Increased Education is Associated with Decreased Compliance in an Urban Multi-Ethnic Lupus Cohort.

OBJECTIVES: To investigate the factors associated with medication compliance in a multi-ethnic population of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus in an urban community. METHODS: We surveyed patients in our cohort using the standardized measures of the Compliance-Questionnaire-Rheumatology (CQR), the Beliefs about Medications Questionnaire (BMQ), as well as patient self-reported compliance. Demographic and clinical characteristics of compliant and non-compliant patients underwent bivariate analysis. A multivariate analysis was then performed on variables of interest. RESULTS: Of the 94 patients who agreed to participate in the survey, 89 fully completed each questionnaire. Overall, 48% of patients were compliant by CQR. In multivariate analyses, higher education level was associated with non-compliance. Spanish-speaking patients and those with an income of greater than $15,000 per year were more likely to be compliant. CONCLUSIONS: In this urban lupus population, several factors may influence medication compliance. Factors associated with non-compliance are not what have been found in other populations. Further studies looking into specific reasons for certain areas of non-compliance as well as addressing these issues will be important in both treatment and outcomes in lupus patients in implementing appropriate interventions.

Affinity purification of GST fusion proteins for immunohistochemical studies of gene expression.

Fusion proteins expressed in bacteria are often insoluble or inefficiently purified by standard procedures previously reported to work well for the non-fused proteins. We report here a simple but general procedure that can be used to quickly customize and optimize the purification of milligram quantities of most GST fusion proteins. For each new protein, this procedure determines the optimal conditions for solubilization with detergents in a bacterial lysate, binding to glutathione-agarose beads, and elution with different buffers. This approach was applied to three GST fusion proteins containing large fragments of the Hox transcription factors Lox2, Lox4, and Lox6 that had low solubility and poor elution when purified following published procedures. After optimization, purified proteins were obtained at high yield and successfully used to raise and purify antibodies for the study of the expression patterns of these genes in embryonic tissues.