Framing the work: A coparenting model for guiding infant mental health engagement with families

: When working with families of infants and toddlers, intentionally looking beyond dyadic child-parent relationship functioning to conceptualize the child's socioemotional adaptation within their broader family collective can enhance the likelihood that clinical gains will be supported and sustained. However, there has been little expert guidance regarding how best to frame infant-family mental health therapeutic encounters for the adults responsible for the child's care and upbringing in a manner that elevates their mindfulness about and their resolve to strengthen the impact of their coparenting collective. This article describes a new collaborative initiative organized by family-oriented infant mental health professionals across several different countries, all of whom bring expansive expertise assessing and working with coparenting and triangular family dynamics. The Collaborative's aims are to identify a means for framing initial infant mental health encounters and intakes with families with the goal of assessing and raising family consciousness about the relevance of coparenting. Initial points of convergence and growing points identified by the Collaborative for subsequent field study are addressed

Formation of the Scandinavian Obesity Surgery Registry, SOReg.

Obesity surgery is expanding, the quality of care is ever more important, and learning curve assessment should be established. A large registry cohort can show long-term effects on obesity and its comorbidities, complications, and long-term side effects of surgery, as well as changes in health-related quality of life (QoL). Sweden is ideally suited to the task of data collection and audit, with universal use of personal identification numbers, nation-wide registries permitting cross-matching to analyze causes of death, in-hospital care, and health-related absenteeism

Ghrelin suppresses insulin secretion in human islets and type 2 diabetes patients have diminished islet ghrelin cell number and lower plasma ghrelin levels

Peer reviewe

Common variants in the beta2-(Gln27Glu) and beta3-(Trp64Arg)--adrenoceptor genes are associated with elevated serum NEFA concentrations and type II diabetes

AIMS/HYPOTHESIS: Higher NEFA concentrations predict Type II (non-insulin-dependent) diabetes mellitus but it is not known whether higher NEFA concentrations are genetically determined or reflect coexisting obesity. To address this question we studied whether common variants in two genes encoding for key regulators of lipolysis, the beta2- and beta3- adrenoceptors (B2AR and B3AR) are associated with NEFA concentrations and Type II diabetes. METHODS: A total of 1054 Swedish subjects with varying degrees of glucose tolerance were genotyped for the Gln27Glu variant in the B2AR and for the Trp64Arg variant in the B3AR genes using PCR-RFLP. RESULTS: The B2AR Gln27 allele was more frequent in 219 Type II diabetic patients than in 237 non-diabetic subjects (59.8 % vs 52.3 %; OR = 1.72, p = 0.02) while there was no significant difference in the frequency of the B3AR Arg64 allele. Subjects homozygous for the protective alleles (Glu27 and Trp64) had, however, a lower prevalence of diabetes than subjects with other genotype combinations (OR = 0.58, p = 0.03). Among sibling pairs discordant for the B2AR Gln27Glu polymorphism, siblings with an excess of the Gln27 allele had higher fasting insulin (n = 217; p = 0.02) and NEFA concentrations (107 sex-matched pairs; p = 0.01) than siblings with an excess of the Glu27 allele. Among sibling pairs discordant for the B3AR Trp64Arg variant, siblings with the Arg64 allele had higher 2 h glucose (n = 48; p = 0.01) and NEFA concentrations (16 pairs matched for sex; p < 0.04) than siblings with the Trp64Trp64 genotype. CONCLUSIONS/INTERPRETATION: Common variants in the beta2- and beta3- adrenoceptor genes are associated with increased fasting insulin and NEFA concentrations and could increase susceptibility to Type II diabetes