Women in power: New leadership in the health industry

The health industry may be the prototype for changing gender roles among managers. Already women dominate mid‐level management positions. Meager data exist on senior health executives. In this exploratory study we examine the professional experiences of nationally prominent women leaders in Washington, D.C., who have recently been at the forefront of changing national health policy. Their career development, management styles, and influence in national health policy are discussed and analyzed. The leadership style of these women differs from the traditional male style, and they experienced role conflicts in their rise to power. The women in this study may be foreshadowing the roles of new leaders in the health industry in the 1990s.     

Staurosporine‐induced collapse of cochlear hair bundles

Early postnatal mouse cochlear cultures were treated with a small panel of kinase inhibitors to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the maintenance of hair‐bundle structure in the developing inner ear. At low concentrations (1–10 nM), staurosporine causes the collapse and loss of hair bundles without provoking hair‐cell death, as judged by lack of terminal transferase dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) labeling or reactivity to anti‐activated caspase‐3. Staurosporine exposure results in the fusion of the hair bundle's stereocilia, a resorption of the parallel actin bundles of the stereocilia into the cytoplasm of the hair cell, a detachment of the apical, non‐stereociliary membrane of the hair cell from the underlying cuticular plate, and a severing of the hair‐bundle's rootlets from the actin cores of the stereocilia. It does not block membrane retrieval at the apical pole of the hair cells, nor does it elicit the externalization of phosphatidylserine. Staurosporine treatment causes a reduction in levels of the phosphorylated forms of ezrin, radixin, and moesin in cochlear cultures during the period of hair‐bundle loss, indicating the integrity of the hair bundle may be actively maintained by the phosphorylation status of these proteins. J. Comp. Neurol. 522:3281–3294, 2014. © 2014 The Authors The Journal of Comparative Neurology Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Strategy-based semantic priming in Alzheimer's dementia

The ability to engage semantic search strategies was assessed in a group of patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) (n = 11) and a group of age-matched control subjects (n = 13). The subjects performed a semantic priming task in which attentional priming was induced by manipulating the expected relationship between the primes and targets. Older control subjects were able to predict target words on the basis of expectancy, regardless of the semantic relationship between the prime and target. The DAT patients were also able to predict targets on the basis of expectancy, but only when the prime and target were semantically related. These results suggest that the structure of semantic memory remains intact in DAT, and that semantic memory retrieval may be facilitated by providing DAT patients with appropriate search strategies.     

Measuring the anticoagulant effects of target specific oral anticoagulants—reasons, methods and current limitations

To simplify and optimize oral anticoagulation, new target-specific oral anticoagulants (TSOAs) have been developed. The direct thrombin-inhibitor dabigatran and the direct factor Xa inhibitors rivaroxaban, apixaban and edoxaban are the first such compounds to receive approval in certain countries for various indications. Due to the predictable pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic profiles of these drugs, routine monitoring of patients receiving TSOA therapy has not been considered necessary. However, it has now been realized that in routine clinical settings, there are several situations where it may be prudent to assess the level of TSOA anticoagulation. Several studies evaluating the influence of TSOAs on various coagulation assays have been performed to identify systems that can be used to monitor these drugs. With a particular focus on dabigatran and rivaroxaban, we will describe and discuss the potential of several methods for measuring the anticoagulant effect of TSOAs, as well as their methodological limitations and the restrictions in transferring their results into clinical context.