Exploring the intergenerational continuity of ACEs amongst a sample of Welsh male prisoners: A retrospective cross-sectional study

BackgroundThe relationship between parent and child adverse childhood experience (ACE) exposure remains underexplored, particularly within justice-involved samples.ObjectiveThis objective of the study was to examine the intergenerational continuity of ACEs within a UK prison population.Participants294 males aged 18–69 years in a Welsh prison, with father reported data for 671 children they had fathered.MethodsA face-to-face ACE questionnaire measured exposure to 10 ACE types. For each child they had fathered participants were asked to report their child's gender, age and their exposure before the age of 18 to the same ACE types, except having a household member incarcerated.FindingsPaternal ACE exposure was found to increase the risk of child ACE exposure, both to multiple ACEs and individual ACE types. Compared to children of fathers with no ACEs, those of fathers with 4+ were almost three times more likely to have been exposed to 2–3 ACEs and six times more likely to be exposed to 4+ ACEs. The risk of a child residing in a household where mental illness was present was 7.4 times higher where their father had 4+ ACEs.ConclusionFindings highlight the need for prevention interventions to break the intergenerational continuity of ACEs. Further research is needed to explore what protects against the intergenerational continuity of ACEs. Criminal justice systems and wider services need to ensure that they support those incarcerated alongside their families who are at high risk of ACEs and consequently poorer education, health and criminal justice outcomes

The use of mobile phone applications to enhance personal safety from interpersonal violence – an overview of available smartphone applications in the United Kingdom

BACKGROUND: Interpersonal violence has devastating implications for individuals, families, and communities across the globe, placing a significant burden on health, justice, and social welfare systems. Smartphone technology may provide a platform for violence prevention interventions. However, evidence on the availability and user experience of smartphone applications aimed to prevent violence is underexplored. METHODS: Systematic searches of available smartphone applications marketed for personal safety and violence prevention on the Apple Store (IOS) and Google Play (Android) in the United Kingdom were run in May 2021. Relevant applications were downloaded, with data on user reviews and ratings extracted. Included applications were categorised according to their features and functions. Online user reviews were rated according to their sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) and thematically analysed. RESULTS: Of 503 applications, 86 apps met review criteria. Only 52 (61%) apps offered full functionality free of charge. Over half (52%) of apps were targeted towards the general population, with 16% targeting women and 13% targeting families. App functionality varied with 22% providing an alarm, 71% sending alerts to pre-designated contacts, 34% providing evidence capture and 26% offering educational information. Overall, 71% of applications had a user rating of four or above. For 61 apps a total of 3,820 user reviews were extracted. Over half (52.4%) of reviews were rated as having a positive sentiment, with 8.8% neutral and 38.8% negative. Key themes across user reviews included positive consequences of app use, technical and usage issues including app reliability, dissatisfaction with the financial cost of some app features and personal data and ethical issues. CONCLUSIONS: Reviews suggest that users find apps for personal safety and violence prevention useful. However, individuals also report them being unreliable, not working as described and having features that others may exploit. Findings have implications for the development of policy on apps to improve personal safety, especially given recent national policy (e.g. UK) discussions about their utility. Without the regulation or accreditation of such technology for quality assurance and reliability, emphasis needs to be placed on ensuring user safety; otherwise vulnerable individuals may continue to place reliance on untested technology in potentially dangerous circumstances. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-022-13551-9

The impact of behavioural risk factors on communicable diseases: a systematic review of reviews

Abstract Background The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted that individuals with behavioural risk factors commonly associated with non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as smoking, harmful alcohol use, obesity, and physical inactivity, are more likely to experience severe symptoms from COVID-19. These risk factors have been shown to increase the risk of NCDs, but less is known about their broader influence on communicable diseases. Taking a wide focus on a range of common communicable diseases, this review aimed to synthesise research examining the impact of behavioural risk factors commonly associated with NCDs on risks of contracting, or having more severe outcomes from, communicable diseases. Methods Literature searches identified systematic reviews and meta-analyses that examined the association between behavioural risk factors (alcohol, smoking, illicit drug use, physical inactivity, obesity and poor diet) and the contraction/severity of common communicable diseases, including infection or associated pathogens. An a priori, prospectively registered protocol was followed (PROSPERO; registration number CRD42020223890). Results Fifty-three systematic reviews were included, of which 36 were also meta-analyses. Reviews focused on: tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus, hepatitis C virus, hepatitis B virus, invasive bacterial diseases, pneumonia, influenza, and COVID-19. Twenty-one reviews examined the association between behavioural risk factors and communicable disease contraction and 35 examined their association with communicable disease outcomes (three examined their association with both contraction and outcomes). Fifty out of 53 reviews (94%) concluded that at least one of the behavioural risk factors studied increased the risk of contracting or experiencing worse health outcomes from a communicable disease. Across all reviews, effect sizes, where calculated, ranged from 0.83 to 8.22. Conclusions Behavioural risk factors play a significant role in the risk of contracting and experiencing more severe outcomes from communicable diseases. Prevention of communicable diseases is likely to be most successful if it involves the prevention of behavioural risk factors commonly associated with NCDs. These findings are important for understanding risks associated with communicable disease, and timely, given the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for improvements in future pandemic preparedness. Addressing behavioural risk factors should be an important part of work to build resilience against any emerging and future epidemics and pandemics

A rapid assessment of re-opening nightlife whilst containing COVID-19 and preventing violence

At a time of national and international emergency, the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic has resulted in closures and restrictions on nightlife environments around the world including Wales. After months of control measures, many countries are now in the process of re-opening their nightlife economies. As these restrictions are gradually lifted, we face the challenge of how to safely re-open the night-time economy (NTE) whilst minimising risks of COVID-19 transmission, protecting night-time industries and ensuring the ‘new normal’ of nightlife does not exacerbate other public health problems, particularly violence

