Smoking cessation support for pregnant women: role of mobile technology.

BACKGROUND: Smoking during pregnancy has deleterious health effects for the fetus and mother. Given the high risks associated with smoking in pregnancy, smoking cessation programs that are designed specifically for pregnant smokers are needed. This paper summarizes the current landscape of mHealth cessation programs aimed at pregnant smokers and where available reviews evidence to support their use. METHODS: A search strategy was conducted in June-August 2015 to identify mHealth programs with at least one component or activity that was explicitly directed at smoking cessation assistance for pregnant women. The search for text messaging programs and applications included keyword searches within public health and medical databases of peer-reviewed literature, Google Play/iTunes stores, and gray literature via Google. RESULTS: Five unique short message service programs and two mobile applications were identified and reviewed. Little evidence was identified to support their use. Common tools and features identified included the ability to set your quit date, ability to track smoking status, ability to get help during cravings, referral to quitline, and tailored content for the individual participant. The theoretical approach utilized was varied, and approximately half of the programs included pregnancy-related content, in addition to cessation content. With one exception, the mHealth programs identified were found to have low enrollment. CONCLUSION: Globally, there are a handful of applications and text-based mHealth programs available for pregnant smokers. Future studies are needed that examine the efficacy of such programs, as well as strategies to best promote enrollment

Short-Term Joint Effects of PM; 10; , NO; 2; and SO; 2; on Cardio-Respiratory Disease Hospital Admissions in Cape Town, South Africa

In sub-Sahara Africa, few studies have investigated the short-term association between hospital admissions and ambient air pollution. Therefore, this study explored the association between multiple air pollutants and hospital admissions in Cape Town, South Africa.; Generalized additive quasi-Poisson models were used within a distributed lag linear modelling framework to estimate the cumulative effects of PM; 10; , NO; 2; , and SO; 2; up to a lag of 21 days. We further conducted multi-pollutant models and stratified our analysis by age group, sex, and season.; The overall relative risk (95% confidence interval (CI)) for PM; 10; , NO; 2; , and SO; 2; at lag 0-1 for hospital admissions due to respiratory disease (RD) were 1.9% (0.5-3.2%), 2.3% (0.6-4%), and 1.1% (-0.2-2.4%), respectively. For cardiovascular disease (CVD), these values were 2.1% (0.6-3.5%), 1% (-0.8-2.8%), and -0.3% (-1.6-1.1%), respectively, per inter-quartile range increase of 12 µg/m; 3; for PM; 10; , 7.3 µg/m; 3; for NO; 2; , and 3.6 µg/m; 3; for SO; 2; . The overall cumulative risks for RD per IQR increase in PM; 10; and NO; 2; for children were 2% (0.2-3.9%) and 3.1% (0.7-5.6%), respectively.; We found robust associations of daily respiratory disease hospital admissions with daily PM; 10; and NO; 2; concentrations. Associations were strongest among children and warm season for RD

Short-Term Effects of PM; 10; , NO; 2; , SO; 2; and O; 3; on Cardio-Respiratory Mortality in Cape Town, South Africa, 2006-2015

The health effect of air pollution is rarely quantified in Africa, and this is evident in global systematic reviews and multi-city studies which only includes South Africa.; A time-series analysis was conducted on daily mortality (cardiovascular (CVD) and respiratory diseases (RD)) and air pollution from 2006-2015 for the city of Cape Town. We fitted single- and multi-pollutant models to test the independent effects of particulate matter (PM; 10; ), nitrogen dioxide (NO; 2; ), sulphur dioxide (SO; 2; ) and ozone (O; 3; ) from co-pollutants.; daily average concentrations per interquartile range (IQR) increase of 16.4 µg/m; 3; PM; 10; , 10.7 µg/m; 3; NO; 2; , 6 µg/m; 3; SO; 2; and 15.6 µg/m; 3; O; 3; lag 0-1 were positively associated with CVD, with an increased risk of 2.4% (95% CI: 0.9-3.9%), 2.2 (95% CI: 0.4-4.1%), 1.4% (95% CI: 0-2.8%) and 2.5% (95% CI: 0.2-4.8%), respectively. For RD, only NO; 2; showed a significant positive association with a 4.5% (95% CI: 1.4-7.6%) increase per IQR. In multi-pollutant models, associations of NO; 2; with RD remained unchanged when adjusted for PM; 10; and SO; 2; but was weakened for O; 3; . In CVD, O; 3; estimates were insensitive to other pollutants showing an increased risk. Interestingly, CVD and RD lag structures of PM; 10; , showed significant acute effect with evidence of mortality displacement.; The findings suggest that air pollution is associated with mortality, and exposure to PM; 10; advances the death of frail population

Quit4baby: Results From a Pilot Test of a Mobile Smoking Cessation Program for Pregnant Women

Background: Text messaging programs have been shown to be effective in helping adult smokers quit smoking. This study describes the results of a pilot test of Quit4baby, a smoking cessation text messaging program for pregnant smokers that was adapted from Text2quit. Objective: The study aimed to demonstrate the feasibility and acceptability of Quit4baby for women currently enrolled in Text4baby, a perinatal health text messaging program. Methods: Pregnant women enrolled in Text4baby and who were current smokers or had quit within the last 4 weeks (N=20) were enrolled in Quit4baby. Those under age 18, not pregnant, not current smokers, those using nicotine replacement therapy and those not interested in participating were ineligible. Participants were surveyed at baseline and at 2 and 4 weeks post-enrollment. Results: Most participants responded to the program favorably. Highly rated aspects included the content of the program, skills taught within the program, and encouragement and social support provided by the program. Participants reported that the program was helpful in quitting, that the program gave good ideas on quitting, and that they would recommend the program to a friend. Suggestions for improvement included increasing the message dose and making the quitpal more interactive. Conclusions: The pilot test provides support for the feasibility and acceptability of Quit4baby. Future studies are needed to assess whether Quit4baby is effective for pregnancy smoking cessation

