Rebels with a Cause: VCU Student Emergency Fund

The project’s mission is to establish a VCU Student Emergency Fund to support the well-being of students who face financial emergencies and to increase student retention and academic success. The fund will provide financial relief to students facing sudden and unexpected financial hardships that can impact their financial stability, academic success, and ability to remain enrolled at VCU. The project will support the work of student support services personnel administering the fund by providing a campus outreach plan to those who can recognize students in financial crises and refer them to the fund\u27s administrators. The project will also support the work of development personnel who will raise money for the fund by providing a donor outreach plan

Testing the Children: Do Non-Genetic Health-Care Providers Differ in Their Decision to Advise Genetic Presymptomatic Testing on Minors? A Cross-Sectional Study in Five Countries in the European Union

BACKGROUND: Within Europe many guidelines exist regarding the genetic testing of minors. Predictive and presymptomatic genetic testing of minors is recommended for disorders for which medical intervention/preventive measures exist, and for which early detection improves future medical health. AIM: This study, which is part of the larger 5th EU-framework "genetic education" (GenEd) study, aimed to evaluate the self-reported responses of nongenetic health-care providers in five different EU countries (Germany, France, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands) when confronted with a parent requesting presymptomatic testing on a minor child for a treatable disease. METHODS: A cross-sectional study design using postal, structured scenario-based questionnaires that were sent to 8129 general practitioners (GPs) and pediatricians, between July 2004 and October 2004, addressing self-reported management of a genetic case for which early medical intervention during childhood is beneficial, involving a minor. RESULTS: Most practitioners agreed on testing the oldest child, aged 12 years (81.5% for GPs and 87.2% for pediatricians), and not testing the youngest child, aged 6 months (72.6% for GPs and 61.3% for pediatricians). After multivariate adjustment there were statistical differences between countries in recommending a genetic test for the child at the age of 8 years. Pediatricians in France (50%) and Germany (58%) would recommend a test, whereas in the United Kingdom (22%), Sweden (30%), and the Netherlands (32%) they would not. CONCLUSION: Even though presymptomatic genetic testing in minors is recommended for disorders for which medical intervention exists, EU physicians are uncertain at what age starting to do so in young children

A Reflection on the Development of a Community Education Program for Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus

The prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in the United States has increased dramatically, in part, because of the emergence of community-associated MRSA. Recognizing that MRSA is an emerging health concern in the community, in August 2007, the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services released guidelines that addressed the control and prevention of MRSA skin and soft tissue infections in non-healthcare settings. The Unified Health Command of Yellowstone County established a subcommittee to institute a mechanism for distributing the recommendations to the community. Educational toolkits and presentations were created for the schools of Yellowstone County based on these guidelines. This paper will look at the use of community collaboration to develop and disseminate educational materials. In addition, a reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of the process and the lessons learned will be included.Master of Public Healt

The Role of Font Size and Familiarity in Evaluations of Truth

https://louis.uah.edu/research-horizons/1222/thumbnail.jp

The Font Size Effect Does Not Extend to Math Problems

https://louis.uah.edu/research-horizons/1132/thumbnail.jp

Identifying Needs of Potential Transfer Students of Color to Enhance Equity and Inclusion in the College of Health Professions

State Council of Higher Education of Virginia (SCHEV)1 data indicate disparities in recruitment and retention outcomes for transfer students of color and those of Hispanic ethnicity compared to non-Hispanic White peers. With the goal of enhancing equity and inclusion while diversifying the health professions, this project characterizes the needs of this population to inform the development of a new bachelor’s program within the College of Health Professions. The project provides recommendations based on data collected from both prospective and current VCU transfer students

Intimate partner violence and children’s memory.

