Case Report of Rare Parathyroid Tumor with Atypical Presentation and Early Diagnosis

Parathyroid carcinoma is a rare condition, accounting for 1% of cases of hyperparathyroidism. Other causes of hyperparathyroidism main group are single adenoma and parathyroid hyperplasia. The clinics presented by the patients are typical of hyperparathyroidism (fatigue, weakness, weight loss, and anorexia), bone impairment, pain, and fractures, in addition to affecting the renal system The diagnosis of parathyroid carcinoma is most often done postoperatively by means of a histological study. The case report is a 49-year-old male patient who came to the emergency room of Mackenzie Evangelical University Hospital complaining of progressive “muscle weakness” and “joint” that started about 2 months ago. To raise the suspicion of parathyroid carcinoma, it is essential to perform the correlation of the clinical picture, biochemical values, and imaging exams, but to obtain the definitive diagnosis, intraoperative recognition of the tumor and the result of the histopathological examination of the resected tumor are necessary.

Spiritual Struggle and Spiritual Growth of Bereft College Students in a Christian Evangelical University

This article examines spiritual struggle in bereft Christian evangelical students and how struggle might potentiate spiritual growth. The death loss of a close person can result in shattered assumptions about the world that trigger spiritual questions and struggle and spiritual struggle can be a catalyst for growth. To our knowledge, spiritual growth has not been measured utilizing the actual voices of those struggling with the loss, nor has it been measured in Christian evangelical populations who may find it more threatening to yield to spiritual questioning. The Spirit-centered Change Model guides our conceptualization of spiritual growth from a Christian evangelical perspective. Utilizing a mixed methods design, bereft college students (n=161) at a Christian evangelical university answered questionnaires about religious coping, daily spiritual experiences, meaning in life, and open-ended questions about their spiritual growth and how students’ beliefs about God had changed after the loss. Compared to non-bereft peers, bereft students reported higher daily spiritual experiences, but bereft students who struggled spiritually reported less meaning and daily spiritual experiences than bereft students who did not struggle. Narrative responses indicated that spiritual struggle simultaneously tended to reflect more expansive beliefs around God and a deepened spirituality, according to the Spirit-centered Change Model. Results reflect a first empirical step toward measuring spiritual growth as epistemological change.

Differential Impacts of Religious Cultural Competence on Students' Perceived Conflict with Evolution at an Evangelical University

Evolution remains a controversial issue in the United States, particularly for evangelical Christians, who as a group have been a key player in anti-evolution education legislation. Religious cultural competence can be effective in decreasing undergraduate biology students' perceived conflict between religion and evolution. However, the impact on student populations who are particularly resistant to evolution is unknown. We explored the efficacy of culturally competent evolution education practices adapted for biology students in a genetics course at an evangelical Christian university. This included the presence of an instructor as a religious scientist role model who accepts evolution, and the use of the book The Language of God. We explored how this curriculum affected students' conceptions of religion and evolution using pre- and post-surveys. We found a differential impact of the curriculum: 31% of the students who indicated that there was a conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution changed their conceptions to be more in line with scientific evidence, but the remaining 69% did not. We describe reasons why, including students' perceptions of The Language of God. This research indicates the challenges of implementing culturally competent evolution education for evangelical students, given their strong commitment to biblical literalism and their lower likelihood of being convinced by scientific evidence for evolution.

Profile of thoracic trauma victims submitted to chest drainage

ABSTRACT Objective: to describe and compare the variables involved in trauma victims undergoing thoracic drainage. Methods: we conducted a retrospective, analytical, descriptive, cross-sectional study, with medical records of patients attended at the Trauma Service of the Curitiba Evangelical University Hospital between February 2011 and January 2014. Results: there were 488 patients undergoing chest drainage, 84.7% men and 15.3% women, with an average age of 38.2 years. Attendances usually occurred at night, without predominance between open or closed mechanism, gender or age group. The majority of patients with thoracic trauma requiring drainage were diagnosed by anamnesis and physical examination (41.1%) and drained in the emergency room (80.8%). Most of the patients (66.2%) had another associated lesion, mostly some abdominal viscera. Complications were present in 16.6% (81 patients), most of them due to drainage positioning error (9.2%). The mean hospital stay was 15 days and drainage lasted for an average of 8.1 days, with no statistical difference between open and closed trauma. The clinical outcome was discharge in most cases. Conclusion: the profile of patients with thoracic trauma is that of young men, attended at night, with some other associated lesion. Although diagnosis and treatment were rapid and most often without the need for complex examinations, the time of drainage, hospitalization and complications were higher than in the literature, which can be explained by the drainage being made at the Emergency Room and the presence of associated injuries.

Teaching for Conversion

Following much recent scholarship on the relationship between the affective and cognitive dimensions of the human person, and the ways in which that relationship shapes the educational process, this article argues that conversion should be a primary goal of the humanist educator, whether that conversion be religious or theological in nature (as it might be in an explicitly religious institution) or a more generic idea of the educator cultivating a student’s love for a particular author, poem, or other imaginative literary work. The context for this argument is the author’s own experience teaching a poetry course in “faith and doubt” at an evangelical university, and the article focuses on the British Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins.