A postal questionnaire was sent to all consultants and specialist trainees in the West Midlands about the use of spinal boards in the accident and emergency (A&E) department. Response rate was 70%. There was widespread use of boards in A&E despite an ATLS recommendation to the contrary. Hospitals should review their policies on use of spinal boards within the department, using the evidence avai...

What are the initial steps you take when a patient presents with a traumatic spinal cord injury? Trauma patients are worked up in the emergency department through the general surgery trauma team in conjunction with the orthopedic trauma team. Initial management is done under the guidelines of the Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) protocol, where we recognize and manage potential vital threats...

Cardiac contusion is an infrequent but occasionally serious complication of deceleration injury. According to ATLS teaching, the true diagnosis of contusion can only be established by direct inspection of the myocardium. The clinically important sequelae of myocardial contusion are hypotension and arrhythmia. Despite recent advances in investigative techniques, myocardial trauma remains an impo...

There are very few reports in the English literature regarding cases with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) who developed acute tumor lysis syndrome (ATLS) after a single dose of steroid at the beginning of the chemotherapy [1-6]. Herein, we present a child with T-cell ALL who developed ATLS after methylprednisolone (2 mg/kg) therapy. A seven-year-old, previously healthy girl was admitted to o...

Higher cognitive function reflects the interaction of a network of multiple brain regions. Previous investigations have plotted out these networks using functional or structural connectivity approaches. While these map the topography of the regions involved, they do not explore the key aspect of this neuroscience principle-namely that the regions interact in a dynamic fashion. Here, we achieved...

RING finger E3 ligases are components of the ubiquitin proteasome system (UPS) that mediate the transfer of ubiquitin to substrates. Single-subunit RING finger E3s binds the E2 ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme and contains recognition sequences for the substrate within the same polypeptide. Here we describe the characterization of a class of RING finger E3 ligases that is conserved among eukaryotes...

One influential account asserts that the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) is a domain-general hub for semantic memory. Other evidence indicates it is part of a domain-specific social cognition system. Arbitrating these accounts using functional magnetic resonance imaging has previously been difficult because of magnetic susceptibility artifacts in the region. The present study used parameters optim...