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• Back pain early warning sign preceding out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is experienced in variety of ways both in relation to location as well as complex descriptions. • The professional call-taker must be aware that patients are not trained health professionals, that can communicate according to the health system's own logic. • Following this, call-takers should perhaps be trained to disregard the immediate diagnostic conclusions made by the patient. Cardiac arrest patients presenting with back pain are at risk of not receiving the appropriate help when calling emergency medical services. In telephone consultations regarding patients with back pain preceding an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, we investigated how communication between caller and call-taker influenced the call-taker's interpretation of back pain descriptions and decision-making about choice of response. The study was conducted using 20 recorded phone calls from 17 patients who contacted the Copenhagen Emergency Medical Services (Denmark) reporting back pain up to 24 hours before an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Qualitative content analysis was applied. Two main categories emerged: (1) reasons, including subcategories: reported conditions, descriptions of conditions, patient's interpretation of condition and patient's own remedial actions; and (2) considerations, including subcategories: assessment of the severity, call-taker's interpretation of the condition, arguments for chosen response and conditions not facilitating further communication by the call-taker. In telephone consultations regarding patients with back pain preceding an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest the communication was influenced by the communicative preconditions of the call-taker. Communication in consultations where ambulances were not dispatched was characterized by complex descriptions of symptoms not easily fitting into the health system's interpretations of conditions warranting an urgent response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The ability to control the behavior of stem cells provides crucial benefits, for example, in tissue engineering and toxicity/drug screening, which utilize the stem cell’s capacity to engineer new tissues for regenerative purposes and the testing of new drugs in vitro. Recently, surface topography has been shown to influence stem cell differentiation; however, general trends are often difficult to establish due to differences in length scales, surface chemistries and detailed surface topographies. Here we apply a highly versatile screening approach to analyze the interplay of surface topographical parameters on cell attachment, morphology, proliferation and osteogenic differentiation of human mesenchymal dental-pulp-derived stem cells (DPSCs) cultured with and without osteogenic differentiation factors in the medium (ODM). Increasing the inter-pillar gap size from 1 to 6μm for surfaces with small pillar sizes of 1 and 2μm resulted in decreased proliferation and in more elongated cells with long pseudopodial protrusions. The same alterations of pillar topography, up to an inter-pillar gap size of 4μm, also resulted in enhanced mineralization of DPSCs cultured without ODM, while no significant trend was observed for DPSCs cultured with ODM. Generally, cells cultured without ODM had a larger deposition of osteogenic markers on structured surfaces relative to the unstructured surfaces than what was found when culturing with ODM. We conclude that the topographical design of biomaterials can be optimized for the regulation of DPSC differentiation and speculate that the inclusion of ODM alters the ability of the cells to sense surface topographical cues. These results are essential in order to transfer the use of this highly proliferative, easily accessible stem cell into the clinic for use in cell therapy and regenerative medicine. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Four high resolution negative electron beam resists are compared: TEBN-1 from Tokuyama Corp. Japan, ma-N 2401XP and mr-L 6000.1XP from microresist technology GmbH Germany, and SU-8 2000 series from MicroChem Corp., USA. Narrow linewidth high density patterns are defined by 100 kV electron beam lithography, and the pattern is transferred into silicon by a highly anisotropic SF6/O2/CHF3 based reactive ion etch process with a selectivity between silicon and the investigated resists of approximately 2. 20 nm half-pitch lines and 10 nm lines with a pitch down to 60 nm are written and transferred into silicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]