Early-life predictors of resilience and related outcomes up to 66 years later in the 6-day sample of the 1947 Scottish mental survey.

PURPOSE: Psychological resilience, the ability to manage and quickly recover from stress and trauma, is associated with a range of health and wellbeing outcomes. Resilience is known to relate to personality, self-esteem and positive affect, and may also depend upon childhood experience and stress. In this study, we investigated the role of early-life contributors to resilience and related factors in later life. METHODS: We used data from the 6-day sample of the Scottish mental survey 1947, an initially representative sample of Scottish children born in 1936. They were assessed on a range of factors between the ages of 11 and 27 years, and resilience and other outcomes at 77 years. RESULTS: Higher adolescent dependability unexpectedly predicted lower resilience in older-age, as did childhood illnesses, while a count of specific stressors experienced throughout early life significantly predicted higher later-life resilience. We also observed significant cross-sectional correlations between resilience and measures of physical health, mental health, wellbeing and loneliness. Some of the associations between early-life predictors and later-life outcomes were significantly mediated by resilience. CONCLUSIONS: Our results support the hypothesis that stress throughout early life may help to build resilience in later-life, and demonstrate the importance of resilience as a mediator of other influences on health and wellbeing in older age. We suggest that the mechanisms determining how early-life stress leads to higher resilience are worthy of further investigation, and that psychological resilience should be a focus of research and a target for therapeutic interventions aiming to improve older-age health and wellbeing

Diet and Hygiene Between Ethics and Medicine: Evidence and the Reception of Alvise Cornaro\u2019s La Vita Sobria in Early Seventeenth-Century England

Alvise Cornaro\u2019s Treatises on the Sober Life (Discorsi della vita sobria) was one of the most popular books on diet and hygiene across the whole of Europe from its publication in the sixteenth century up to the early twentieth century. In this chapter, I show that the reasons for the success of Cornaro\u2019s work in early modern England lie in the fact that two very different communities of practice saw the work\u2019s conclusions as grounded upon a particular configuration of evidence that resonated with them: one spiritual, where it was used as part of an attempt to forge a via media between Puritans and Anglicans; the other medical, where it served as a case study from which more general conclusions about how to prolong life might be extrapolated. The unique context in which the first English translation of the Discorsi was conceived, produced, and published\u2014involving some of the most prominent intellectual figures of the time, such as Francis Bacon, Nicholas Ferrar, and George Herbert\u2014make this an important case study, useful for the reconstruction of a significant chapter of the history of dieting and hygiene, and the history of conceptions of evidence and their relationship to different communities of practice

Getting your life back on track after stroke : a phase II multi-centered, single-blind, randomized, controlled trial of the Stroke Self-Management Program vs. the Stanford Chronic Condition Self-Management Program or standard care in stroke survivors

Background Self-management is seen as a primary mechanism to support the optimization of care for people with chronic diseases such as symptomatic vascular disease. There are no established and evidence-based stroke-specific chronic disease self-management programs. Our aim is to evaluate whether a stroke-specific program is safe and feasible as part of a Phase II randomized-controlled clinical trial.Methods Stroke survivors are recruited from a variety of sources including: hospital stroke services, local paper advertisements, Stroke South Australia newsletter (volunteer peer support organization), Divisions of General Practice, and community service providers across Adelaide, South Australia. Subjects are invited to participate in a multi-center, single-blind, randomized, controlled trial. Eligible participants are randomized to either;&bull; standard care,&bull; standard care plus a six week generic chronic condition self-management group education program, or,&bull; standard care plus an eight week stroke specific self-management education group program.Interventions are conducted after discharge from hospital. Participants are assessed at baseline, immediate post intervention and six months.Study Outcomes The primary outcome measures determine study feasibility and safety, measuring, recruitment, participation, compliance and adverse events.Secondary outcomes include:&bull; positive and active engagement in life measured by the Health Education Impact Questionnaire,&bull; improvements in quality of life measured by the Assessment of Quality of Life instrument,&bull; improvements in mood measured by the Irritability, Depression and Anxiety Scale, &bull; health resource utilization measured by a participant held diary and safety.Conclusion The results of this study will determine whether a definitive Phase III efficacy trial is justified.<br /