The Relationship Between Preoccupation Habits and Characteristics of Orthorexia Nervosa Among College Students

In Volume 3, Issue 1 of the JSMAHS you will find Professional research abstracts, as well as Under Graduate student research abstracts, case reports, and critically appraised topics. Thank you for viewing this 3rd Annual OATA Special Edition

Comparing Effectiveness of Colonoscopy versus Fecal Immunochemical Testing in Screening for Colorectal Cancer

Introduction: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is deadly neoplasm that takes many lives in the United States and is a leading cause of cancer worldwide. If CRC is detected early through screening, there is a higher chance of remission which makes screening an important tool in CRC prevention. Currently, colonoscopy is the gold standard, but due to the undesirable preparation needed for a colonoscopy, patient compliance is low. Giving patients a screening option that requires less preparation may help to increase the compliance for CRC screening. Fecal Immunological testing has been shown to have higher compliance rates among patients as compared to colonoscopy. Objective: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate three research studies to compare the effectiveness of FIT to the gold standard colonoscopy. Methods: Utilized PubMed database with several MeSH terms: colorectal neoplasms, diagnosis, and colonoscopy to find the three articles outlined in this paper. Results: All three studies demonstrated that FIT had comparable effectiveness in detecting colorectal cancer but was insufficient in detecting advanced adenomas in comparison to colonoscopy. A high compliance rate was noted among the FIT group versus colonoscopy, as well. Conclusions: We recommend that colonoscopy remain the gold standard to be conducted every 10 years with a yearly FIT to attempt to detect rapidly growing neoplasms. Further research should be conducted in which all participants complete a FIT and undergo a colonoscopy

Less-structured time in children's daily lives predicts self-directed executive functioning.

Executive functions (EFs) in childhood predict important life outcomes. Thus, there is great interest in attempts to improve EFs early in life. Many interventions are led by trained adults, including structured training activities in the lab, and less-structured activities implemented in schools. Such programs have yielded gains in children's externally-driven executive functioning, where they are instructed on what goal-directed actions to carry out and when. However, it is less clear how children's experiences relate to their development of self-directed executive functioning, where they must determine on their own what goal-directed actions to carry out and when. We hypothesized that time spent in less-structured activities would give children opportunities to practice self-directed executive functioning, and lead to benefits. To investigate this possibility, we collected information from parents about their 6-7 year-old children's daily, annual, and typical schedules. We categorized children's activities as "structured" or "less-structured" based on categorization schemes from prior studies on child leisure time use. We assessed children's self-directed executive functioning using a well-established verbal fluency task, in which children generate members of a category and can decide on their own when to switch from one subcategory to another. The more time that children spent in less-structured activities, the better their self-directed executive functioning. The opposite was true of structured activities, which predicted poorer self-directed executive functioning. These relationships were robust (holding across increasingly strict classifications of structured and less-structured time) and specific (time use did not predict externally-driven executive functioning). We discuss implications, caveats, and ways in which potential interpretations can be distinguished in future work, to advance an understanding of this fundamental aspect of growing up

"Cutting through": overcoming the barriers to academic engagement with policy processes

A lack of access and poor communication are often cited as reasons why academic research is not widely used by policymakers. But what about the challenges for researchers engaging with decision-makers such as parliaments? Lindsay Walker, Lindsey Pike, Marsha Wood and Hannah Durrant have surveyed more than 400 research professionals and identified some clear barriers, with heavy workloads and a lack of transparency around how research will be used among the most prominent. In order to promote better engagement between academia and policy such initiatives should provide guidance for academics on the different opportunities to submit research evidence, be transparent about why and how that evidence will be used, and provide clear acknowledgement of the research contribution by academic sources

Urban Flooding Accelerates the Affordable Housing Shortage: A Case Study in Columbia, South Carolina

The state of South Carolina stands at the corner where climate change and the housing crisis meet. The affordable housing stock across South Carolina continues to deplete as its major cities experience urban flooding events due to outdated and weakened infrastructure, compounded by an intensification of storm systems brought on by a changing climate. Lower income communities are forced to accept lesser living conditions and less resilient housing options because these options are more affordable. Renters are often met with more challenges when navigating disaster recovery compared to homeowners. Using a case study established in Columbia, South Carolina of the 1000- year rainfall event that occurred October 2015, this project is grounded in a qualitative inquiry centered around the experience of renters immediately following the flood and an evaluation of Columbia’s flood mitigation efforts since 2015. To inform this inquiry, tenants/landlords, community organizers, and legal aid professionals participated in semi-structured interviews. These interviews were supplemented with participatory observations from South Carolina Eviction Consortium meetings and document analyses spanning across dozens of news reports and disaster summary reports by national, state, and local agencies. With the support of this research, this thesis argues municipal response to urban flooding should take a “housing first” approach to ensure urban flooding’s impact on the affordable housing stock is weakene

Perch, Perca fluviatilis show a directional preference for, but do not increase attacks toward, prey in response to water-borne cortisol

In freshwater environments, chemosensory cues play an important role in predatorprey interactions. Prey use a variety of chemosensory cues to detect and avoid predators. However, whether predators use the chemical cues released by disturbed or stressed prey has received less attention. Here we tested the hypothesis that the disturbance cue cortisol, in conjunction with visual cues of prey, elevates predatory behavior. We presented predators (perch, Perca fluviatilis) with three chemosensory choice tests and recorded their location, orientation, and aggressive behavior. We compared the responses of predators when provided with (i) visual cues of prey only (two adjacent tanks containing sticklebacks); (ii) visual and natural chemical cues of prey vs. visual cues only; and (iii) visual cues of prey with cortisol vs. visual cues only. Perch spent a significantly higher proportion of time in proximity to prey, and orientated toward prey more, when presented with a cortisol stimulus plus visual cues, relative to presentations of visual and natural chemical cues of prey, or visual cues of prey only. There was a trend that perch directed a higher proportion of predatory behaviors (number of lunges) toward sticklebacks when presented with a cortisol stimulus plus visual cues, relative to the other chemosensory conditions. But they did not show a significant increase in total predatory behavior in response to cortisol. Therefore, it is not clear whether water-borne cortisol, in conjunction with visual cues of prey, affects predatory behavior. Our results provide evidence that cortisol could be a source of public information about prey state and/or disturbance, but further work is required to confirm this