Evaluating audio-visual falls prevention messages with community-dwelling older people using a World Café forum approach

Background: Falls risk increases sharply with older age but many older people are unaware or underestimate their risk of falling. Increased population-based efforts to influence older people’s falls prevention behavior are urgently needed. The aim of this study was to obtain a group of older people’s collective perspectives on newly developed prototypes of audio-visual (AV) falls prevention messages, and evaluate changes in their falls prevention behaviour after watching and discussing these. Methods: A mixed-method study using a community World Café forum approach. Results: Although the forum participants (n = 38) mostly responded positively to the three AV messages and showed a significant increase in their falls prevention capability and motivation after the forum, the participants collectively felt the AV messages needed a more inspirational call to action. The forum suggested this could be achieved by means of targeting the message and increasing the personal connection. Participants further suggested several alternatives to online falls prevention information, such as printed information in places in the community, as a means to increase opportunity to seek out falls prevention information. Conclusions: Falls prevention promotion messages need to be carefully tailored if they are to be more motivating to older people to take action to do something about their falls risk. A wider variety of revised and tailored AV messages, as one component of a community-wide falls prevention campaign, could be considered in an effort to persuade older people to take decisive action to do something about their falls risk. Trial registration: This study was registered prospectively: NCT03154788. Registered 11 May 2017

Spirits, Ghosts, Atmospheres of Capital

To identify genetic variants associated with head circumference in infancy, we performed a meta-analysis of seven genome-wide association (GWA) studies (N=10,768 from European ancestry enrolled in pregnancy/birth cohorts) and followed up three lead signals in six replication studies (combined N=19,089). Rs7980687 on chromosome 12q24 (P=8.1×10(−9)), and rs1042725 on chromosome 12q15 (P=2.8×10(−10)) were robustly associated with head circumference in infancy. Although these loci have previously been associated with adult height(1), their effects on infant head circumference were largely independent of height (P=3.8×10(−7) for rs7980687, P=1.3×10(−7) for rs1042725 after adjustment for infant height). A third signal, rs11655470 on chromosome 17q21, showed suggestive evidence of association with head circumference (P=3.9×10(−6)). SNPs correlated to the 17q21 signal show genome-wide association with adult intra cranial volume(2), Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases(3-5), indicating that a common genetic variant in this region might link early brain growth with neurological disease in later life