How Do Pharmacists Construct, Facilitate and Consolidate Their Professional Identity?

The pharmacy profession has, and continues to experience change regarding roles and responsibilities. The supply of medicines still remains a central function but patient facing, clinical roles are now becoming more common place where pharmacists use their knowledge to maximise patient use of medicines. This transitional state from supplier of medicine to medicine advisor raises questions over the professional identity of pharmacists. This literature-informed commentary highlights current understanding of how identity is formed and reinforced.We propose the profession needs to be clearer in articulating what pharmacy does and advocate the need for strong branding that the profession, public and other healthcare practitioners understand

ESSAY: Injustice in Black and White: Eliminating Prosecutors’ Peremptory Strikes in Interracial Death Penalty Cases

This essay advocates that prosecutors’ peremptory strikes should be eliminated in interracial capital cases. The application of the death penalty has a race problem, especially for interracial cases. A conviction is far more likely if the defendant is black and the victim is white. This is due to the fact that in interracial cases, prosecutors utilize peremptory strikes to prevent black jurors from serving on cases in which the defendant is black and the victim is white. This essay is the first to argue that such a system stacks the deck against defendants in interracial capital cases in an unconstitutional way under the Supreme Court’s holding in Turner v. Murray. Thus, peremptory strikes should be eliminated to ameliorate the manifestation of racial discrimination

Photodecarboxylative additions to phthalimides and their application in the synthesis of AKS-186 and its analogues

Photochemical methods have been widely neglected by industry for the search of novel pharmaceutical lead compounds. The photodecarboxylative addition of various carboxylates to phthalimides has been developed in our group as a powerful access to hydroxyl- and methylene-isoindolinones. Likewise, the intramolecular version yields the corresponding cyclisation products. In this thesis the intermolecular version, i.e. the photodecarboxylative addition of carboxylates to phthalimides, has been further investigated. Various heteroatom-substituted carboxylates have been studied in order to establish a mechanistic understanding of the photoinduced electron transfer processes involved. N-methylphthalimide was used as a model substrate and was irradiated at λ = 300 nm in aqueous acetone and in the presence of excess amounts of potassium carboxylates, the latter generated from the corresponding carboxylic acid and potassium carbonate. The evolution of carbon dioxide was tested using barium hydroxide solutions and was deemed positive when barium carbonate precipitation was formed. Among the carboxylates used were alkyl-, benzyl- and heteroatom-substituted carboxylates. Alkylated amino acid derived carboxylates solely underwent photoreduction whereas N-acylated amino acid readily furnished the desired addition products. To investigate the possibility of deactivation by certain electron-donors, various phthalimides with potential electron-donor substituents in the N-side chain have been studied. In these cases potassium propionate served as model carboxylate. In an extension of the decarboxylative addition, alkyl benzoylformates were irradiated in the presence of sulphur-containing carboxylates and the corresponding addition products were obtained in moderate to good yields. Due to their less favourable electrochemical properties, these compounds do not undergo photoinduced electron transfer reactions with alkyl-, benzyl- or oxygen-containing carboxylates, respectively. The optimised irradiation conditions were applied to the synthesis of AKS-186 and its derivatives. AKS-186 has demonstrated promising cardiovascular drug activities and became readily accessible from N-(4-acetoxybenzyl)phthalimide using the developed photochemical method as key-step. Depending on the nature of the chosen carboxylate the addition products were obtained in poor to good yield of 10-76%. Subsequent dehydration/deprotection gave the desired target compounds in good to excellent yield of 70-96%

Framing Absence: Visuals of the Wall and the Vanishing Landscapes in Palestine

This dissertation explores peoples relationship to the landscapes of material, abstract, and visual borders in the context of Palestine-Israel. Since 2002, the construction of the Israeli separation Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has significantly transformed the way locals, particularly on the Palestinian side of the Wall see and articulate their relation to the landscape. Already living in a state of military occupation through restriction of movement, limited access to land and urban expansion on occupied territory, the Wall has considerably shifted Palestinians relationships to the landscape. To them the landscape has become a visual field on which power dynamics and political structures are embodied and expressed. Moreover, for many Palestinians the Israeli construction of the Wall is visible evidence of the on-going process of destruction of the Palestinian landscape. But what is the view of Palestinians and Israelis living on the Israeli side of the Wall and those living in Palestine but in close proximity to the Wall? What is their engagement with the Wall? To answer these questions, this dissertation draws on more than 12 months of ethnographic research in Israel and Palestine that involved extended interviews with Palestinian and Israeli photographers and activists in Israel, as well as Palestinians whose lives were affected by the Walls construction in proximity to their homes and for whom the Wall route brought them into direct confrontation with the Israeli military. This research also examined representations of the Wall in different visual projects. From a theoretical perspective, this dissertation asks how do visual fields facilitate the structuring of national imaginaries and what sights and future visions are offered by different readings of the landscape? To answer these questions, I employ anthropological theories of violence, borders and the visual, and propose the concept of landscapocide, a violent visual process through which landscapes are framed, and made to be seen and unseen. Through landscapocide and other anthropologically grounded theories and concepts I offer a new reading of the ways in which people in bordered contexts give meaning to what they see

Recent advances in the use of metformin: Can treating diabetes prevent breast cancer?

