Posttraumatic stress disorder following asthma attack (post-asthma attack PTSD) and psychiatric co-morbidity: The impact of alexithymia and coping

This study investigated the prevalence of post-asthma attack posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the severity of psychiatric co-morbidity among a group of college students and whether alexithymia and coping strategies would relate to health outcomes. This is a cross-sectional study in which 156 college students who had previously experienced asthma attack were recruited. They completed a demographic page, Asthma Symptom Checklist, PTSD Checklist, General Health Questionnaire-28, Toronto Alexithymia Scale and the COPE. They were also matched with 141 students without asthma. The results showed that 3% met the criteria for full-PTSD, 44% for partial and 53% for no-PTSD. There were no significant differences between the asthma and control groups in severity of psychiatric co-morbid symptoms. Path analyses showed that asthma severity was significantly correlated with PTSD and psychiatric co-morbidity. It was also correlated with alexithymia which was in turn associated with psychiatric co-morbidity but not PTSD. Coping strategies were not correlated with health outcomes. To conclude, people can develop PTSD symptoms and degrees of psychiatric co-morbid symptoms after suffering asthma attack. The severity of these symptoms relates to people\u27s perceptions of asthma severity and alexithymia. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd

Dental Hygiene Education About Patients With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: A Survey of U.S. Dental Hygiene Programs

In 2019, the Commission on Dental Accreditation (CODA) changed its standard from “assessing treatment needs” to require “providing dental hygiene care” for dental hygiene students to obtain competency in the treatment of patients with special needs. The study’s purpose was to evaluate accredited U.S. dental hygiene programs’ preparation of their students treating patients with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). A 25-item Qualtrics® survey was sent to 325 dental hygiene directors. Survey topics included curriculum content and structure, curriculum changes in response to new CODA standards, didactic and clinical experiences in treatment of patients with IDD. Descriptive statistics were calculated and comparisons were made using chi-square tests. The response rate was 29.5% (n=89/301 delivered surveys). Results indicated the need for improving program directors’ understanding of the new accreditation requirement and increasing some programs’ clinical education for dental hygiene students in treating patients with IDD.Master of Scienc

The organization of melatonin in lipid membranes

AbstractMelatonin is a hormone that has been shown to have protective effects in several diseases that are associated with cholesterol dysregulation, including cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, and certain types of cancers. We studied the interaction of melatonin with model membranes made of dimyristoylphosphatidylcholine (DMPC) at melatonin concentrations ranging from 0.5mol% to 30mol%. From 2-dimensional X-ray diffraction measurements, we find that melatonin induces a re-ordering of the lipid membrane that is strongly dependent on the melatonin concentration. At low melatonin concentrations, we observe the presence of melatonin-enriched patches in the membrane, which are significantly thinner than the lipid bilayer. The melatonin molecules were found to align parallel to the lipid tails in these patches. At high melatonin concentrations of 30mol%, we observe a highly ordered melatonin structure that is uniform throughout the membrane, where the melatonin molecules align parallel to the bilayers and one melatonin molecule associates with 2 lipid molecules. Understanding the organization and interactions of melatonin in membranes, and how these are dependent on the concentration, may shed light into its anti-amyloidogenic, antioxidative and photoprotective properties and help develop a structural basis for these properties

ADDRESSING COMMUNITY HEALTH THROUGH UPSTREAM DETERMINANTS: INCREASING CHILD RESILIENCE BY TRANSFORMING THE SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY CONTEXT IN CUMBERLAND COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA

Interactions with our community and social environment play a significant role in our overall health and wellbeing and are considered Social Determinants of Health (SDOH). One SDOH that impacts Cumberland County, North Carolina is the number of children aged 0-3 years old who have been abused or maltreated. This leads to multiple health issues including cardiovascular disease, strokes, and mental health issues and can perpetuate the cycle of violent crime. Due to this issue, we have formed the Cumberland County Child Resiliency Organization (CCCRO), an Accountable Care Community (ACC) whose goal is to addressing health outcomes by improving parenting strategies for caregivers to reduce the incidence of child abuse by 10% by 2024. The CCCRO will be working with a group of community stakeholders and partners to advocate for a federal ban on corporal punishment and to implement the Building Resilient Families program for parents and caregivers in Cumberland County.Master of Public Healt

ADDRESSING COMMUNITY HEALTH THROUGH UPSTREAM DETERMINANTS: INCREASING CHILD RESILIENCE BY TRANSFORMING THE SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY CONTEXT IN CUMBERLAND COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA

Interactions with our community and social environment play a significant role in our overall health and wellbeing and are considered Social Determinants of Health (SDOH). One SDOH that impacts Cumberland County, North Carolina is the number of children aged 0-3 years old who have been abused or maltreated. This leads to multiple health issues including cardiovascular disease, strokes, and mental health issues and can perpetuate the cycle of violent crime. Due to this issue, we have formed the Cumberland County Child Resiliency Organization (CCCRO), an Accountable Care Community (ACC) whose goal is to addressing health outcomes by improving parenting strategies for caregivers to reduce the incidence of child abuse by 10% by 2024. The CCCRO will be working with a group of community stakeholders and partners to advocate for a federal ban on corporal punishment and to implement the Building Resilient Families program for parents and caregivers in Cumberland County.Master of Public Healt

The Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper (LunaH-Map) CubeSat Mission

The Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper (LunaH-Map) is a 6U CubeSat mission recently selected by NASA\u27s Science Mission Directorate to fly as a secondary payload on first Exploration Mission (EM-1) of the Space Launch System (SLS), scheduled to launch in July 2018. LunaH-Map is led by a small team of researchers and students at Arizona State University, in collaboration with NASA centers, JPL, universities, and commercial space businesses. The LunaH-Map mission will reveal hydrogen abundances at spatial scales below 10 km in order to understand the relationship between hydrogen and permanently shadowed regions, particularly craters, at the Moon\u27s South Pole. The mission\u27s primary payload is designed to use the scintillator material Cs2YLiCl6:Ce, or CLYC to measure count rates of thermal and epithermal neutrons. Enabled by a low-thrust ion propulsion system, LunaH-Map will achieve lunar orbit insertion within ~12 months of SLS separation and maneuver into a highly elliptical, low-perilune (5-10 km) orbit centered around the South Pole of the Moon. In this orbit, LunaH-Map will achieve over 140 low-altitude fly-bys of the South Pole during its two month science phase. LunaH-Map and two fellow secondary payloads selected by NASA to fly on SLS EM-1 will be the first CubeSats to explore the Moon and interplanetary space

Determination of differential emission measure from solar extreme ultraviolet images

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on board the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) has been providing high-cadence, high-resolution, full-disk UV-visible/extreme ultraviolet (EUV) images since 2010, with the best time coverage among all the solar missions. A number of codes have been developed to extract plasma differential emission measures (DEMs) from AIA images. Although widely used, they cannot effectively constrain the DEM at flaring temperatures with AIA data alone. This often results in much higher X-ray fluxes than observed. One way to solve the problem is by adding more constraint from other data sets (such as soft X-ray images and fluxes). However, the spatial information of plasma DEMs are lost in many cases. In this Letter, we present a different approach to constrain the DEMs. We tested the sparse inversion code and show that the default settings reproduce X-ray fluxes that could be too high. Based on the tests with both simulated and observed AIA data, we provided recommended settings of basis functions and tolerances. The new DEM solutions derived from AIA images alone are much more consistent with (thermal) X-ray observations, and provide valuable information by mapping the thermal plasma from ~0.3 to ~30 MK. Such improvement is a key step in understanding the nature of individual X-ray sources, and particularly important for studies of flare initiation

DNA hypomethylation during MSC chondrogenesis occurs predominantly at enhancer regions

Regulation of transcription occurs in a cell type specific manner orchestrated by epigenetic mechanisms including DNA methylation. Methylation changes may also play a key role in lineage specification during stem cell differentiation. To further our understanding of epigenetic regulation in chondrocytes we characterised the DNA methylation changes during chondrogenesis of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) by Infinium 450 K methylation array. Significant DNA hypomethylation was identified during chondrogenic differentiation including changes at many key cartilage gene loci. Integration with chondrogenesis gene expression data revealed an enrichment of significant CpGs in upregulated genes, while characterisation of significant CpG loci indicated their predominant localisation to enhancer regions. Comparison with methylation profiles of other tissues, including healthy and diseased adult cartilage, identified chondrocyte-specific regions of hypomethylation and the overlap with differentially methylated CpGs in osteoarthritis. Taken together we have associated DNA methylation levels with the chondrocyte phenotype. The consequences of which has potential to improve cartilage generation for tissue engineering purposes and also to provide context for observed methylation changes in cartilage diseases such as osteoarthritis

Global analysis of aberrant pre-mRNA splicing in glioblastoma using exon expression arrays

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Tumor-predominant splice isoforms were identified during comparative <it>in silico </it>sequence analysis of EST clones, suggesting that global aberrant alternative pre-mRNA splicing may be an epigenetic phenomenon in cancer. We used an exon expression array to perform an objective, genome-wide survey of glioma-specific splicing in 24 GBM and 12 nontumor brain samples. Validation studies were performed using RT-PCR on glioma cell lines, patient tumor and nontumor brain samples.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In total, we confirmed 14 genes with glioma-specific splicing; seven were novel events identified by the exon expression array (<it>A2BP1, BCAS1, CACNA1G, CLTA, KCNC2, SNCB</it>, and <it>TPD52L2</it>). Our data indicate that large changes (> 5-fold) in alternative splicing are infrequent in gliomagenesis (< 3% of interrogated RefSeq entries). The lack of splicing changes may derive from the small number of splicing factors observed to be aberrantly expressed.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>While we observed some tumor-specific alternative splicing, the number of genes showing exclusive tumor-specific isoforms was on the order of tens, rather than the hundreds suggested previously by <it>in silico </it>mining. Given the important role of alternative splicing in neural differentiation, there may be selective pressure to maintain a majority of splicing events in order to retain glial-like characteristics of the tumor cells.</p