Evacuation solutions for individuals with functional limitations in the built environment: a scoping review protocol.

BACKGROUND: Whether due to aging, disability, injury, or other circumstances, an increasing number of Canadians experience functional limitations that reduce their ability to participate in activities of daily life. While the built environment has become increasingly accessible, existing Canadian evacuation guidelines lack comprehensive strategies for evacuating individuals with functional limitations from buildings during emergencies. To inform guideline revisions, a map of existing solutions for evacuating such individuals is required. Therefore, this scoping review aims to provide an account of solutions that have been reported to safely evacuate individuals with functional limitations from the built environment. METHODS: We will conduct a scoping review using the Arksey and O'Malley methodological framework. To identify potentially relevant studies, comprehensive searches (from January 2002 onwards) of the CINAHL, Ei Compendex, Inspec, Embase, MEDLINE, KCI, RSCI, SciELO CI, Web of Science Collection, and Scopus databases will be performed. Using a set of inclusion and exclusion criteria, two reviewers will independently (1) classify identified studies as relevant, irrelevant, or maybe relevant by evaluating their titles and abstracts and (2) classify the relevant and maybe relevant studies as included or excluded by evaluating their full-text. From each included study, data on publication information, study purpose, methodological details, evacuation information, and outcomes will be extracted using a set of data extraction items. We will present a numerical summary of the key characteristics of the included studies. For each evacuation activity, reported evacuation solutions will be summarized, and citations provided for functional limitations that are targeted by a given evacuation solution. To inform Canadian evacuation guideline revisions, we will tabulate evacuation activities common to different types of buildings and emergencies. DISCUSSION: To our knowledge, this will be the first scoping review to identify the state and use of solutions for evacuating individuals with functional limitations from the built environment. Identifying solutions that enable all individuals to safely evacuate from different types of buildings will allow us to inform recommendations for the revision of evacuation guidelines in Canada and other jurisdictions. The findings of this scoping review will be published in a peer-reviewed journal, presented at relevant conferences, and made publicly available on the internet. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: Open Science Framework: osf.io/jefgy.

Identification of candidate disease genes by EST alignments, synteny, and expression and verification of Ensembl genes on rat chromosome 1q43-54.

We aligned Incyte ESTs and publicly available sequences to the rat genome and analyzed rat chromosome 1q43-54, a region in which several quantitative trait loci (QTLs) have been identified, including renal disease, diabetes, hypertension, body weight, and encephalomyelitis. Within this region, which contains 255 Ensembl gene predictions, the aligned sequences clustered into 568 Incyte genes and gene fragments. Of the Incyte genes, 261 (46%) overlapped 184 (72%) of the Ensembl gene predictions, whereas 307 were unique to Incyte. The rat-to-human syntenic map displays rearrangement of this region on rat chr. 1 onto human chromosomes 9 and 10. The mapping of corresponding human disease phenotypes to either one of these chromosomes has allowed us to focus in on genes associated with disease phenotypes. As an example, we have used the syntenic information for the rat Rf-1 disease region and the orthologous human ESRD disease region to reduce the size of the original rat QTL to only 11.5 Mb. Using the syntenic information in combination with expression data from ESTs and microarrays, we have selected a set of 66 candidate disease genes for Rf-1. The combination of the results from these different analyses represents a powerful approach for narrowing the number of genes that could play a role in the development of complex diseases.