Make Your Students Sweat: Fitness Integrated Learning in Business Education

In this exploratory study, we propose a new pedagogy for teaching business courses—Fitness Integrated Learning (FIL). Our FIL modality of course instruction embeds physical education into an existing college-level business course curriculum for the purpose of enhancing students’ cognitive performance and student experience. Drawing from research literature on fitness and education as well as our own exploratory study of applying three major FIL-modalities in four college campuses in the Northeast, we formulate a conceptual FIL model and offer a theoretical framework to test our propositions. We conclude by offering a research design to test a full FIL-structured course

Host factors are associated with vaginal microbiome structure in pregnancy in the ECHO Cohort Consortium

Using pooled vaginal microbiota data from pregnancy cohorts (N = 683 participants) in the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program, we analyzed 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequences to identify clinical and demographic host factors that associate with vaginal microbiota structure in pregnancy both within and across diverse cohorts. Using PERMANOVA models, we assessed factors associated with vaginal community structure in pregnancy, examined whether host factors were conserved across populations, and tested the independent and combined effects of host factors on vaginal community state types (CSTs) using multinomial logistic regression models. Demographic and social factors explained a larger amount of variation in the vaginal microbiome in pregnancy than clinical factors. After adjustment, lower education, rather than self-identified race, remained a robust predictor of L. iners dominant (CST III) and diverse (CST IV) (OR = 8.44, 95% CI = 4.06–17.6 and OR = 4.18, 95% CI = 1.88–9.26, respectively). In random forest models, we identified specific taxonomic features of host factors, particularly urogenital pathogens associated with pregnancy complications (Aerococcus christensenii and Gardnerella spp.) among other facultative anaerobes and key markers of community instability (L. iners). Sociodemographic factors were robustly associated with vaginal microbiota structure in pregnancy and should be considered as sources of variation in human microbiome studies