A pilot study on mindfulness based stress reduction for smokers

BACKGROUND: Mindfulness means paying attention in the present moment, non-judgmentally, without commentary or decision-making. We report results of a pilot study designed to test the feasibility of using Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) (with minor modifications) as a smoking intervention. METHODS: MBSR instructors provided instructions in mindfulness in eight weekly group sessions. Subjects attempted smoking cessation during week seven without pharmacotherapy. Smoking abstinence was tested six weeks after the smoking quit day with carbon monoxide breath test and 7-day smoking calendars. Questionnaires were administered to evaluate changes in stress and affective distress. RESULTS: 18 subjects enrolled in the intervention with an average smoking history of 19.9 cigarettes per day for 26.4 years. At the 6-week post-quit visit, 10 of 18 subjects (56%) achieved biologically confirmed 7-day point-prevalent smoking abstinence. Compliance with meditation was positively associated with smoking abstinence and decreases in stress and affective distress. DISCUSSIONS AND CONCLUSION: The results of this study suggest that mindfulness training may show promise for smoking cessation and warrants additional study in a larger comparative trial

"You have to get wet to learn how to swim" applied to bridging the gap between research into personnel scheduling and its implementation in practice

Personnel scheduling problems have attracted research interests for several decades. They have been considerably changed over time, accommodating a variety of constraints related to legal and organisation requirements, part-time staff, flexible hours of staff, staff preferences, etc. This led to a myriad of approaches developed for solving personnel scheduling problems including optimisation, meta-heuristics, artificial intelligence, decision-support, and also hybrids of these approaches. However, this still does not imply that this research has a large impact on practice and that state-of-the art models and algorithms are widely in use in organisations. One can find a reasonably large number of software packages that aim to assist in personnel scheduling. A classification of this software based on its purpose will be proposed, accompanied with a discussion about the level of support that this software offers to schedulers. A general conclusion is that the available software, with some exceptions, does not benefit from the wealth of developed models and methods. The remaining of the paper will provide insights into some characteristics of real-world scheduling problems that, in the author’s opinion, have not been given a due attention in the personnel scheduling research community yet and which could contribute to the enhancement of the implementation of research results in practice. Concluding remarks are that in order to bridge the gap that still exists between research into personnel scheduling and practice, we need to engage more with schedulers in practice and also with software developers; one may say we need to get wet if we want to learn how to swim

Nurses' experiences, expectations, and preferences for mind-body practices to reduce stress

BACKGROUND: Most research on the impact of mind-body training does not ask about participants\u27 baseline experience, expectations, or preferences for training. To better plan participant-centered mind-body intervention trials for nurses to reduce occupational stress, such descriptive information would be valuable. METHODS: We conducted an anonymous email survey between April and June, 2010 of North American nurses interested in mind-body training to reduce stress. The e-survey included: demographic characteristics, health conditions and stress levels; experiences with mind-body practices; expected health benefits; training preferences; and willingness to participate in future randomized controlled trials. RESULTS: Of the 342 respondents, 96% were women and 92% were Caucasian. Most (73%) reported one or more health conditions, notably anxiety (49%); back pain (41%); GI problems such as irritable bowel syndrome (34%); or depression (33%). Their median occupational stress level was 4 (0 = none; 5 = extreme stress). Nearly all (99%) reported already using one or more mind-body practices to reduce stress: intercessory prayer (86%), breath-focused meditation (49%), healing or therapeutic touch (39%), yoga/tai chi/qi gong (34%), or mindfulness-based meditation (18%). The greatest expected benefits were for greater spiritual well-being (56%); serenity, calm, or inner peace (54%); better mood (51%); more compassion (50%); or better sleep (42%). Most (65%) wanted additional training; convenience (74% essential or very important), was more important than the program\u27s reputation (49%) or scientific evidence about effectiveness (32%) in program selection. Most (65%) were willing to participate in a randomized trial of mind-body training; among these, most were willing to collect salivary cortisol (60%), or serum biomarkers (53%) to assess the impact of training. CONCLUSIONS: Most nurses interested in mind-body training already engage in such practices. They have greater expectations about spiritual and emotional than physical benefits, but are willing to participate in studies and to collect biomarker data. Recruitment may depend more on convenience than a program\u27s scientific basis or reputation. Knowledge of participants\u27 baseline experiences, expectations, and preferences helps inform future training and research on mind-body approaches to reduce stress

Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting Education: Promoting Family Mindfulness During the Perinatal Period

We present the conceptual and empirical foundation and curriculum content of the Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting (MBCP) program and the results of a pilot study of n = 27 pregnant women participating in MBCP during their third trimester of pregnancy. MBCP is a formal adaptation of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program and was developed and refined over the course of 11 years of clinical practice with 59 groups of expectant couples. MBCP is designed to promote family health and well-being through the practice of mindfulness during pregnancy, childbirth, and early parenting. Quantitative results from the current study include statistically significant increases in mindfulness and positive affect, and decreases in pregnancy anxiety, depression, and negative affect from pre- to post-test (p < .05). Effect sizes for changes in key hypothesized intervention mediators were large (d > .70), suggesting that MBCP is achieving its intended effects on maternal well-being during pregnancy. Qualitative reports from participants expand upon the quantitative findings, with the majority of participants reporting perceived benefits of using mindfulness practices during the perinatal period and early parenting. Our future research will involve conducting a randomized controlled trial of MBCP to test effects on psychophysiological stress mechanisms and to examine effects on birth outcomes, family relationship quality, and child development outcomes

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Mental Health Professionals—a Pilot Study

We investigated the adherence of mental health professionals to a Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) programme as well as the impact of MBCT on mindful awareness and attention, psychological well-being and distress, state and trait anxiety, worry and satisfaction with life. The design comprised of a prospective uncontrolled intervention study with pre- and post-measurements of meditation adherence and measures of psychological well-being. Twenty-seven mental health professionals participated in an 8-week MBCT programme for relapse prevention of depression, modified for healthy individuals. Their homework, mindful awareness and attention (Mindful Awareness and Attention Scale), general psychological well-being (General Health Questionnaire), state and trait anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), satisfaction with life (Satisfaction with Life Scale), general psychopathology (Brief Symptom Inventory) as well as worry (Penn State Worry Questionnaire) were measured at week 1 and 8 during the intervention and at week 20 as follow-up. Twenty four of 27 (88 %) mental health professionals completed the course and were included in the analysis. Of these, 75 % (18 of 24) were female with a mean age of 36 years and a mean experience in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) of 6 years. Sixty-three per cent (15 of 24) reported continued practice at 20-week follow-up. A statistically significant improvement of mindful awareness and psychological well-being, with significant reduction in worry, trait anxiety and general psychopathology, was observed in participants who continued some form of meditation practice during the follow-up period. The majority of mental health professionals adhered to the MBCT meditation practice, and the more they practised mindfulness meditation, the more they experienced an increase in mindful awareness and attention, general psychological well-being and a decrease in general psychopathology, trait anxiety and worry

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research