[Better Reporting of Interventions: Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) Checklist and Guide]. / Die TIDieR Checkliste und Anleitung - ein Instrument für eine verbesserte Interventionsbeschreibung und Replikation.

Without a complete published description of interventions, clinicians and patients cannot reliably implement interventions that are shown to be useful, and other researchers cannot replicate or build on research findings. The quality of description of interventions in publications, however, is remarkably poor. To improve the completeness of reporting, and ultimately the replicability, of interventions, an international group of experts and stakeholders developed the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) checklist and guide. The process involved a literature review for relevant checklists and research, a Delphi survey of an international panel of experts to guide item selection, and a face-to-face panel meeting. The resultant 12-item TIDieR checklist (brief name, why, what (materials), what (procedure), who intervened, how, where, when and how much, tailoring, modifications, how well (planned), how well (actually carried out)) is an extension of the CONSORT 2010 statement (item 5) and the SPIRIT 2013 statement (item 11). While the emphasis of the checklist is on trials, the guidance is intended to apply across all evaluative study designs. This paper presents the TIDieR checklist and guide, with a detailed explanation of each item, and examples of good reporting. The TIDieR checklist and guide should improve the reporting of interventions and make it easier for authors to structure the accounts of their interventions, reviewers and editors to assess the descriptions, and readers to use the information.

Targeted disruption of the CP2 gene, a member of the NTF family of transcription factors.

The NTF-like family of transcription factors have been implicated in developmental regulation in organisms as diverse as Drosophila and man. The two mammalian members of this family, CP2 (LBP-1c/LSF) and LBP-1a (NF2d9), are highly related proteins sharing an overall amino acid identity of 72%. CP2, the best characterized of these factors, is a ubiquitously expressed 66-kDa protein that binds the regulatory regions of many diverse genes. Consequently, a role for CP2 has been proposed in globin gene expression, T-cell responses to mitogenic stimulation, and several other cellular processes. To elucidate the in vivo role of CP2, we have generated mice nullizygous for the CP2 allele. These animals were born in a normal Mendelian distribution and displayed no defects in growth, behavior, fertility, or development. Specifically, no perturbation of hematopoietic differentiation, globin gene expression, or immunological responses to T- and B-cell mitogenic stimulation was observed. RNA and protein analysis confirmed that the nullizygous mice expressed no full-length or truncated version of CP2. Electrophoretic mobility shift assays with nuclear extracts from multiple tissues demonstrated loss of CP2 DNA binding activity in the -/- lines. However, a slower migrating complex that was ablated with antiserum to NF2d9, the murine homologue of LBP-1a, was observed with these extracts. Furthermore, we demonstrate that recombinant LBP-1a can bind to known CP2 consensus sites and form protein complexes with previously defined heteromeric partners of CP2. These results suggest that LBP-1a/NF2d9 may compensate for loss of CP2 expression in vivo and that further analysis of the role of the NTF family of proteins requires the targeting of the NF2d9 gene.

alpha-thalassemia resulting from a negative chromosomal position effect.

To date, all of the chromosomal deletions that cause alpha-thalassemia remove the structural alpha genes and/or their regulatory element (HS -40). A unique deletion occurs in a single family that juxtaposes a region that normally lies approximately 18-kilobase downstream of the human alpha cluster, next to a structurally normal alpha-globin gene, and silences its expression. During development, the CpG island associated with the alpha-globin promoter in the rearranged chromosome becomes densely methylated and insensitive to endonucleases, demonstrating that the normal chromatin structure around the alpha-globin gene is perturbed by this mutation and that the gene is inactivated by a negative chromosomal position effect. These findings highlight the importance of the chromosomal environment in regulating globin gene expression.

Smoking health risk. Counseling of psychiatric patients.

1. Cigarette smoking has been identified as the single most important source of preventable morbidity and premature mortality in the United States for each of the past 25 years. Despite a smoking rate of 50% to 84%, persons with psychiatric illness have not been the target of any documented smoking health risk education in current literature. 2. Most nurses view smoking health risk education as a nursing function, but few actually provide this care for patients due to perceived ineffectiveness of health risk education, belief that smoking is not a health risk, and lack of knowledge base to provide the care. 3. Data from the study reported on in the article reflected that nurses were providing smoking health risk information to less than 50% of patients. Nurses were not identifying nicotine dependence as a nursing problem and therefore were making no plans to provide nursing interventions to resolve it.