School District Stress Prevention Practices in a Southern U.S. State

The growing recognition that stress is a risk factor for youth health problems has spawned research on school-based stress prevention programs and services. While such programs and services are now available for adoption by schools, there is an absence of data on their use in U.S. schools systems. In the current study, Everett Rogers\u27s diffusion of innovations model provided the theoretical framework for the investigation of school district stress prevention practices in one southern U.S. state. The sample for this quantitative descriptive study consisted of 135 out of 136 active public districts, and 72% of school systems completed and returned the survey (N = 97). Participants were designated school system personnel (83% administrators) who accepted either the e-mail or postal invitation to take part in the study. Descriptive data were gathered on the prevalence and characteristics of stress prevention programs and services for students, and the relationship between school district characteristics and programming and services prevalence was examined via chi-square and Fisher\u27s exact tests. The frequency results indicate that 19% of districts provide programming, 22% provide services, and 23% provide both programming and services to students, and the Fisher\u27s exact test revealed that programming prevalence is highest among urban districts compared to small town/rural school systems (p = 0.12). Recommendations for future research include the study of stress prevention practices with students and school system personnel at the national level. The findings of this study may contribute to the health and welfare of children and adolescents by informing the efforts of school systems to promote the adaptive competence of general student populations

How are secure attachment relationships fostered through talk between teachers and students who have been adopted? A conversation analysis

Despite the growing recognition of the importance of supportive teacher–student relationships to create safety for young people who have experienced early adversity and trauma, there is not a clear understanding of what factors make for positive school relationships and how these can be fostered. The aims of the study were to explore how children with challenging emotional backgrounds are supported by their key adult in school and how this occurs in the process of conversations between them. Three student–teacher pairs from a specialist school took part in a semi-structured interview about their relationship. Data was analysed using conversation analysis. Analysis found how teaching staff use several conversational markers in talk with children with attachment difficulties when emotional experiences are raised and when troubles occur in navigating difficult conversations. Recommendations for clinical practice and future research are made. </jats:p

Confrontational Behavior and Escalation to War 1816-1980: A Research Plan

The understanding of international war, like many complex social events, may be - and has been - ap proached from a range of theoretical perspectives and via a variety of research strategies. Outside of the work of Bloch (1898), Sorokin (1936), Richardson (1941), and Wright (1942), however, there was little re search of a scientific nature until the mid-1960s. And while these past fifteen years have certainly not given us a compelling theory of international war, they have seen a steady growth in cumulative knowledge regar ding the correlates of war. These results, despite the expected mix of inconsistencies and anomalies, provide us with some sense of the factors that are most consistently associated with war over the last century and a half, along with some tentative insights into the rising and declining potency of these factors.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68556/2/10.1177_002234338201900104.pd

A Pathway Based Classification Method for Analyzing Gene Expression for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis.

BACKGROUND: Recent studies indicate that gene expression levels in blood may be able to differentiate subjects with Alzheimer's disease (AD) from normal elderly controls and mild cognitively impaired (MCI) subjects. However, there is limited replicability at the single marker level. A pathway-based interpretation of gene expression may prove more robust. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to investigate whether a case/control classification model built on pathway level data was more robust than a gene level model and may consequently perform better in test data. The study used two batches of gene expression data from the AddNeuroMed (ANM) and Dementia Case Registry (DCR) cohorts. METHODS: Our study used Illumina Human HT-12 Expression BeadChips to collect gene expression from blood samples. Random forest modeling with recursive feature elimination was used to predict case/control status. Age and APOE ɛ4 status were used as covariates for all analysis. RESULTS: Gene and pathway level models performed similarly to each other and to a model based on demographic information only. CONCLUSIONS: Any potential increase in concordance from the novel pathway level approach used here has not lead to a greater predictive ability in these datasets. However, we have only tested one method for creating pathway level scores. Further, we have been able to benchmark pathways against genes in datasets that had been extensively harmonized. Further work should focus on the use of alternative methods for creating pathway level scores, in particular those that incorporate pathway topology, and the use of an endophenotype based approach

Mitochondrial genes are altered in blood early in Alzheimer's disease

Although mitochondrial dysfunction is a consistent feature of Alzheimer's disease in the brain and blood, the molecular mechanisms behind these phenomena are unknown. Here we have replicated our previous findings demonstrating reduced expression of nuclear-encoded oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) subunits and subunits required for the translation of mitochondrial-encoded OXPHOS genes in blood from people with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment. Interestingly this was accompanied by increased expression of some mitochondrial-encoded OXPHOS genes, namely those residing closest to the transcription start site of the polycistronic heavy chain mitochondrial transcript (MT-ND1, MT-ND2, MT-ATP6, MT-CO1, MT-CO2, MT-C03) and MT-ND6 transcribed from the light chain. Further we show that mitochondrial DNA copy number was unchanged suggesting no change in steady-state numbers of mitochondria. We suggest that an imbalance in nuclear and mitochondrial genome-encoded OXPHOS transcripts may drive a negative feedback loop reducing mitochondrial translation and compromising OXPHOS efficiency, which is likely to generate damaging reactive oxygen species

International Nonregimes: A Research Agenda1

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146934/1/j.1468-2486.2007.00672.x.pd