Canadian Stroke Best Practice Recommendations: Rehabilitation, Recovery, and Community Participation following Stroke. Part Two: Transitions and Community Participation Following Stroke.

The sixth update of the Canadian Stroke Best Practice Recommendations for Transitions and Community Participation following Stroke is a comprehensive set of evidence-based guidelines addressing issues faced by people following an acute stroke event. Establishing a coordinated and seamless system of care that supports progress achieved during the initial recovery stages throughout the transition to the community is more essential than ever as the medical complexity of people with stroke is also on the rise. All members of the health-care team engaged with people with stroke, their families, and caregivers are responsible for partnerships and collaborations to ensure successful transitions and return to the community following stroke. These guidelines reinforce the growing and changing body of research evidence available to guide ongoing screening, assessment, and management of individuals following stroke as they move from one phase and stage of care to the next without "falling through the cracks." It also recognizes the growing role of family and informal caregivers in providing significant hours of support that disrupt their own lives and responsibilities and addresses their support and educational needs. According to Statistics Canada, in 2012, eight million Canadians provided care to family members or friends with a long-term health condition, disability, or problems associated with aging. These recommendations incorporate aspects that were previously in the rehabilitation module for the purposes of streamlining, and both modules should be reviewed in order to provide comprehensive care addressing recovery and community reintegration and participation. These recommendations cover topics related to support and education of people with stroke, families, and caregivers during transitions and community reintegration. They include interprofessional planning and communication, return to driving, vocational roles, leisure activities and relationships and sexuality, and transition to long-term care.

Gentrepid V2.0: a web server for candidate disease gene prediction.

BACKGROUND: Candidate disease gene prediction is a rapidly developing area of bioinformatics research with the potential to deliver great benefits to human health. As experimental studies detecting associations between genetic intervals and disease proliferate, better bioinformatic techniques that can expand and exploit the data are required. DESCRIPTION: Gentrepid is a web resource which predicts and prioritizes candidate disease genes for both Mendelian and complex diseases. The system can take input from linkage analysis of single genetic intervals or multiple marker loci from genome-wide association studies. The underlying database of the Gentrepid tool sources data from numerous gene and protein resources, taking advantage of the wealth of biological information available. Using known disease gene information from OMIM, the system predicts and prioritizes disease gene candidates that participate in the same protein pathways or share similar protein domains. Alternatively, using an ab initio approach, the system can detect enrichment of these protein annotations without prior knowledge of the phenotype. CONCLUSIONS: The system aims to integrate the wealth of protein information currently available with known and novel phenotype/genotype information to acquire knowledge of biological mechanisms underpinning disease. We have updated the system to facilitate analysis of GWAS data and the study of complex diseases. Application of the system to GWAS data on hypertension using the ICBP data is provided as an example. An interesting prediction is a ZIP transporter additional to the one found by the ICBP analysis. The webserver URL is https://www.gentrepid.org/.

Mapping the phosphoinositide-binding site on chick cofilin explains how PIP2 regulates the cofilin-actin interaction.

Cofilin plays a key role in the choreography of actin dynamics via its ability to sever actin filaments and increase the rate of monomer dissociation from pointed ends. The exact manner by which phosphoinositides bind to cofilin and inhibit its interaction with actin has proven difficult to ascertain. We determined the structure of chick cofilin and used NMR chemical shift mapping and structure-directed mutagenesis to unambiguously locate its recognition site for phosphoinositides (PIs). This structurally unique recognition site requires both the acyl chain and head group of the PI for a productive interaction, and it is not inhibited by phosphorylation of cofilin. We propose that the interaction of cofilin with membrane-bound PIs abrogates its binding to both actin and actin-interacting protein 1, and facilitates spatiotemporal regulation of cofilin activity.