Jane Gair

University of Victoria | UVIC · Division of Medical Sciences

Implication Statement Mini Med School (MMS) programs led by medical students provide a unique opportunity for community members to access free and accurate health information while engaging with the education of medical students. Virtually delivered MMS programs reduce barriers to access. 90.3% of participants in a recent MMS enjoyed medical studen...

Background: Medical students are at high risk of depression, distress and burnout, which may adversely affect patient safety. There has been growing interest in mindfulness in medical education to improve medical student well-being. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is a commonly used, standardized format for teaching mindfulness skills. P...

Background: Health literacy is an increasingly important topic in healthcare given that low health literacy is widely prevalent and linked to poorer health outcomes and higher healthcare costs. We sought to determine if a Mini-Med School delivered by medical students could prove to be an effective intervention to improve health literacy in the elde...

Tomorrow's medical graduate needs to be equipped today to be able to make sense of continued advancements in medical science and then apply these to the benefit of patents and communities. It is important that current methods of teaching and learning in medical programs such as problem-based learning are subject to critical evaluation as to whether...

Previous studies have suggested an association between rates of biological and reproductive aging. Short telomere length is a marker for cellular aging and may occur more frequently in women with poor oocyte quality and a history of premature reproductive senescence. Telomere length, however, has been both positively and negatively associated with...

Rate of reproductive aging may be related to rate of biological aging. Thus, indicators of aging, such as short telomere length, may be more frequent in women with a history suggestive of premature reproductive senescence. Telomere-specific quantitative PCR was used to assess telomere length in two groups of women with evidence of reproductive agin...

Recurrent trisomy 21: four cases in three generations. While gonadal mosaicism can lead to recurrence of trisomy 21 (T21) for a single couple, the recurrence of free T21 in multiple members of a single pedigree has rarely been reported. We present an unusual pedigree with four cases of Down syndrome (DS) with free T21 were born to four separate wom...

Recently, we reported that skewed X chromosome inactivation (XCI) was more common in women who had experienced a trisomic pregnancy as compared to control women. Rather than an overall shift in the distribution of skewing there appears to only be an excess of extreme (= 95%) skewing. Further analysis of our data reveals that the increase in skewed...

Heritable variation in fitness is the fuel of adaptive evolution, and sex can generate new adaptive combinations of alleles. If the generation of beneficial combinations drives the evolution of recombination, then the level of recombination should result in changes in the response to selection. Three types of lines of Drosophila melanogaster varyin...