Parental Adjustment in Paediatric Acquired Brain Injury

Paediatric acquired brain injury (pABI) can lead to an array of long term physical, cognitive, emotional, and behavioural difficulties. Due to the long-term sequelae of more severe pABI, it presents a significant challenge to the child’s family. Studies have suggested that social support can positively impact psychological adjustment following a stressful life event, and can aid personal resilience. There remains limited qualitative investigation of subjective family and parental adjustment experiences following pABI. Researchers have argued for future research that include the experiences of parents who have children younger than 16 years old, and are able to shed light on the individual experiential journey of parents. The current study used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explore to the experiences of adjustment and social support of parents of children with pABI. Purposive sampling was used to recruit 10 participants who were individually interviewed. Five superordinate themes emerging from the data were identified: 1) Lives changed forever, 2) Sense of self, 3) Interaction with services, 4) The psychological experience, 5) Coping and adjustment. Relevant literature and implications for future research and clinical practice are discussed

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms