Although a plethora of survey research has shown a positive association between smoking https://www.selleckchem.com/products/MK-2206.html and alcohol use, little attention has been given to the utility functions of these co-occurring behaviors.

Methods: Data are drawn from semi-structured interviews with college freshmen at a large Mid-western university in the U.S. (n = 35). In addition, eleven focus groups with fraternity

and sorority members were conducted (n = 70). Interviews and focus groups focused on a range of issues including current smoking behavior, reasons for smoking, and smoking and drinking.

Results: A review of qualitative responses reveals that smoking served multiple utility functions for this population including (I) facilitating social interaction across gender, (2) allowing one to structure time and space at a party, (3) enabling “”party”" smokers to smoke with fewer negative side effects, and (4) helping to calm one down when drunk.

Conclusions: Whereas smoking was stigmatized during the context GW-572016 order of one’s everyday life as a student, at parties while consuming alcohol, smoking was viewed as normative and socially acceptable. Preventive interventions are needed on college campus that target

co-substance use and address widespread misperceptions about the harm of tobacco use and addiction. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.”
“Background: Array based comparative genomic hybridization (arrayCGH) has been increasingly used as the method of choice for diagnosis of patients with unexplained developmental delay/intellectual disability (DD/ID) but is not universally available for the high throughput use in routine practice. The next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques, emerging as a new tool in clinical diagnostics, are at present quite labour-intensive and expensive. Since multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (MLPA) is relatively fast, easily interpreted and cost-effective, it is still a method of choice for screening large KPT-8602 inhibitor cohorts of patients with DD/ID.

Results: We prospectively studied a cohort of 150 patients with

DD/ID with or without dysmorphic features or additional congenital abnormalities. We used two distinct MLPA kits, SALSA P036 and P070, for subtelomere screening and MLPA kit SALSA P245 for the 21 common microdeletion syndromes. Subtelomere analysis was performed by both kits in all patients. All imbalances were verified by follow-up MLPA kits. The MLPA analysis revealed chromosome aberrations in 21 (14%) cases: 11 subtelomeric rearrangements and 10 microdeletions.

Conclusions: We have presented the results of the investigation of patients with DD/ID obtained by using a combination of the MLPA sets for subtelomere aberrations and microdeletion syndromes followed by the confirmation of the aberrant results by the region-specific MLPA kits.