A roadmap to develop dementia research capacity and capability in Pakistan: a model for low- and middle-income countries

Objective To produce a strategic roadmap for supporting the development of dementia research in Pakistan. Background While global research strategies for dementia research already exist, none is tailored to the specific needs and challenges of low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) like Pakistan. Methods We undertook an iterative consensus process with lay and professional experts to develop a Theory of Change-based strategy for dementia research in Pakistan. This included Expert Reference Groups (ERGs), strategic planning techniques, a “research question” priority survey, and consultations with Key Opinion Leaders. Results We agreed on ten principles to guide dementia research in Pakistan, emphasizing pragmatic, resource sparing, real-world approaches to support people with dementia, both locally and internationally. Goals included capacity/capability building. Priority research topics included raising awareness and understanding of dementia, and improving quality of life. Conclusion This roadmap may be a model for other LMIC health ecosystems with emerging dementia research cultures

Evidence based healthcare planning in developing countries: An Informatics perspective

Most of the national Health Information Systems (HIS) in resource limited developing countries do not serve the purpose of management support and thus the service is adversely affected. While emphasising the importance of timely and accurate health information in decision making in healthcare planning, this paper explains that Health Management Information System Failure is commonly seen in developing countries as well as the developed countries. It is suggested that the possibility of applying principles of Health Informatics and the technology of Decision Support Systems should be seriously considered to improve the situation. A brief scientific explanation of the evolution of these two disciplines is included

Economic Growth, Population Theory, and Physiology: The Bearing of Long-Term Processes on the Making of Economic Policy

Prize Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1993Economics History;

Interdisciplinarity and research on local issues: evidence from a developing country

This paper examines the role of interdisciplinarity on research pertaining to local issues. Using Colombian publications from 1991 until 2011 in the Web of Science, we investigate the relationship between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the local orientation of the articles. We find that a higher degree of interdisciplinarity in a publication is associated with a greater emphasis on local issues. In particular, our results support the view that research that combines cognitively disparate disciplines, what we refer to as distal interdisciplinarity, is associated with more local focus of research. We discuss the policy implications of these results in the context of national research assessments targeting excellence and socio-economic impact

Decision-making regarding total knee replacement surgery: a qualitative meta-synthesis

Knee osteoarthritis is a highly prevalent condition that can result in disability and reduced quality of life. The evidence suggests that total knee replacement surgery (TKR) is an effective intervention for patients with severe knee problems, but there is also an unmet need for this treatment in the UK. To help understand the reason for this unmet need, the aim of this study was to explore the factors that influence the decision-making process of TKR surgery by synthesising the available evidence from qualitative research on this topic

ENIGMA and global neuroscience: A decade of large-scale studies of the brain in health and disease across more than 40 countries.

This review summarizes the last decade of work by the ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) Consortium, a global alliance of over 1400 scientists across 43 countries, studying the human brain in health and disease. Building on large-scale genetic studies that discovered the first robustly replicated genetic loci associated with brain metrics, ENIGMA has diversified into over 50 working groups (WGs), pooling worldwide data and expertise to answer fundamental questions in neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, and genetics. Most ENIGMA WGs focus on specific psychiatric and neurological conditions, other WGs study normal variation due to sex and gender differences, or development and aging; still other WGs develop methodological pipelines and tools to facilitate harmonized analyses of "big data" (i.e., genetic and epigenetic data, multimodal MRI, and electroencephalography data). These international efforts have yielded the largest neuroimaging studies to date in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorders, epilepsy, and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. More recent ENIGMA WGs have formed to study anxiety disorders, suicidal thoughts and behavior, sleep and insomnia, eating disorders, irritability, brain injury, antisocial personality and conduct disorder, and dissociative identity disorder. Here, we summarize the first decade of ENIGMA's activities and ongoing projects, and describe the successes and challenges encountered along the way. We highlight the advantages of collaborative large-scale coordinated data analyses for testing reproducibility and robustness of findings, offering the opportunity to identify brain systems involved in clinical syndromes across diverse samples and associated genetic, environmental, demographic, cognitive, and psychosocial factors

Quantitative Perspectives on Fifty Years of the Journal of the History of Biology

Journal of the History of Biology provides a fifty-year long record for examining the evolution of the history of biology as a scholarly discipline. In this paper, we present a new dataset and preliminary quantitative analysis of the thematic content of JHB from the perspectives of geography, organisms, and thematic fields. The geographic diversity of authors whose work appears in JHB has increased steadily since 1968, but the geographic coverage of the content of JHB articles remains strongly lopsided toward the United States, United Kingdom, and western Europe and has diversified much less dramatically over time. The taxonomic diversity of organisms discussed in JHB increased steadily between 1968 and the late 1990s but declined in later years, mirroring broader patterns of diversification previously reported in the biomedical research literature. Finally, we used a combination of topic modeling and nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques to develop a model of multi-article fields within JHB. We found evidence for directional changes in the representation of fields on multiple scales. The diversity of JHB with regard to the representation of thematic fields has increased overall, with most of that diversification occurring in recent years. Drawing on the dataset generated in the course of this analysis, as well as web services in the emerging digital history and philosophy of science ecosystem, we have developed an interactive web platform for exploring the content of JHB, and we provide a brief overview of the platform in this article. As a whole, the data and analyses presented here provide a starting-place for further critical reflection on the evolution of the history of biology over the past half-century.Comment: 45 pages, 14 figures, 4 table

Rationalizing health care in a changing world: the need to know

The World Development Report 1993 announced that global life expectancy was then 65. Experience in the developed world suggests that the World Health Organization’s dictum, ‘health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being’, is simply not attainable for the foreseeable future. As physical health has improved, mental problems have become more prominent and a sense of well-being has declined. Furthermore, as the population ages and medical technology improves, the cost of health care grows almost exponentially. Since the population of the developed world is continuing to age and aging is spreading rapidly throughout the developing world, knowledge is the principal way of dealing with this seemingly intractable problem: we must know, quantitatively, the age-specific causes of ill health, and we must know which means of prevention and treatment are effective. Finally, we must apply that knowledge rationally