Workplace screening programs for chronic disease prevention: a rapid review

This review examined the effectiveness of workplace screening programs for chronic disease prevention based on evidence retrieved from the main databases of biomedical and health economic literature published to March 2012, supplemented with relevant reports. The review found: 1. Strong evidence of effectiveness of HRAs (when used in combination with other interventions) in relation to tobacco use, alcohol use, dietary fat intake, blood pressure and cholesterol 2. Sufficient evidence for effectiveness of worksite programs to control overweight and obesity 3. Sufficient evidence of effectiveness for workplace HRAs in combination with additional interventions to have favourable impact on the use of healthcare services (such as reductions in emergency department visits, outpatient visits, and inpatient hospital days over the longer term) 4. Sufficient evidence for effectiveness of benefits-linked financial incentives in increasing HRA and program participation 5. Sufficient evidence that for every dollar invested in these programs an annual gain of $3.20 (range$1.40 to $4.60) can be achieved 6. Promising evidence that even higher returns on investment can be achieved in programs incorporating newer technologies such as telephone coaching of high risk individuals and benefits-linked financial incentive

Protein-S Deficiency Diagnosed Post-ACL Injury in a Collegiate Track and Field Athlete

OBJECTIVES 1.Summarize details of unique case involving undiagnosed clotting disorder in a collegiate athlete. 2.Present overview regarding mechanism and epidemiology of protein S deficiency. 3.Identify the role of the certified athletic trainer in the evaluation and treatment process, and as a patient advocate. 4.Emphasize importance of trust and communication between athlete, certified athletic trainer, and team physician throughout evaluation and treatment

Defending the Humanities: Making a Case for Eighteenth-Century Studies

While the percentage of humanities majors has long been on the decline, the more recent experiences of the Great Recession, its aftermath, and the outbreak of Covid-19 have introduced a variety of daunting and intertwined challenges to scholars in these disciplines. Financial and occupational anxieties surrounding higher education threaten not only to crowd out humanities departments but also to alter the very understanding of what higher education is. While some students attend college to prepare themselves for engaged citizenship or to learn in a community, many also attend as a pathway to employment and expect a prompt return on investment. Moreover, state-level disinvestment contributes to higher tuition fees and student debt, heightening an emphasis on immediate job outcomes to the detriment of the humanities, which typically do not offer study-to-job pipelines. Such financial and legislative divestment can lead to falling enrollments within and cuts to humanities departments, simultaneously reflecting and confirming the public perception that humanistic study is impractical. While humanists have long sought to stem this decline, scholars of the eighteenth century may be uniquely positioned to innovate pragmatic solutions because of the historical period we study. First, eighteenth-century Europe experienced political and economic phenomena that parallel trends in our own era. In England alone, eighteenth-century society faced sharp financial downturns, rising inequities, unfit political leaders, moribund statutes, and new technologies that abetted entrenched class structures. Second, scholars of the eighteenth century have a model of interdisciplinarity and innovation in Enlightenment philosophes, who were not siloed within discrete disciplines as we are today and so were more able and willing to think across epistemological categories. By drawing upon our knowledge of eighteenth-century culture, the following essays seek both to open an inquiry into the decline of the humanities and to provide potential solutions to it. They grew out of a roundtable discussion held at the March 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. In publishing this forum, we hope to continue the expansive and ambitious conversation begun in Orlando, Florida. As scholars of the eighteenth century, we seek to apply the interdisciplinary insights drawn from our research to help strengthen the humanities, especially within those academic institutions that have neither expansive funds nor research-intensive aims. As these authors argue, today’s humanists face extremely high stakes but also abundant possibilities

Qollateral: The Impact of QAnon on Loved Ones and the Potential for P/CVE Programs to Help

Since 2017, the conspiracy theory known as QAnon has boomed in popularity and spread across national borders. While QAnon is linked to various violent criminal acts, including the January 6th riots on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., there is abundant anecdotal data to suggest QAnon also has destructive relational effects on the loved ones of its adherents. While these Q-believers and their loved ones would benefit from psychosocial support, they either do not seek help or are unable to find the type of support they need. By conducting an original survey of 473 family members and friends of Q-believers, this study adds to a nascent but growing body of research documenting the negative collateral effects of conspiracies on loved ones and their need for professional and psychosocial support. Our findings indicate that younger, immediate family members who live with the Q-person experience the greatest negative impacts from their loved one’s belief in QAnon. While this group expressed the highest level of need and desire to access psychosocial support services, they also reported the most barriers to accessing these services. Among these barriers, many respondents identified a lack of QAnon-informed or -specialized support services. These findings suggest that programs aimed at preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) are uniquely positioned to help Q-believers and their loved-ones, as well as to build capacity among health and social service providers to increase the support available to this population

