in vitamin D synthesis nor vitamin D supplementation had an effect on survival in cerebral malaria. Taken together, these results indicate that neither melanin nor vitamin D production improve survival in severe malaria