Serendipitous discovery of a dying Giant Radio Galaxy associated with NGC 1534, using the Murchison Widefield Array

This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. © 2015 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.Recent observations with the Murchison Widefield Array at 185~MHz have serendipitously unveiled a heretofore unknown giant and relatively nearby ($z = 0.0178$) radio galaxy associated with NGC\,1534. The diffuse emission presented here is the first indication that NGC\,1534 is one of a rare class of objects (along with NGC\,5128 and NGC\,612) in which a galaxy with a prominent dust lane hosts radio emission on scales of $\sim$700\,kpc. We present details of the radio emission along with a detailed comparison with other radio galaxies with disks. NGC1534 is the lowest surface brightness radio galaxy known with an estimated scaled 1.4-GHz surface brightness of just 0.2\,mJy\,arcmin$^{-2}$. The radio lobes have one of the steepest spectral indices yet observed: $\alpha=-2.1\pm0.1$, and the core to lobe luminosity ratio is $Peer reviewe

Measuring performance on the Healthcare Access and Quality Index for 195 countries and territories and selected subnational locations: A systematic analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

Background: A key component of achieving universal health coverage is ensuring that all populations have access to quality health care. Examining where gains have occurred or progress has faltered across and within countries is crucial to guiding decisions and strategies for future improvement. We used the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016) to assess personal health-care access and quality with the Healthcare Access and Quality (HAQ) Index for 195 countries and territories, as well as subnational locations in seven countries, from 1990 to 2016. Methods Drawing from established methods and updated estimates from GBD 2016, we used 32 causes from which death should not occur in the presence of effective care to approximate personal health-care access and quality by location and over time. To better isolate potential effects of personal health-care access and quality from underlying risk factor patterns, we risk-standardised cause-specific deaths due to non-cancers by location-year, replacing the local joint exposure of environmental and behavioural risks with the global level of exposure. Supported by the expansion of cancer registry data in GBD 2016, we used mortality-to-incidence ratios for cancers instead of risk-standardised death rates to provide a stronger signal of the effects of personal health care and access on cancer survival. We transformed each cause to a scale of 0-100, with 0 as the first percentile (worst) observed between 1990 and 2016, and 100 as the 99th percentile (best); we set these thresholds at the country level, and then applied them to subnational locations. We applied a principal components analysis to construct the HAQ Index using all scaled cause values, providing an overall score of 0-100 of personal health-care access and quality by location over time. We then compared HAQ Index levels and trends by quintiles on the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a summary measure of overall development. As derived from the broader GBD study and other data sources, we examined relationships between national HAQ Index scores and potential correlates of performance, such as total health spending per capita. Findings In 2016, HAQ Index performance spanned from a high of 97\ub71 (95% UI 95\ub78-98\ub71) in Iceland, followed by 96\ub76 (94\ub79-97\ub79) in Norway and 96\ub71 (94\ub75-97\ub73) in the Netherlands, to values as low as 18\ub76 (13\ub71-24\ub74) in the Central African Republic, 19\ub70 (14\ub73-23\ub77) in Somalia, and 23\ub74 (20\ub72-26\ub78) in Guinea-Bissau. The pace of progress achieved between 1990 and 2016 varied, with markedly faster improvements occurring between 2000 and 2016 for many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia, whereas several countries in Latin America and elsewhere saw progress stagnate after experiencing considerable advances in the HAQ Index between 1990 and 2000. Striking subnational disparities emerged in personal health-care access and quality, with China and India having particularly large gaps between locations with the highest and lowest scores in 2016. In China, performance ranged from 91\ub75 (89\ub71-93\ub76) in Beijing to 48\ub70 (43\ub74-53\ub72) in Tibet (a 43\ub75-point difference), while India saw a 30\ub78-point disparity, from 64\ub78 (59\ub76-68\ub78) in Goa to 34\ub70 (30\ub73-38\ub71) in Assam. Japan recorded the smallest range in subnational HAQ performance in 2016 (a 4\ub78-point difference), whereas differences between subnational locations with the highest and lowest HAQ Index values were more than two times as high for the USA and three times as high for England. State-level gaps in the HAQ Index in Mexico somewhat narrowed from 1990 to 2016 (from a 20\ub79-point to 17\ub70-point difference), whereas in Brazil, disparities slightly increased across states during this time (a 17\ub72-point to 20\ub74-point difference). Performance on the HAQ Index showed strong linkages to overall development, with high and high-middle SDI countries generally having higher scores and faster gains for non-communicable diseases. Nonetheless, countries across the development spectrum saw substantial gains in some key health service areas from 2000 to 2016, most notably vaccine-preventable diseases. Overall, national performance on the HAQ Index was positively associated with higher levels of total health spending per capita, as well as health systems inputs, but these relationships were quite heterogeneous, particularly among low-to-middle SDI countries. Interpretation GBD 2016 provides a more detailed understanding of past success and current challenges in improving personal health-care access and quality worldwide. Despite substantial gains since 2000, many low-SDI and middle- SDI countries face considerable challenges unless heightened policy action and investments focus on advancing access to and quality of health care across key health services, especially non-communicable diseases. Stagnating or minimal improvements experienced by several low-middle to high-middle SDI countries could reflect the complexities of re-orienting both primary and secondary health-care services beyond the more limited foci of the Millennium Development Goals. Alongside initiatives to strengthen public health programmes, the pursuit of universal health coverage hinges upon improving both access and quality worldwide, and thus requires adopting a more comprehensive view-and subsequent provision-of quality health care for all populations