[IPADAM quali study. Intervention of the Pharmacist in the Issue of Self-medication: Experience of pharmacy team focus groups and patients' perceptions]. / IPADAM quali « Interventions Pharmaceutiques À propos du Dossier pharmaceutique et de l'AutoMédication ¼ : expérience des équipes officinales et ressenti des patients.

OBJECTIVES: This study had two main aims: (i) document the experience of community pharmacists receiving a spontaneous request for ibuprofen and oral pseudoephedrine, and their use of pharmaceutical records, and (ii) explore patients' perceptions of pharmaceutical records and pharmaceutical interventions. METHODS: The study was conducted over two weeks between February and April 2014 in 482 community pharmacies and 8 French faculties of pharmacy. It was based on data collected by pharmacy team focus groups during patient telephone interviews using standardized question grids. Textual and thematic analyses were made of the patient responses. RESULTS: Four pharmacy team focus groups carried out 49 telephone interviews. Examination of the practice of the groups showed that pharmaceutical interventions, although incompletely registered, are performed on a daily basis and enhance the value of the pharmacist's function. Analysis of the telephone interviews also showed the importance of the advisory role of the pharmacist in dispensing an optional medical prescription. The thematic analysis of the results identified a positive response of patients to pharmaceutical interventions if made by their regular pharmacist and accompanied by explanatory information. The focus groups and patients agreed that pharmaceutical records were not consulted often enough. CONCLUSION: This study underlines the need for greater safety in the use of optional medical prescription drugs. Promoting responsible self-medication in compliance with proper use should include systematic reference to a PR and informed dialogue with the patient.

Plasmid and clonal interference during post horizontal gene transfer evolution.

Plasmids are nucleic acid molecules that can drive their own replication in a living cell. They can be transmitted horizontally and can thrive in the host cell to high-copy numbers. Plasmid replication and gene expression consume cellular resources and cells carrying plasmids incur fitness costs. But many plasmids carry genes that can be beneficial under certain conditions, allowing the cell to endure in the presence of antibiotics, toxins, competitors or parasites. Horizontal transfer of plasmid-encoded genes can thus instantaneously confer differential adaptation to local or transient selection conditions. This conflict between cellular fitness and plasmid spread sets the scene for multilevel selection processes. We have engineered a system to study the short-term evolutionary impact of different synonymous versions of a plasmid-encoded antibiotic resistance gene. Applying experimental evolution under different selection conditions and deep sequencing allowed us to show rapid local adaptation to the presence of antibiotic and to the specific version of the resistance gene transferred. We describe the presence of clonal interference at two different levels: at the within-cell level, because a single cell can carry several plasmids, and at the between-cell level, because a bacterial population may contain several clones carrying different plasmids and displaying different fitness in the presence/absence of antibiotic. Understanding the within-cell and between-cell dynamics of plasmids after horizontal gene transfer is essential to unravel the dense network of mobile elements underlying the worldwide threat to public health of antibiotic resistance.

[Pharmacist's interview with type 2 diabetes: Development of a follow-up form]. / L'entretien pharmaceutique pour le patient diabétique de type 2 : élaboration d'une fiche de suivi.

OBJECTIVES: Type 2 diabetes is a major public health concern because of its prevalence, the severity of complications and the financial implications. Compliance and patient's autonomy in medications intake play key roles in the success of treatment. Pharmacists' interviews ensure an optimized and individual follow-up. Type 2 diabetes is not one of the targeted diseases to perform pharmacists' interviews on under Health Insurance. We thus judged useful to contribute to their development. METHODS: We applied a cross-disciplinary methodological process in order to define the specifications of the follow-up form useful to conduct the pharmacist's interview 1 by focusing on the identification of a non-compliance and its origins. A feasibility study was carried out in order to check its workability to the pharmacy practice. RESULTS: The follow-up form, associated with a pharmacist practical guide, includes 3 parts: (1) General informations, (2) Survey establishing patient's knowledge, (3) Summary including a level of knowledge assessment grid. Outcomes provide a long but appropriate-felt duration, few difficulties to conduct the interview and a proven usefulness in 90% of all cases that make the follow-up form suitable to the pharmacy practice. CONCLUSIONS: This tool could serve as a model for the pharmacist to conduct his future interviews for the type 2 diabetes patients, thus improving patient care, together with other health professionals.