Mitochondria directly influence fertilisation outcome in the pig

The mitochondrion is explicitly involved in cytoplasmic regulation and is the cell's major generator of ATP. Our aim was to determine whether mitochondria alone could influence fertilisation outcome. In vitro, oocyte competence can be assessed through the presence of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) as indicated by the dye, brilliant cresyl blue (BCB). Using porcine in vitro fertilisation (IVF), we have assessed oocyte maturation, cytoplasmic volume, fertilisation outcome, mitochondrial number as determined by mtDNA copy number, and whether mitochondria are uniformly distributed between blastomeres of each embryo. After staining with BCB, we observed a significant difference in cytoplasmic volume between BCB positive (BCB+) and BCB negative (BCB-) oocytes. There was also a significant difference in mtDNA copy number between fertilised and unfertilised oocytes and unequal mitochondrial segregation between blastomeres during early cleavage stages. Furthermore, we have supplemented BCB- oocytes with mitochondria from maternal relatives and observed a significant difference in fertilisation outcomes following both IVF and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) between supplemented, sham-injected and non-treated BCB- oocytes. We have therefore demonstrated a relationship between oocyte maturity, cytoplasmic volume, and fertilisation outcome and mitochondrial content. These data suggest that mitochondrial number is important for fertilisation outcome and embryonic development. Furthermore, a mitochondrial pre-fertilisation threshold may ensure that, as mitochondria are diluted out during post-fertilisation cleavage, there are sufficient copies of mtDNA per blastomere to allow transmission of mtDNA to each cell of the post-implantation embryo after the initiation of mtDNA replication during the early postimplantation stages

A Markov model for inferring flows in directed contact networks

Directed contact networks (DCNs) are a particularly flexible and convenient class of temporal networks, useful for modeling and analyzing the transfer of discrete quantities in communications, transportation, epidemiology, etc. Transfers modeled by contacts typically underlie flows that associate multiple contacts based on their spatiotemporal relationships. To infer these flows, we introduce a simple inhomogeneous Markov model associated to a DCN and show how it can be effectively used for data reduction and anomaly detection through an example of kernel-level information transfers within a computer.Comment: 12 page

Simulation of Man in the Middle Attack On Smart Grid Testbed

Over the past decade, the frequency of cyber attacks against power grids has steadily increased, requiring researchers to find and patch vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Our research introduces the prototype of a man-in-the-middle attack to be implemented on a microgrid emulator of a smart grid. We present a method of violating the integrity and authentication of packets that are using the IEEE Synchrophasor Protocol in a controlled environment, but this same approach could be used on any other protocol that lacks the proper overhead to ensure the integrity and authenticity of packets. In future research, we plan to implement and test the attack on the previously mentioned smart grid testbed in order to assess the attacks feasibility and tangible effects on Wide Area Monitoring and Control applications, as well as propose possible countermeasures. For this paper, we developed a working simulation of our intended attack using the software ModelSim 10.4. The attack will modify network packet data coming from a Schweitzer Engineering Labs (SEL) Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) hardware sensor, which provides a stream of precise timing values associated with current and voltage values, as these measured values are en route to the Open Phasor Data Concentrator (OpenPDC) application running on a Windows server. Our simulation provides and validates all of the necessary code in order to program a Field Programmable Gate Array and execute our attack on the testbed in future research

Bridging flavour violation and leptogenesis in SU(3) family models

We reconsider basic, in the sense of minimal field content, Pati-Salam x SU(3) family models which make use of the Type I see-saw mechanism to reproduce the observed mixing and mass spectrum in the neutrino sector. The goal of this is to achieve the observed baryon asymmetry through the thermal decay of the lightest right-handed neutrino and at the same time to be consistent with the expected experimental lepton flavour violation sensitivity. This kind of models have been previously considered but it was not possible to achieve a compatibility among all of the ingredients mentioned above. We describe then how different SU(3) messengers, the heavy fields that decouple and produce the right form of the Yukawa couplings together with the scalars breaking the SU(3) symmetry, can lead to different Yukawa couplings. This in turn implies different consequences for flavour violation couplings and conditions for realizing the right amount of baryon asymmetry through the decay of the lightest right-handed neutrino. Also a highlight of the present work is a new fit of the Yukawa textures traditionally embedded in SU(3) family models.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures, Some typos correcte

Time to Regenerate: Ecosystems and Health Promotion

Butler and Friel call upon the health promotion community to strongly reengage with environmental and ecological issues

The oxidative stress adaptor p66Shc is required for permanent embryo arrest in vitro

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Excessive developmental failure occurs during the first week of <it>in vitro </it>embryo development due to elevated levels of cell death and arrest. We hypothesize that permanently arrested embryos enter a stress-induced "senescence-like" state that is dependent on the oxidative stress-adaptor and lifespan determinant protein p66Shc. The aim of this study was to selectively diminish p66Shc gene expression in bovine oocytes and embryos using post-transcriptional gene silencing by RNA-mediated interference to study the effects of p66Shc knockdown on <it>in vitro </it>fertilized bovine embryos.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Approximately 12,000–24,000 short hairpin (sh)RNAi molecules specific for p66Shc were microinjected into bovine germinal vesicle stage oocytes or zygotes. Experiments were comprised of a control group undergoing IVF alone and two groups microinjected with and without p66Shc shRNAi molecules prior to IVF. The amount of p66Shc mRNA quantified by Real Time PCR was significantly (P < 0.001) lowered upon p66Shc shRNAi microinjection. This reduction was selective for p66Shc mRNA, as both histone H2a and p53 mRNA levels were not altered. The relative signal strength of p66Shc immuno-fluorescence revealed a significant reduction in the number of pixels for p66Shc shRNAi microinjected groups compared to controls (P < 0.05). A significant decrease (P < 0.001) in the incidence of arrested embryos upon p66Shc shRNAi microinjection was detected compared to IVF and microinjected controls along with significant reductions (P < 0.001) in both cleavage divisions and blastocyst development. No significant differences in p66Shc mRNA levels (P = 0.314) were observed among the three groups at the blastocyst stage.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These results show that p66Shc is involved in the regulation of embryo development specifically in mediating early cleavage arrest and facilitating development to the blastocyst stage for in vitro produced bovine embryos.</p