Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The MTA is a material developed for endodontics. It is derived from Portland cement (hydraulic cement sets and hardens by reacting with the water forming a body strong and durable, used in architecture and construction). The MTA was developed and first reported for use in dentistry in 1993 by Lee, Torabinejad et al (Chaple y col, 2007). The main use of MTA occurs in the pulp treatment of vital teeth (pulpotomy, direct pulp capping), apexification treatment (apical barrier), endodontic surgery, repair of furca and side perforations, and those caused by the reabsorptions. The MTA promotes formation of bone and cement facilitating the regeneration of the periodontal ligament. This article explains the composition, chemical and physical properties, action mechanism, handling, preparation, advantages and disadvantages of the MTA in temporary teeth pulpotherapy as a substitute for formocresol in clinical treatments performed according to studies in the literature.

Prognosis is the prediction of the probable course of a disease. Assigning a prognosis to a particular tooth, offers critical information for the develop- ment of a treatment plan. The aim is to restore and/or maintain suitable conditions for dental function. Prognosis constitutes one of the most important decision functions in dentistry, and it will determine the success of the periodontal treatment. The patient must know the condition of his/her teeth, in order to take part in the decisions, participate in take note of the difference and become moti- vated by the changes seen before and after the treatment. Prognosis establishes a projection during time, based on previous success and failures which have been properly, making this application a valuable experience.

AbstractIntroduction: It is not unusual during the clinical clerkship to hear complaints about the inadequate scientific knowledge that undergraduates retain from their basic science years, and there are reports supporting the relevance of this knowledge in the future understanding of clinical diagnoses and management.Objective: To assess the retention of basic science knowledge after the first two-years of medical school studies, previous to clinical clerkships; a five-year longitudinal retrospective study was implemented.Method: A 120-item Multiple Choice Question test to assess the basic knowledge retention was structured by the academic departments in charge of each course. The same assessment was applied each year at the same time, after the end of the first two years of medical school and before their clinical clerkship rotations.Results: More than 75% of students from each class took the exam: 894 (80.7%) in 2007; 752 (86.9%) in 2008; 820 (77.2%) in 2009; 890 (79.8%) in 2010 and 925 (84.4%) in 2011. Cronbach’s α was above 0.7 in each test application. Besides the 2011 class which had a lower mean score, the average for each year remained similar. The lowest scores were for Medical Psychology and Pharmacology, followed by Physiology, Developmental Biology and Cell and Tissue Biology. Public Health I and II and Surgery had the highest scores. When groups are ordered by scores’ average, only the two High Achievement Program Groups (PAEA) had a score equal or higher than 6. Conclusion: Our findings are in agreement with those reported in the literature. The gap of basic and clinical knowledge seems to be a common problem in undergraduates. New strategies should be explored for students to integrate basic sciences with clinical work, resulting in an improved understanding of the scientific foundation of medical practice.

En este número de la revista se presentan trabajos y reflexiones, que pueden motivar modificaciones en nuestra conducta de enseñanza y aprendizaje. Tenemos cuatro trabajos de investigación originales, que abordan aspectos tradicionales y novedosos de la enseñanza de la medicina.

Imagine that you were appointed as a member of a task force that your associate dean for education created to develop a new test to assess medical students’ diagnostic reasoning. You met for the first time and various members of the task force had many ideas about such a test.

Objective: The aim of this study was to show and characterize acts of discrimination and violence occurring among medical students at the University of Caldas (Colombia).Materials and method: This is a descriptive, prospective, cross sectional study, conducted between the first semester of 2010 and the second semester of 2011; the sample was randomly selected to obtain 88 undergraduate students. Results: The 86.4% of students had the antecedent of one of the studied events: discrimination by physical appearance, origin, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation and religion; verbal, physical and psychological aggression; abuse of authority; workplace harassment; threat or intimidation; sanction or punishment; blackmail; teasing, compliments, or obscene gestures; exclusion; sexual harassment and rape. The most frequently reported types of violence were abuse of authority and psychological aggression. Conclusion: The results show the existence of discrimination and violence against medical students and document the need for interventions by the University welfare and administrative staff.

