Autofluorescence of blood and its application in biomedical and clinical research.

Autofluorescence of blood has been explored as a label free approach for detection of cell types, as well as for diagnosis and detection of infection, cancer, and other diseases. Although blood autofluorescence is used to indicate the presence of several physiological abnormalities with high sensitivity, it often lacks disease specificity due to use of a limited number of fluorophores in the detection of several abnormal conditions. In addition, the measurement of autofluorescence is sensitive to the type of sample, sample preparation, and spectroscopy method used for the measurement. Therefore, while current blood autofluorescence detection approaches may not be suitable for primary clinical diagnosis, it certainly has tremendous potential in developing methods for large scale screening that can identify high risk groups for further diagnosis using highly specific diagnostic tests. This review discusses the source of blood autofluorescence, the role of spectroscopy methods, and various applications that have used autofluorescence of blood, to explore the potential of blood autofluorescence in biomedical research and clinical applications.

Effect of educational intervention on awareness of pharmacovigilance among medical undergraduates in a tertiary care teaching hospital.

AIM: (1) To assess the knowledge and attitude of undergraduates about adverse drug reaction (ADR) reporting at a tertiary care teaching hospital. (2) To assess the effect of educational intervention among medical undergraduates on knowledge and attitude about pharmacovigilance (PV). MATERIALS AND METHODS: Cross-sectional, questionnaire-based survey conducted at a tertiary care teaching hospital. Respondents were 192 undergraduate students (2nd year). The study instrument was a self-developed, prevalidated semi-structured questionnaire. Participants were given 1 h to complete the questionnaire. After this, a 2 h lecture about PV was taken. Participants were asked to fill the same questionnaire after the educational intervention. Pre- and post-test questionnaire were compared. RESULTS: There was an overall improvement in all three aspects, i.e., awareness, knowledge, and attitude. Most of the students had knowledge of the meaning of PV and reporting of ADR by doctors. However, there was a significant improvement in the knowledge regarding reporting of ADR by dentist, nurses, and pharmacist. Similarly, students were aware of the fact that ADR with allopathic medicines should be reported, but postintervention, there was improvement in percentage regarding reporting of ADR in the case of herbal and traditional medicine, blood products, and biological and medical device. There was a significant improvement in percentage regarding awareness about process of reporting ADR after exposure to lecture. CONCLUSION: There is a need of increasing awareness among the medical students to improve the reporting of ADRs. Adequate consideration needs to be given to the subject of ADRs in the clinical pharmacology and therapeutics curricula in undergraduate medical education.