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“Background:Telephone-based monitoring is a promising approach to continuing care of substance use disorders, but patients often do not engage or participate enough to benefit. Voucher incentives can increase retention in outpatient treatment and continuing care, but may be less effective when reinforcement is delayed, as in telephone-based care. We compared treatment utilization β-Nicotinamide datasheet rates among cocaine-dependent patients enrolled in telephone continuing care

with and without voucher incentives to determine whether incentives increase participation in telephone-based care.

Method: Participants were 195 cocaine-dependent patients who completed two weeks of community-based intensive outpatient treatment for substance use disorders and were randomly assigned to receive telephone continuing care with or without voucher incentives for participation as part of a larger clinical trial. The 12-month intervention included 2 in-person orientation sessions followed by up to 30 telephone sessions. Danusertib mw Incentivized

patients could receive up to $400 worth of gift cards.

Results: Patients who received incentives were not more likely to complete their initial orientation to continuing care. Incentivized patients who completed orientation completed 67% of possible continuing care sessions, as compared to 39% among non-incentivized patients who completed orientation. Among all patients randomized to receive incentives, the average number of completed sessions was 15.5, versus 7.2 for patients who did not receive incentives, and average voucher earnings were $200.

Conclusions: Voucher incentives can have a large effect on telephone continuing care participation, even when reinforcement is delayed. Further research will determine whether increased participation leads to better outcome among patients who received incentives. (c) 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd.

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“p53 can serve as a paradigm in studies aiming to figure out how allosteric perturbations in transcription factors (TFs) triggered Temsirolimus in vitro by small changes in DNA response element (RE) sequences, can spell selectivity in co-factor recruitment. p53-REs are 20-base pair (bp) DNA segments specifying diverse functions. They may be located near the transcription start sites or thousands of bps away in the genome. Their number has been estimated to be in the thousands, and they all share a common motif. A key question is then how does the p53 protein recognize a particular p53-RE sequence among all the similar ones? Here, representative p53-REs regulating diverse functions including cell cycle arrest, DNA repair, and apoptosis were simulated in explicit solvent. Among the major interactions between p53 and its REs involving Lys120, Arg280 and Arg248, the bps interacting with Lys120 vary while the interacting partners of other residues are less so. We observe that each p53-RE quarter site sequence has a unique pattern of interactions with p53 Lys120.