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INTRODUCTION: Lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic had a disruptive effect on medical education when they prevented medical students accessing real patients. To address this, we piloted 35 medical students at home consulting remotely with patients. METHOD: We evaluated the intervention using qualitative analysis of post-experience interviews with a sample of 13 students and 10 clinical supervisors. RESULTS: The experience was perceived by all those interviewed to be both acceptable and educationally valuable. Data analysis revealed different models of implementation according to type of patients involved (acute, recently treated or expert patients) and type of communication platform used (AccuRx, Microsoft Teams or telephone). Practical and educational challenges were identified in relation to the following elements of the experience: patients consulting with students remotely, students being remotely supervised and students undertaking patient contact from home. Strategies for addressing these challenges were directly suggested by interviewees and also inferred from our analysis of the data. CONCLUSIONS: Remotely supervised medical students at home undertaking remote consultations with patients can be acceptable and educationally valuable. The intervention was piloted in a UK graduate entry medical course and so it would be useful to replicate this study in other medical student populations.

Background: Huntington’s disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disorder that typically manifests between the ages of 30 and 50 years. However, the disease can present at any age, and phenotypic differences between younger and later-onset patients have received limited attention. Objective: To compare clinical features of late- (>70 years of age) and younger-onset (

Several recent studies have used transcranial alternating stimulation (tACS) to demonstrate a causal role of neural oscillatory activity in speech processing. In particular, it has been shown that the ability to understand speech in a multi-speaker scenario or background noise depends on the timing of speech presentation relative to simultaneously applied tACS. However, it is possible that tACS did not change actual speech perception but rather auditory stream segregation. In this study, we tested whether the phase relation between tACS and the rhythm of degraded words, presented in silence, modulates word report accuracy. We found strong evidence for a tACS-induced modulation of speech perception, but only if the stimulation was applied bilaterally using ring electrodes (not for unilateral left hemisphere stimulation with square electrodes). These results were only obtained when data was analyzed using a statistical approach that was identified as optimal in a previous simulation study. The effect was driven by a phasic disruption of word report scores. Our results suggest a causal role of neural entrainment for speech perception and emphasize the importance of optimizing stimulation protocols and statistical approaches for brain stimulation research.

Introduction: Brachytherapy is a preferred choice of radiotherapy in the treatment of sensitive tissues cancer like intestine and gonad. The treatment is expensive because of the frequent replacement of radionuclide sources. A better understanding of cell killing and the cellular responses at different dose rates, might aid in tumor cell killing with fewer doses thereby enhancing a better prognosis.

To determine whether the bleomycin (BLM)-induced bystander response occurs in human brain glioblastoma (BMG-1) cells, the BMG-1 cells were exposed to two different concentrations of BLM. The co-culture methodology was adopted to study the in vitro bystander effects. DNA damage was measured using the micronucleus (MN) and γ-H2AX assays. Cytotoxicity was measured using the trypan blue assay. Cell cycle kinetics was analyzed using flow cytometry. The overall results did not show any significant increase in either genotoxicity or cytotoxicity or a delay in the cell cycle kinetics in BMG-1 bystander cells co-cultured with BLM-exposed cells, suggesting that BLM did not induce a bystander response in the BMG-1 cells. Furthermore, the MN results of the BLM-exposed BMG-1 cells co-cultured with unexposed bystander human lung adenocarcinoma (A549 and NCI-H460) cells and vice versa suggested that the BMG-1 cells do not secrete bystander signals but do respond to those signals. Analyzing the underlying mechanism and pathways involved in preventing the cells from secreting bystander signals will provide new insights that can be applied to inhibit these mechanisms in other cell types, thereby preventing and controlling the bystander response and genomic instability and increasing the therapeutic gain in chemotherapy.