The current study was designed to examine the relation between intimate partner violence (IPV) and children’s memory and drew from a socioeconomically and racially diverse sample of children living in and around a midsized southeastern city (n = 140). Mother-reported IPV when the children were 30 months old was a significant predictor of children’s short-term, working, and deliberate memory at 60 months of age, even after controlling for the children’s sex and race, the families’ income-to-needs ratio, the children’s expressive vocabulary, and maternal harsh-intrusive parenting behaviors. These findings add to the limited extant literature that finds linkages between IPV and children’s cognitive functioning and suggest that living in households in which physical violence is perpetrated among intimate partners may have a negative effect on multiple domains of children’s memory development

Integration of datasets for individual prediction of DNA methylation-based biomarkers

BACKGROUND: Epigenetic scores (EpiScores) can provide biomarkers of lifestyle and disease risk. Projecting new datasets onto a reference panel is challenging due to separation of technical and biological variation with array data. Normalisation can standardise data distributions but may also remove population-level biological variation.RESULTS: We compare two birth cohorts (Lothian Birth Cohorts of 1921 and 1936 - nLBC1921 = 387 and nLBC1936 = 498) with blood-based DNA methylation assessed at the same chronological age (79 years) and processed in the same lab but in different years and experimental batches. We examine the effect of 16 normalisation methods on a novel BMI EpiScore (trained in an external cohort, n = 18,413), and Horvath's pan-tissue DNA methylation age, when the cohorts are normalised separately and together. The BMI EpiScore explains a maximum variance of R2=24.5% in BMI in LBC1936 (SWAN normalisation). Although there are cross-cohort R2 differences, the normalisation method makes a minimal difference to within-cohort estimates. Conversely, a range of absolute differences are seen for individual-level EpiScore estimates for BMI and age when cohorts are normalised separately versus together. While within-array methods result in identical EpiScores whether a cohort is normalised on its own or together with the second dataset, a range of differences is observed for between-array methods.CONCLUSIONS: Normalisation methods returning similar EpiScores, whether cohorts are analysed separately or together, will minimise technical variation when projecting new data onto a reference panel. These methods are important for cases where raw data is unavailable and joint normalisation of cohorts is computationally expensive.</p

Blood- and brain-based genome-wide association studies of smoking

Background Self-reported smoking is often incorporated into disease prediction tools but suffers from recall bias and does not capture passive exposure. Blood-based DNA methylation (DNAm) is an objective way to assess smoking. However, studies have not fully explored tissue-specificity or epigenome-wide coverage beyond array data. Here, we update the existing biomarkers of smoking and conduct a detailed analysis of the associations between blood DNAm and self-reported smoking.Methods and Findings A blood-based Bayesian epigenome-wide association study (EWAS) of smoking was carried out in 17,865 Generation Scotland individuals at ∼850k CpG sites (Illumina EPIC array). For 24 pairs of smokers and non-smokers a high-resolution approach was implemented (∼4 million sites, TWIST methylome panel). A DNAm-derived biomarker of smoking (mCigarette) was tested in the independent Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 (n=882, Illumina 450k array) and in the ALSPAC parents and offspring at four time points (range n=496–1,207). To explore tissue specific signals, EWASs of smoking were run across five brain regions for 14 individuals using DNAm from the EPIC array. Lastly, genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of smoking pack years and an epigenetic score for smoking (GrimAge DNAm pack years) were conducted (n=17,105). The primary EWAS analyses identified two novel genome-wide significant loci, mapping to genes related to addiction and carcinogenesis. Associations with CpG sites which are currently absent from methylation arrays were identified by the high resolution EWAS of smoking (n=48). The mCigarette pack years biomarker showed excellent discrimination across all smoking categories (current, former, never), and outperformed existing predictors in associations with pack years in an external test dataset (Pearson r=0.75). Several CpGs showed near-perfect discrimination of smoking status in both blood and brain, but these loci did not overlap across tissues. The GWAS of DNAm (but not self-reported) pack years identified novel and established smoking-related loci. However, the self-reported phenotype GWAS had a higher genetic correlation with a large meta-analysis GWAS of self-reported pack years. Among the study shortcomings are its potential lack of generalizability to non-Europeans and the absence of serum cotinine data.Conclusion A multi-tissue, multi-cohort analysis of the relationship between smoking, DNA and DNAm (assessed via arrays and targeted sequencing) has improved our understanding of the biological consequences of smoking