Biomedical subjects
M Brackley
Publications and source records attributed to M Brackley.
Project Hope: changing care delivery for the substance abuse patient.
Project Hope is a program designed to assist healthcare providers in the assessment, care, referral, and follow-up of the hospitalized substance abuse patient. First implemented in 1990 at what is now called University Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, the program has influenced care in a positive way through change in the attitude and knowledge of personnel, administrators, and community. In this paper, the authors provide an overview of the approaches utilized, improvement process, and outcomes obtained from this project. To formally evaluate the effectiveness of Project Hope, a quasi-experimental, Solomon-Four design study was conducted. Eighty nurses from various educational backgrounds and experience with alcohol were divided into groups by nursing unit. A normative-reeducative intervention was applied as described by Chin and Benne. Test of cognition showed significant change (p < .01) in the experimental group; no significance was found for attitudes change. Reasons for these findings and lessons learned from the process are described.
DNA strand biases and the mutational resilience of genes.
This paper quantifies the resilience of a gene to each class of base substitution. The resilience of a gene is defined as the set of probabilities of synonymous base substitution (one for each type of base substitution on each DNA strand), and is derived from the fraction of all possible substitutions which result in no change of encoded amino acids. We discuss the resilience of the common mutational target genes, lacI and hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase (hprt), and the p53 tumour suppressor gene. There are inherent strand biases to mutation in terms of the resilience differences between the non-template and template DNA strands. The ability to quantify resilience differences between the two DNA strands contributes to our understanding of strand bias to mutation.
Stability of the paraoxonase phenotyping ratio in collections of human sera with differing storage times.
Results from automated testing of 673 human sera, divided into four batches by duration of storage at -20 degrees C, indicated that paraoxon-hydrolysing activity, a, decreased with increased storage time. By contrast, the paraoxonase phenotyping ratio, c/b, a ratio designating enzyme activation by Na+ in the presence of Ca2+, was stable over a four year storage period.