Strengthening At Risk and Homeless Young Mothers and Children Evaluation Report: Year 2, 2008-2009

Assesses the second-year enrollment in and impact of Hilton's initiative to address the needs of homeless and at-risk young families, including employment, education, housing, health, and family functioning; promising practices; and lessons learned

Postpartum sleep disturbance and psychomotor vigilance performance

Postpartum women have high rates of sleep disturbance and commonly suffer from many of the effects of disturbed sleep, though attentional state has not been studied extensively in this population. This study assessed sleep and attentional state psychomotor performance in postpartum women to develop a better understanding of how sleep disturbance --specifically sleep fragmentation and partial sleep deprivation-- is associated with attentional state psychomotor performance. Participants were a sample of 24 postpartum mothers from a larger study. Mothers were 29.96 (SD = 7.94) years old, had a mean income of {dollar}65,808 (SD = {dollar}41,398), and had 17.04 (SD = 2.53) years of education. Of these women, 95.83% lived with their partner, 91.67% were white, and 50% were primiparious. Data were collected from 8 through 15 weeks postpartum, inclusive. Mothers wore an actigraph on their non-dominant wrist to record their sleep and recorded their sleep and wake behaviors in an electronic diary. Mothers completed a psychomotor vigilance test (PVT) each morning within 2 hours of awakening and before consuming caffeine. Overall, mothers obtained a reasonable amount of 24 hour sleep (7 hours and 36 minutes); however, this sleep was fragmented (M = 14.19, SE = .16). Additionally, mothers performed poorly on the PVT (Reaction time: M = 397.52, msec. SE = 2.61; Percent lapses M = 15.89, SE = .52) when compared to normative values. Results indicate that sleep time and sleep fragmentation from the previous night are not associated with attentional based psychomotor performance the following day in this sample of women. Across postpartum weeks 8-16 the amount of sleep obtained remained the same; however, across time it became less fragmented (p \u3c .001) and was obtained in more consolidated periods. The current study provides objective data regarding the amount of sleep fragmentation in postpartum women and describes how sleep fragmentation changes across postpartum weeks 8-16. Additionally, this study indicates that postpartum women perform poorly on the PVT, yet they obtain a reasonable amount of sleep time

Sleep and sleepiness among first-time postpartum parents

Objectives. Postpartum maternal sleep disturbance is common. However, little research has examined postpartum fathers\u27 sleep. Additionally, the magnitude of postpartum mothers\u27 and fathers\u27 daytime sleepiness has not been objectively indexed. The aims of this dissertation study were to: (1) objectively examine the difference in sleep and sleepiness levels among first-time mothers and fathers during their early postpartum period; (2) examine parents\u27 perceptions of their own and their partner\u27s mood, sleep, and sleepiness.;Method. Twenty one first-time postpartum mother-father dyads (N = 42; 27.38 +/- 4.92 years; 91.67% white; 15.40 +/- 3.53 years of education; annual household income {dollar}56,091 +/- {dollar}34,320), completed one week of continuous wrist actigraphy and electronic sleep diary monitoring followed by standard four-nap Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT) when their infants were 6.93 +/- 1.26 weeks old.;Results. Mothers (M = 424.83, SD = 42 minutes) had significantly (F[1, 18] = 17.31, p \u3c .01, d = 1.30) more 24-hour sleep time than fathers (M = 375.14, SD = 34.06 minutes); however, mothers (M = 18.86, SD = 3.34) also had significantly (F[1,18] = 13.17, p \u3c .01, d = 1.12) more sleep fragmentation than fathers (M = 14.34, SD = 4.62). Fathers ( M = 11.80, SD = 4.60) had significantly ( F[1, 19] = 11.85, p \u3c .005, d = 0.88) higher levels of sleepiness than mothers (M = 8.03, SD = 3.92). Overall, fathers were better at reporting their partner\u27s objective sleepiness than mothers were their partner\u27s; furthermore, fathers were better judges of their own objective nocturnal wake time than mothers were their own.;Conclusions. The current study is the first to objectively report sleepiness values among postpartum mothers and fathers during their early postpartum period. Furthermore, the current study expands the knowledge of the relatively unknown sleep experience of postpartum fathers. Additionally, the identification of parental perceptions of sleep and sleepiness may lay the framework to identify ways to maximize productivity and safety within a postpartum household. The early postpartum period is important in the context of these findings because it is a time when one, or both parents go back to work to function as productive members of society---and they have a new infant to care for---yet, new parents may experience various sleep and sleepiness-associated impairments.;Support. NIH grant R21HD053836 (HMD); APA Basic Psychological Science Research Grant (SI); WVU Doctoral Student Research Support (SI); WVU Alumni Fund (SI); WVU Behavioral and Biomedical Sciences Training Scholarship Research Award (SI)