A heuristic framework for video-based teaching and learning scenarios in higher education

Video has been proven to be an effective tool for enhancing the professional vision of higher education students, which is a crucial situation-specific skill within their professional competence. To ensure the successful integration of video in higher education teaching and learning, several implementation actions and processes need to be considered. This paper proposes a heuristic framework for implementing video-based teaching and learning scenarios across various disciplines in higher education. The framework combines existing research strands on professional vision, video implementation, technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK), and interactive, constructive, active, and passive (ICAP) learning activities. To highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the framework, examples from four different higher education disciplines (Catholic moral theology, Communication science, German as a second and foreign language, Medicine) are provided. These examples serve to underscore the framework’s applicability across a range of academic fields

1H, 13C, and 15N resonance assignments for the tandem PHD finger motifs of human CHD4

The plant homeodomain (PHD) zinc finger is a structural motif of about 40–60 amino acid residues found in many eukaryotic proteins that are involved in chromatin-mediated gene regulation. The human chromodomain helicase DNA binding protein 4 (CHD4) is a multi-domain protein that harbours, at its N-terminal end, a pair of PHD finger motifs (dPHD) connected by a ~30 amino acid linker. This tandem PHD motif is thought to be involved in targeting CHD4 to chromatin via its interaction with histone tails. Here we report the 1H, 13C and 15N backbone and side-chain resonance assignment of the entire dPHD by heteronuclear multidimensional NMR spectroscopy. These assignments provide the starting point for the determination of the structure, dynamics and histone-binding properties of this tandem domain pair

Protein-protein and peptide-protein docking and refinement using ATTRACT in CAPRI

International audienceThe ATTRACT coarse-grained docking approach in combination with various types of atomistic, flexible refinement methods has been applied to predict protein-protein and peptide-protein complexes in CAPRI rounds 28-36. For a large fraction of CAPRI targets (12 out of 18), at least one model of acceptable or better quality was generated, corresponding to a success rate of 67%. In particular, for several peptide-protein complexes excellent predictions were achieved. In several cases, a combination of template-based modeling and extensive molecular dynamics-based refinement yielded medium and even high quality solutions. In one particularly challenging case, the structure of an ubiquitylation enzyme bound to the nucleosome was correctly predicted as a set of acceptable quality solutions. Based on the experience with the CAPRI targets, new interface refinement approaches and methods for ab-initio peptide-protein docking have been developed. Failures and possible improvements of the docking method with respect to scoring and protein flexibility will also be discussed

Quit4baby: Results from a pilot test of a mobile smoking cessation program for pregnant women

Background: Text messaging (short message service, SMS) programs have been shown to be effective in helping adult smokers quit smoking. This study describes the results of a pilot test of Quit4baby, a smoking cessation text messaging program for pregnant smokers that was adapted from Text2quit. Objective: The study aimed to demonstrate the feasibility and acceptability of Quit4baby for women currently enrolled in Text4baby, a perinatal health text messaging program. Methods: Pregnant women enrolled in Text4baby and who were current smokers or had quit within the last 4 weeks (n=20) were enrolled in Quit4baby. Those under the age of 18, not pregnant, not current smokers, those using nicotine replacement therapy, and those not interested in participating were ineligible. Participants were surveyed at baseline and at 2 and 4 weeks postenrollment. Results: Most participants responded to the program favorably. Highly rated aspects included the content of the program, skills taught within the program, and encouragement and social support provided by the program. Participants reported that the program was helpful in quitting, that the program gave good ideas on quitting, and that they would recommend the program to a friend. Suggestions for improvement included increasing the message dose and making the quitpal more interactive. Conclusions: This pilot test provides support for the feasibility and acceptability of Quit4baby. Future studies are needed to assess whether Quit4baby is effective for smoking cessation during pregnancy

Best practices for constructing, preparing, and evaluating protein-ligand binding affinity benchmarks

Free energy calculations are rapidly becoming indispensable in structure-enabled drug discovery programs. As new methods, force fields, and implementations are developed, assessing their expected accuracy on real-world systems (benchmarking) becomes critical to provide users with an assessment of the accuracy expected when these methods are applied within their domain of applicability, and developers with a way to assess the expected impact of new methodologies. These assessments require construction of a benchmark - a set of well-prepared, high quality systems with corresponding experimental measurements designed to ensure the resulting calculations provide a realistic assessment of expected performance when these methods are deployed within their domains of applicability. To date, the community has not yet adopted a common standardized benchmark, and existing benchmark reports suffer from a myriad of issues, including poor data quality, limited statistical power, and statistically deficient analyses, all of which can conspire to produce benchmarks that are poorly predictive of real-world performance. Here, we address these issues by presenting guidelines for (1) curating experimental data to develop meaningful benchmark sets, (2) preparing benchmark inputs according to best practices to facilitate widespread adoption, and (3) analysis of the resulting predictions to enable statistically meaningful comparisons among methods and force fields