Introduction: Little has been studied about the way in which medical students develop the term medicine. This research focuses on how the concept develops during their career. Objective: the analyses of the restructuring process that the student performs on the concept of “medicine”. Method: Qualitative five-year longitudinal study with annual cross-sections, in students from a high academic performance program at UNAM Faculty of Medicine in Mexico. A natural semantic networks (RSN) method was used that analyzed: 1) The total number of words generated around the term “medicine”, 2) The frequency with which they used these terms, 3) Semantic value of the terms that were more frequently mentioned, 4) The distance between the terms according to their percentage, and 5) The forming of term clusters based on their conceptual similarity. Results: An average of 800 words was obtained during the five years of the study. In first year, the students centered on the words “life” and “health”, in the second year on “health”, “disease”, and “science”, in third and fourth year the main term was “patients”, and in the fifth year it was “health”. The terms clustered into seven categories: values, knowledge, tools, characteristics of the individual, people involved, participants and medical activities. Conclusions: Ten words were prevalent throughout the study and were joined to define Medicine as: the health of the patient, to avoid illness in favor of life, with the support of the doctor, based on the science and knowledge to cure in the clinic. The studied population provides data that are valuable for decision making in education, course content organization, selection of texts, and the implementation of strategies for learning and the development of assessment instruments. 

Introduction: Elevated blood pressure (BP) represents one of the most clinically important problems that affect Mexican population. Medical undergraduate students should master the auscultatory BP measurement method to detect patients at risk. The purpose of this report was to compare the BP measurement technique in different years of the medical undergraduate program and compare the impact of the teaching strategies that are currently used at UNAM Faculty of Medicine. Materials and methods: This is a cross-sectional, observational study. Hundred first-year medical students, 151 third-year students and 150 fifth-year students who measured blood pressure in real subjects were evaluated. BM measurement technique and physician-patient relationship were measured with checklist instruments developed at UNAM Faculty of Medicine, and comparison in scores of the three groups were performed. Results: Third-year students had better technical and cognitive performances (p<0.05) compared with the other two groups. First year students demonstrated a better technique and had higher patient-physician communication skills. Conclusion: Our results support the need to reinforce clinical skills learned during the program, incorporating practical training at an earlier stage. 

Introduction: The preferred strategy to evaluate teaching activities at Mexican universities has been the application of ex profeso questionnaires in which students give their opinion of their teachers’ educational skills. The purpose of this study is to analyze the potential impact of teachers’ and students’ gender on teaching evaluation and to characterize some teaching situations (different courses) that could be associated with certain types of teaching behavior. Methods: Observational study, 505 groups/teachers were evaluated in seven courses of the basic sciences during the 2007 to 2008 academic year, as part of the Unified Plan of Studies at UNAM Faculty of Medicine in Mexico. The Opinion Questionnaire for Evaluation of Teaching (COED) was used to assess teaching performance, an instrument for which there is evidence of validity and reliability. The relationship among teaching performance evaluations by medical students and teachers’ gender were analyzed. Based on the proportion of teachers of a specific sex that are responsible for the teaching of a particular course, a four-type taxonomy of the courses or educational situations was designed, which by a correspondence factorial analysis were associated with differential types of teaching performance behavior. Results: The results show that teachers’ and students’ gender, as well as the type of course or teaching situation, are important factors that intervene in teachers’ performance evaluations by the students via opinion instruments. Conclusions: The evaluations of teachers are influenced by factors different to educational competence itself. These factors should be considered when, based on anonymous questionnaires filled by students, decisions are taken to improve quality of teaching.

Introduction: A “learning style” is the use of a cognitive style in a given learning condition. It is the result of the temporal interaction between personal traits and context. The importance of identifying the students’ learning styles has been widely described as fundamental for achieving congruency between learning and teaching. The Vermunt Inventory of Learning Styles (VILS) is a tool to assess constituents of the learning process that have not been studied in combination. Currently there is not a similar tool that can be applied to the Spanish speaking population, since most of the existing instruments that assess learning styles have been written in English. Objective: Translation to Spanish of Vermunt’s inventory and measurement of reliability. Methods: We followed the methodology suggested by Brislin. In summary, a Spanish translation was done followed by a grammatical revision of the translated version and then a backtranslation to English; finally, every item in both English versions were compared. Statistics included descriptive and inferential analysis. Results: The Spanish translation of the 120 items of the inventory was obtained, Cronbach’s alpha was 0.91. Conclusion: Translations present some problems due to linguistic and cultural variance. The globalization of education allows tools interchange that may be translated and adapted to the cultural context of target population. Since the translation of a measurement instrument is an important step to adopt the tool in a different language, it is essential to emphasize that the quality of the translated tool be directly related to the process of translation and validation.