Pain, mechanisms of fatigue and autonomic function in rheumatoid arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a disabling chronic autoimmune disease characterized by joint pain, and potentially leading to a serious decay of life quality. Pain remains the most important problem for patients with RA, and there is an obvious need to increase the knowledge of pain patterns in early disease and relation to anti-rheumatic treatment. The first three papers of this thesis are based on the population-based early RA cohort (EIRA study), linked to the Swedish Rheumatology Register (SRQ). The main focus was to investigate pain patterns in early RA and the relation to other clinical factors. First we studied the frequency of remaining pain after three months’ treatment with the first-line agent methotrexate, and found this outcome in a majority of the patients. Moreover, remaining pain was found in almost a third of patients with good clinical response, and predicted by high disability and low inflammatory activity at diagnosis. Further, we found that despite satisfactory inflammation control one year after diagnosis, strongly predicts development of outcome, unacceptable pain, and studied the pain course during the first five years after remaining pain widespread pain and fatigue three years after diagnosis. Next, we used a more severe pain diagnosis. We found that almost a third of the patients still have unacceptable pain after one year of adequate anti-rheumatic treatment, and there is minor further decrease of the proportion with this outcome after five years, suggesting that optimization of immune suppressive treatment can not decrease pain levels further at this stage. Women were more likely than men to develop unacceptable pain and the strongest predictors at diagnosis for this outcome were disability, patients global assessment (PGA) of disease, high number of tender joint count (TJC) and low number of swollen joint count (SJC). At diagnosis, pain correlated to disease activity and SJC/TJC, and this correlation increased after three months to stable levels that remained throughout the first five years of disease. TJC was higher correlated to pain than SJC during the whole early RA disease course. Pain mechanisms are closely linked to the autonomic nervous system (ANS), and dysfunction of autonomic activity is well documented in pain conditions such as fibromyalgia (FM). Our investigation of ANS function in RA and FM revealed different autonomic patterns that could also be coupled to differences in neuroinflammation. Thus, central nervous system (CNS) mechanisms in RA were characterized by an IL-1β dominated intrathecal immune activation, which, unlike in FM, was coupled to reduced parasympathetic activity. These data indicate an earlier unknown interaction between CNS mediators and autonomic activity, which may be of interest to further identify treatment targets in neuro-immune regulation. Conversely in FM, there was an increase of central IL-8, known to associate with pain regulation, and FM also displayed an upregulation of sympathetic activity, which was independent of neuroinflammation. Altogether, our data imply that remaining pain after anti-rheumatic treatment is not uncommon. The frequency of remaining pain stabilizes during the first years of disease and is a strong risk factor for subsequent generalized pain. Furthermore, we have shown that neuroinflammatory patterns in RA are coupled to autonomic dysfunction, and also clearly differ from FM, indicating different mechanisms behind RA pain and dysfunctional pain. The findings of this thesis have illustrated the pain problem in early RA, and hopefully this knowledge may contribute to early identification and treatment of patients at risk of developing pain conditions in connection to their rheumatic disease

2004-2006 Xavier University Undergraduate and Graduate Information College of Arts and Sciences, College of Social Sciences, Williams College of Business, Course Catalog

https://www.exhibit.xavier.edu/coursecatalog/1154/thumbnail.jp

A quantitative and qualitative approach to cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) body patterning

Cuttlefish are renowned for their ability to quickly alter the colour and texture of their skin, for camouflage and communication. This is due to the presence of thousands of pigment-filled sacs, known as chromatophores, which are distributed across the skin. The chromatophores are innervated by motoneurons, which dilate the chromatophores to create the spots, stripes, and other markings, known as chromatic components. There are 34 recognized chromatic components, and it is an interesting question how cuttlefish coordinate the expression of these components to camouflage and communicate. The digital age has introduced new, powerful algorithms and methods to tease out subtle features in the coloration patterns, by means of image registration, segmentation, and identification, as well as methods for modeling the underlying control systems. These tools offer major new insights into the mechanisms of visual perception. In addition, powerful techniques have recently been developed that have yet to be applied to this complex visual motor control system. These methods have large potential in helping discover what features between the pattern and the environment are necessary to prevent detection. Here I present four laboratory experiments, that for the first time use machine learning models, to investigate cuttlefish pattern formation, implementation, and information. The first two experimental chapters investigate how cuttlefish orchestrate their chromatic components for camouflage patterns, and what strategies they employ on diverse backgrounds. I demonstrate that components are expressed more independently than previously believed, finding that the range of patterns expressed lie on a continuum, allowing us to suggest a revised classification scheme for cuttlefish body patterns. The diversity of patterns seem to imply that a cuttlefish could use its repertoire flexibly to display the maximally cryptic pattern for a given background, however I show that cuttlefish to not in fact select a single (possibly optimal) camouflage pattern, continually alter their appearance on a given background, and that the frequency of change increases in relation to the size of the objects in the environment. My third chapter investigated the language-like properties of cuttlefish communication using human speech recognition models. From our subset of cuttlefish patterns, I discovered cuttlefish utilize a lexicon of 10 patterns, with language-like properties such as: they obeyed Zipf’s law, contained around 1.6 bits per display, and interestingly, while 2 patterns were visually similar, they were displayed in separate contexts. By implementing a regression onto the patterns, I introduce a basic dictionary of cuttlefish terms and their meaning. From my investigations into cuttlefish intraspecific signaling, I discovered two previously undocumented patterns, used in agonistic encounters between cuttlefish. My final chapter describes these patterns and the contexts they are displayed