The Tohoku journal of experimental medicine
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Tohoku J. Exp. Med. · Jan 2007
Nursing students' willingness to use complementary and alternative therapies for cancer patients: Istanbul survey.
It is important for student nurses to be knowledgeable of the complementary and alternative therapies and to provide accurate information to both cancer patients and other health care professionals. This study examined the nursing students' willingness to use these therapies, availability of sources of information, use of the therapies for self care, opinions about the integration of these therapies into nursing curriculum, and analyzed the differences among the responses. A self-administered questionnaire was offered to 640 nursing students in Istanbul, descriptive statistics were used, and comparisons among responses were made with chi-square test. ⋯ The statistically significant differences were found among the responses related to use five therapies for care and related to desired three therapies to be included in nursing curriculum. Although students had not previously been exposed to these therapies use with oncology patients, many of students expressed a desire to integrate therapies learning into nursing curriculum. The more student nurses document high risk patients, the more effective strategies will be developed by other health care professionals.
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Tohoku J. Exp. Med. · Jan 2007
Increased nitrosative and oxidative stress in platelets of migraine patients.
The molecular mechanisms of migraine have not been fully clarified yet. Increased nitrosative and oxidative stress may be associated with migraine attacks. Platelets may play an important role in migraine patients and they can reflect the lability of tissues to nitrosative/oxidative stress. ⋯ By contrast, during headache-free period, no statistically significant differences were found in the platelet levels of nitrate, nitrite and MDA between migraineurs and controls (p > 0.05), although the marginal increases were detected in migraineurs. These results suggest that increased biomarkers of nitrosative and oxidative stress in platelets may be important in migraine patients, especially during attacks; increase of NO metabolites in platelets during attacks supports the opinion that NO may play a modulatory role in biological processes particularly by vasodilatation in migraine attacks. Therefore, MDA and NO metabolites may serve as useful markers to show the increased vulnerability to nitrosative and oxidative stress in migraine patients.