Reflective Visual Journaling During Art Therapy and Counseling Internships

Visual journaling is thought to promote students\u27 critical reflection upon their previous learning, their current experiences, and their ongoing professional growth. Research supports the value of written journals as educational tools that encourage reflection, but the potential for visual journaling to facilitate reflection has not been explored through systematic inquiry until now. This qualitative multiple case study explored four art therapy students\u27 and four counseling students\u27 responses to visual journaling during their internships. They maintained their journals throughout one 15-week academic semester, and were interviewed four times over the course of the study. Data consisted of transcribed interviews and photographs of participants\u27 journal imagery. Data analysis yielded three overarching patterns: The Internship Experience Overall, The Visual Journal Experience, and Journaling Process. The first pattern refers to the participants\u27 affective reaction to the challenges of the internship, the foci of their internship work, and the ways they responded to the internship other than through visual journaling. The second pattern refers to the participants\u27 use of the visual journal in response to the internship experience. The third pattern encompasses the participants\u27 approaches to the process of visual journaling, such as media used, and the participants\u27 evaluation of their experience with the visual journal. The participants\u27 experiences in their internships closely paralleled the characteristics and phases of professional growth described by Ronnestad and Skovholt (2003) and Skovholt and Ronnestad (2003). This sequence has not been documented heretofore in the art therapy literature. The visual journal facilitated the process of reflection. The participants gained insights into aspects of their experience through the process of making art, combining it with written text, and reflecting upon their journal entries. Additionally, they used their visual journals for case conceptualization, addressing countertransference, and stress reduction. Whereas all of the participants deemed the visual journal valuable, counseling interns had initial difficulty with visual thinking. The participants considered the combination of artmaking and responsive writing to be a particularly effective aspect of their experience

Spinal cord and brain concentrations of riluzole after oral and intrathecal administration: A potential new treatment route for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Riluzole is the only treatment known to improve survival in patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). However, oral riluzole efficacy is modest at best, further it is known to have large inter-individual variability of serum concentration and clearance, is formulated as an oral drug in a patient population plagued with dysphagia, and has known systemic side-effects like asthenia (limiting patient compliance) and elevated liver enzymes. In this context, we postulated that continuous intrathecal (IT) infusion of low doses of riluzole could provide consistent elevations of the drug spinal cord (SC) concentrations at or above those achieved with oral dosing, without increasing the risk for adverse events associated with systemic drug exposure or off-target side effects in the brain. We developed a formulation of riluzole for IT delivery and conducted our studies in purpose-bred hound dogs. Our non-GLP studies revealed that IT infusion alone was able to increase SC concentrations above those provided by oral administration, without increasing plasma concentrations. We then conducted two GLP studies that combined IT infusion with oral administration at human equivalent dose, to evaluate SC and brain concentrations of riluzole along with assessments of safety and tolerability. In the 6-week study, the highest IT dose (0.2 mg/hr) was well tolerated by the animals and increased SC concentrations above those achieved with oral riluzole alone, without increasing brain concentrations. In the 6-month study, the highest dose tested (0.4 mg/hr) was not tolerated and yielded SC significantly above those achieved in all previous studies. Our data show the feasibility and safety profile of continuous IT riluzole delivery to the spinal cord, without concurrent elevated liver enzymes, and minimal brain concentrations creating another potential therapeutic route of delivery to be used in isolation or in combination with other therapeutics.

Development of Electrochemiluminescent Serology Assays to Measure the Humoral Response to Antigens of Respiratory Syncytial Virus

Sensitive and precise serology assays are needed to measure the humoral response to antigens of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) following natural infection or vaccination. We developed and evaluated a collection of electrochemiluminescent (ECL) serology assays using four RSV antigens (F, N, Ga and Gb). To assess the merits of ECL technology, the four ECL serology assays were evaluated using a well-characterized gold standard panel of acute and convalescent serum samples from fifty-nine RSV-positive and thirty RSV-negative elderly subjects (≥65 years old). The combined results from the four ECL assays demonstrated good concordance to the gold standard diagnosis, reaching 95% diagnostic sensitivity and 100% diagnostic specificity. Additionally, a combination of ECL assays provided higher diagnostic sensitivity than a commercially available diagnostic ELISA or cell-based microneutralization assay. In summary, these data demonstrate the advantages of using ECL-based serology assays and highlight their use as a sensitive diagnostic approach to detect recent RSV infection in an elderly population