© 2015 Diana Hatoum and Eileen M. McGowan. There is substantial epidemiological evidence pointing to an increased incidence of breast cancer and morbidity in obese, prediabetic, and diabetic patients. In vitro studies strongly support metformin, a diabetic medication, in breast cancer therapy. Although metformin has been heralded as an exciting new breast cancer treatment, the principal consideration is whether metformin can be used as a generic treatment for all breast cancer types. Importantly, will metformin be useful as an inexpensive therapy for patients with comorbidity of diabetes and breast cancer? In general, meta-analyses of clinical trial data from retrospective studies in which metformin treatment has been used for patients with diabetes and breast cancer have a positive trend; nevertheless, the supporting clinical data outcomes remain inconclusive. The heterogeneity of breast cancer, confounded by comorbidity of disease in the elderly population, makes it difficult to determine the actual benefits of metformin therapy. Despite the questionable evidence available from observational clinical studies and meta-analyses, randomized phases I-III clinical trials are ongoing to test the efficacy of metformin for breast cancer. This special issue review will focus on recent research, highlighting in vitro research and retrospective observational clinical studies and current clinical trials on metformin action in breast cancer

Advantages of Percent Weight Loss as a Method of Reporting Weight Loss after Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass

Objective: Although Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) is a generally effective treatment for severe obesity, weight loss (WL) after this operation is highly variable. Accurate predictors of outcome would thus be useful in identifying those patients who would most benefit from this invasive therapy. WL has been characterized using several different metrics, including the number of BMI units lost (ΔBMI), percent baseline WL (%WL), and percent excess body WL (%EBWL). To identify clinically relevant predictors most sensitively it is necessary to avoid confounding by other factors, including preoperative BMI (pBMI), the strongest known predictor of RYGB-induced WL. Design and Methods To determine the WL measure least associated with pBMI, we analyzed outcomes of 846 patients undergoing RYGB. Results: Patients in this cohort had an average pBMI of 50.0 kg/m2. At weight nadir, they lost an average 19.4 kg/m2, 38.7% WL, and 81.2% EBWL. pBMI was strongly and positively associated with ΔBMI at both one year (r=0.56, p=4.7×10−51) and nadir (r=0.58, p=2.8×10−77) and strongly but negatively associated with %EBWL at one year (r=−0.52, p=3.8×10−44) and nadir (r=−0.45, p=7.2×10−43). In contrast, pBMI was not significantly associated with %WL at one year (r=0.04, p=0.33), and only weakly associated at nadir (r=0.13, p=0.0002). Conclusions: Of the metrics examined, %WL is the parameter describing WL after RYGB least influenced by pBMI. It thus improves comparison of WL outcomes across studies of patients undergoing surgery and facilitates the most sensitive identification of novel predictors of surgery-induced WL. We therefore recommend that %WL be adopted more broadly in reporting weight loss after RYGB

Blind Image Watermarking using Normalized STDM robust against Fixed Gain Attack

International audienceSpread Transform Dither Modulation (STDM), as an extension of Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) is a blind watermarking scheme that achieves high robustness against random noise and re-quantization attacks, with a limitation against the Fixed Gain Attack (FGA). In this paper, we improve the STDM watermarking scheme by making the quantization step size dependent on the watermarked content to resist the FGA attack. Simulations on real images show that our approach achieves strong robustness against the FGA attack, the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) attack, and the JPEG compression attack while preserving a higher level of transparency

Good guy or bad guy? The duality of wild-type p53 in hormone-dependent breast cancer origin, treatment, and recurrence

© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. “Lactation is at one point perilously near becoming a cancerous process if it is at all arrested”, Beatson, 1896. Most breast cancers arise from the milk-producing cells that are characterized by aberrant cellular, molecular, and epigenetic translation. By understanding the underlying molecular disruptions leading to the origin of cancer, we might be able to design novel strategies for more efficacious treatments or, ambitiously, divert the cancerous process. It is an established reality that full-term pregnancy in a young woman provides a lifetime reduction in breast cancer risk, whereas delay in full-term pregnancy increases short-term breast cancer risk and the probability of latent breast cancer development. Hormonal activation of the p53 protein (encode by the TP53 gene) in the mammary gland at a critical time in pregnancy has been identified as one of the most important determinants of whether the mammary gland develops latent breast cancer. This review discusses what is known about the protective influence of female hormones in young parous women, with a specific focus on the opportune role of wild-type p53 reprogramming in mammary cell differentiation. The importance of p53 as a protector or perpetrator in hormone-dependent breast cancer, resistance to treatment, and recurrence is also explored