Faculty Bibliography

One's style of communicating is vitally important to both the message being sent as well as to the message being received. We have often heard that how something is said is far more important than what actually was said. With this in mind, this piece deals with the essence of stylistic communication and this type of communication in proffering a second opinion. There are many reasons that people seek second opinions just as there are many reasons why doctors offer them. These reasons will be discussed in detail. This article will go into a detailed protocol for how to offer a second opinion. There are 3 types of second opinions that will be discussed. The first is the pre-treatment consultation. The second is the mid-treatment second opinion. The final one is the second opinion offered when one is acting as an expert witness. The offering of a second opinion is an art that needs to be studied and when expressed is truly a communications masterpiece.(C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The management of patients with cleft lip and cleft palate requires prolonged orthodontic and surgical treatment and an interdisciplinary approach in providing them with optimal esthetics, function, and stability. This article describes an update on the current concepts and principles in the treatment of patients with cleft lip and palate. Sequencing and timing of orthodontic/ orthopedic and surgical treatment in infancy, early mixed dentition, early permanent dentition, and after the completion of facial growth will be discussed. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

PURPOSE: To investigate the influence of atmospheric pressure plasma (APP) treatment on the microtensile dentin bond strength of two etch-and-rinse adhesive systems, after one week and one year of water storage, and additionally to observe the micromorphology of resin/dentin interfaces under scanning electronic microscopy (SEM). MATERIALS AND METHODS: The occlusal enamel was removed from third human molars to expose a flat dentin surface. The teeth were then randomly divided into six groups (n = 7), according to two adhesives (Optibond FL and XP-Bond) and three APP treatments (untreated dentin [control], APP application before or after acid etching). After performing the composite resin buildup on bonded dentin, the teeth were sectioned perpendicularly to the bonded interface to obtain beam-shaped specimens (cross-sectional area of ~0.9 mm2). The specimens were tested in tension until failure after one week and one year of water storage (1.0 mm/min rate). Bond strength data were analyzed by three-way ANOVA and Tukey's post-hoc test (alpha = 0.05%). Bonded beam specimens from each tooth were also prepared for interfacial SEM investigation. RESULTS: At one week, APP treatment applied after acid etching increased the dentin bond strength for XP Bond, while no effect was observed for Optibond FL. After one year, the bond strength of XP Bond decreased in groups where APP was applied after etching. The evaluation time did not influence the bond strength for Optibond FL. CONCLUSION: One-year evaluation did not show any sign of degradation of interfacial structures in any group. Application of APP to etched dentin combined with a two-step etch-and-rinse adhesive significantly increased bond strength at one week, but the effect was not stable after one year and was adhesive dependent.

Functional analysis of a clinical microbiome facilitates the elucidation of mechanisms by which microbiome perturbation can cause a phenotypic change in the patient. The direct approach for the analysis of the functional capacity of the microbiome is via shotgun metagenomics. An inexpensive method to estimate the functional capacity of a microbial community is through collecting 16S rRNA gene profiles then indirectly inferring the abundance of functional genes. This inference approach has been implemented in the PICRUSt and Tax4Fun software tools. However, those tools have important limitations since they rely on outdated functional databases and uncertain phylogenetic trees and require very specific data pre-processing protocols. Here we introduce Piphillin, a straightforward algorithm independent of any proposed phylogenetic tree, leveraging contemporary functional databases and not obliged to any singular data pre-processing protocol. When all three inference tools were evaluated against actual shotgun metagenomics, Piphillin was superior in predicting gene composition in human clinical samples compared to both PICRUSt and Tax4Fun (p<0.01 and p<0.001, respectively) and Piphillin's ability to predict disease associations with specific gene orthologs exhibited a 15% increase in balanced accuracy compared to PICRUSt. From laboratory animal samples, no performance advantage was observed for any one of the tools over the others and for environmental samples all produced unsatisfactory predictions. Our results demonstrate that functional inference using the direct method implemented in Piphillin is preferable for clinical biospecimens. Piphillin is publicly available for academic use at http://secondgenome.com/Piphillin.

Raf Kinase Inhibitory Protein (RKIP) expression has been profiled for a number of unique tissue cancers. However, certain tissues have not been explored, and oral and oropharyngeal cancers stand out as high priority targets, given their relatively high incidence, high morbidity rate, and in many cases, preventable nature. The purpose of this study was to examine changes in RKIP expression and phosphorylation in tissues resected from oral cancer patients, and compare to results generated from immortalized cell lines raised from primary oral cancer tissues, including oral squamous cell carcinoma line 4 (SCC4) and human squamous cell carcinoma line 3 (HSC3). Out of 4 human samples collected from male and female patients across various ages with variable risk factors, we observed an across the board reduction in RKIP expression. Two human samples demonstrated a significant increase in phosphorylated RKIP when normalized to total RKIP, however all 4 were increased when normalized to total cellular protein. The immortalized oral cancer cell culture HSC3 revealed significant increases in phosphorylated RKIP with no change in total RKIP expression, while line SCC4 demonstrated an increase in both total and phosphorylated RKIP. Results presented here indicate that oral cancers behave similarly to other cancers in terms of changes in RKIP expression and phosphorylation, although immortalized cell line expression profiles significantly differ from human tissue biopsies.

Communications are a vital part of the doctor patient relationship. In orthodontic practice there are essentially 3 types of orthodontic communications: intra-office, inter-office, and extra-office. Various types of each communication will be discussed with sample letters for exemplary purposes. Utilizing all 3 types can aid the practitioner in establishing a high risk management profile and make daily practice easier, more meaningful, less stressful, and certainly safer from a dent-legal perspective. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.