Sexual conflict in wing size and shape in Drosophila melanogaster.

Intralocus sexual conflict occurs when opposing selection pressures operate on loci expressed in both sexes, constraining the evolution of sexual dimorphism and displacing one or both sexes from their optimum. We eliminated intralocus conflict in Drosophila melanogaster by limiting transmission of all major chromosomes to males, thereby allowing them to win the intersexual tug-of-war. Here, we show that this male-limited (ML) evolution treatment led to the evolution (in both sexes) of masculinized wing morphology, body size, growth rate, wing loading, and allometry. In addition to more male-like size and shape, ML evolution resulted in an increase in developmental stability for males. However, females expressing ML chromosomes were less developmentally stable, suggesting that being ontogenetically more male-like was disruptive to development. We suggest that sexual selection over size and shape of the imago may therefore explain the persistence of substantial genetic variation in these characters and the ontogenetic processes underlying them.

An evolutionary cost of separate genders revealed by male-limited evolution.

Theory predicts that intralocus sexual conflict can constrain the evolution of sexual dimorphism, preventing each sex from independently maximizing its fitness. To test this idea, we limited genome-wide gene expression to males in four replicate Drosophila melanogaster populations, removing female-specific selection. Over 25 generations, male fitness increased markedly, as sexually dimorphic traits evolved in the male direction. When male-evolved genomes were expressed in females, their fitness displayed a nearly symmetrical decrease. These results suggest that intralocus conflict strongly limits sex-specific adaptation, promoting the maintenance of genetic variation for fitness. Populations may carry a heavy genetic load as a result of selection for separate genders.

Resource depletion in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes infected by the microsporidia Vavraia culicis.

SUMMARYParasitic infection is often associated with changes in host life-history traits, such as host development. Many of these life-history changes are ultimately thought to be the result of a depletion or reallocation of the host's resources driven either by the host (to minimize the effects of infection) or by the parasite (to maximize its growth rate). In this paper we investigate the energetic budget of Aedes aegypti mosquito larvae infected by Vavraia culicis, a microsporidian parasite that transmits horizontally between larvae, and which has been previously shown to reduce the probability of pupation of its host. Our results show that infected larvae have significantly less lipids, sugars and glycogen than uninfected larvae. These differences in resources were not due to differences in larval energy intake (feeding rate) or expenditure (metabolic rate). We conclude that the lower energetic resources of infected mosquitoes are the result of the high metabolic demands that microsporidian parasites impose on their hosts. Given the fitness advantages for the parasite of maintaining the host in a larval stage, we discuss whether resource depletion may also be a parasite mechanism to prevent the pupation of the larvae and thus maximize its own transmission.

Sex-specific reaction norms to intraspecific larval competition in the mosquito Aedes aegypti.

As the relationship between a given life-history trait and fitness is not necessarily the same for the two sexes, an 'intersexual ontogenetic conflict' may arise. We analysed the phenotypic reaction to intraspecific larval competition of the mosquito, Aedes aegypti, asking: (i) Do both sexes pay the cost of competition with the same life-history traits and are they equal competitors? (ii) Is there a specific cost of competition beyond sharing food resources? We found that competition incurs a specific cost that was expressed differently by the two sexes. Indeed, each sex maintained the more important life-history trait(s) for their fitness (developmental time for males and body weight and size for females) at the expense of other traits, thus minimizing the effects of competition on their fitness. The competition exerted by females was estimated as being more intense, probably linked with the greater importance of body size for their fitness.