Queens Library HealthLink: Fighting Health Disparities through Community Engagement

Queens, New York is a diverse urban environment and home to many recent immigrants and low-income populations, which are known to have lower access to healthcare and are thus at higher risk for a wide range of negative health outcomes. Queens residents face serious cancer disparities, with late-stage cancer detection rates for breast, colorectal and prostate cancers far surpassing national averages. Developed to address such disparities, Queens Library HealthLink (HealthLink) is a four-way partnership that seeks to increase access to cancer screening, care and education in medically underserved neighborhoods in Queens. Through 20 of the 62 Queens Public Libraries, HealthLink organizes community members into Cancer Action Councils that develop and tailor interventions suited to community needs, assets and priorities, as well as perform evaluation of their work. This article describes the partnership, its program outcomes and case examples of successful initiatives in order to present HealthLink’s relevance to other urban public libraries as a model for reaching broad, underserved audiences with health information and services

Penerapan Model Pembelajaran Atraktif Berbasis Multiple Intelligences Tentang Pemantulan Cahaya pada Cermin

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui efektivitas penerapan model pembelajaran atraktif berbasis multiple intelligences dalam meremediasi miskonsepsi siswa tentang pemantulan cahaya pada cermin. Pada penelitian ini digunakan bentuk pre-eksperimental design dengan rancangan one group pretest-post test design. Alat pengumpulan data berupa tes pilihan ganda dengan reasoning. Hasil validitas sebesar 4,08 dan reliabilitas 0,537. Siswa dibagi menjadi lima kelompok kecerdasan, yaitu kelompok linguistic intelligence, mathematical-logical intelligence, visual-spatial intelligence, bodily-khinestetic intelligence, dan musical intelligence. Siswa membahas konsep fisika sesuai kelompok kecerdasannya dalam bentuk pembuatan pantun-puisi, teka-teki silang, menggambar kreatif, drama, dan mengarang lirik lagu. Efektivitas penerapan model pembelajaran multiple intelligences menggunakan persamaan effect size. Ditemukan bahwa skor effect size masing-masing kelompok berkategori tinggi sebesar 5,76; 3,76; 4,60; 1,70; dan 1,34. Penerapan model pembelajaran atraktif berbasis multiple intelligences efektif dalam meremediasi miskonsepsi siswa. Penelitian ini diharapkan dapat digunakan pada materi fisika dan sekolah lainnya

Functional Connectivity of Brain Structures Correlates with Treatment Outcome in Major Depressive Disorder

Identifying biosignatures to assess the probability of response to an antidepressant for patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) is critically needed. Functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI) offers the promise to provide such a measure. Previous work with fcMRI demonstrated that the correlation in signal from one region to another is a measure of functional connectivity. In this pilot work, a baseline non-task fcMRI was acquired in 14 adults with MDD who were free of all medications. Participants were then treated for 8 weeks with an antidepressant and then clinically re-evaluated. Probabilistic anatomic regions of interest (ROI) were defined for 16 brain regions (eight for each hemisphere) previously identified as being important in mood disorders. These ROIs were used to determine mean time courses for each individual's baseline non-task fcMRI. The correlations in time courses between 16 brain regions were calculated. These calculated correlations were considered to signify measures of functional connectivity. The degree of connectivity for each participant was correlated with treatment outcome. Among 13 participants with 8 weeks follow-up data, connectivity measures in several regions, especially the subcallosal cortex, were highly correlated with treatment outcome. These connectivity measures could provide a means to evaluate how likely a patient is to respond to an antidepressant treatment. Further work using larger samples is required to confirm these findings and to assess if measures of functional connectivity can be used to predict differential outcomes between antidepressant treatments

Overexpression of Carnitine Palmitoyltransferase-1 in Skeletal Muscle Is Sufficient to Enhance Fatty Acid Oxidation and Improve High-Fat Diet–Induced Insulin Resistance

OBJECTIVE—Skeletal muscle insulin resistance is associated with lipid accumulation, but whether insulin resistance is due to reduced or enhanced flux of long-chain fatty acids into the mitochondria is both controversial and unclear. We hypothesized that skeletal muscle–specific overexpression of the muscle isoform of carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1 (CPT1), the enzyme that controls the entry of long-chain fatty acyl CoA into mitochondria, would enhance rates of fatty acid oxidation and improve insulin action in muscle in high-fat diet insulin-resistant rats

Optimizing the use of continuous glucose monitoring in young children with type 1 diabetes with an adaptive study design and multiple randomizations

Parents of young children with type 1 diabetes (T1D) experience unique, developmental challenges in managing their child's T1D, resulting in psychosocial distress. Only a small portion of young children reach glucose goals and adherence to diabetes devices that help improve T1D management have historically been low in this population. The purpose of this study is to test four interventions that couple developmentally tailored behavioral supports with education to optimize use of diabetes devices, improve glucose control, and reduce psychosocial distress for parents of young children with T1D. The study team designed four behavioral interventions, two aimed at improving glucose control and two aimed at optimizing use of diabetes devices. The goal of this paper is to describe the behavioral interventions developed for this study, including the results of a pilot test, and describe the methods and analysis plan to test this intervention strategy with ninety participants in a large-scale, randomized trial using a sequential multiple assignment randomization trial (SMART) design. A SMART design will permit a clinically relevant evaluation of the intervention strategy, as it allows multiple randomizations based on individualized assessments throughout the study instead of a fixed intervention dose seen in most traditional randomized controlled trials

Drug-gene interactions of antihypertensive medications and risk of incident cardiovascular disease: a pharmacogenomics study from the CHARGE consortium

Background Hypertension is a major risk factor for a spectrum of cardiovascular diseases (CVD), including myocardial infarction, sudden death, and stroke. In the US, over 65 million people have high blood pressure and a large proportion of these individuals are prescribed antihypertensive medications. Although large long-term clinical trials conducted in the last several decades have identified a number of effective antihypertensive treatments that reduce the risk of future clinical complications, responses to therapy and protection from cardiovascular events vary among individuals. Methods Using a genome-wide association study among 21,267 participants with pharmaceutically treated hypertension, we explored the hypothesis that genetic variants might influence or modify the effectiveness of common antihypertensive therapies on the risk of major cardiovascular outcomes. The classes of drug treatments included angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, beta-blockers, calcium channel blockers, and diuretics. In the setting of the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) consortium, each study performed array-based genome-wide genotyping, imputed to HapMap Phase II reference panels, and used additive genetic models in proportional hazards or logistic regression models to evaluate drug-gene interactions for each of four therapeutic drug classes. We used meta-analysis to combine study-specific interaction estimates for approximately 2 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a discovery analysis among 15,375 European Ancestry participants (3,527 CVD cases) with targeted follow-up in a case-only study of 1,751 European Ancestry GenHAT participants as well as among 4,141 African-Americans (1,267 CVD cases). Results Although drug-SNP interactions were biologically plausible, exposures and outcomes were well measured, and power was sufficient to detect modest interactions, we did not identify any statistically significant interactions from the four antihypertensive therapy meta-analyses (Pinteraction > 5.0×10−8). Similarly, findings were null for meta-analyses restricted to 66 SNPs with significant main effects on coronary artery disease or blood pressure from large published genome-wide association studies (Pinteraction ≥ 0.01). Our results suggest that there are no major pharmacogenetic influences of common SNPs on the relationship between blood pressure medications and the risk of incident CVD