Building on the Rich Metadata from Decades of Health Behavior Studies: The Potential for Common Data Elements (CDEs) to Enhance the Identification of Health Data Across Different Research Projects

Continued analyses of key datasets are extremely important to building understanding of the underlying causes of substance use and addiction, and multiply the benefits of our nation’s investment in this science. ICPSR and the National Addiction and HIV Data Archive Program (NAHDAP) disseminate data from hundreds of NIH-funded research studies, as well as data collected with support from other agencies and foundations, many with questions about health outcomes or status that are not easily discovered with current search protocols which can be either too narrow or too broad. With funding from NIDA, we are working to increase the use of these extant data for health research by making these variables easier to identify. This is of great benefit the research community, providing improved discoverability of relevant health concepts within and, more importantly, across the multiple studies maintained in our repositories.OBSSR/NIHhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145467/1/IASSIST2018_CDE_Poster.pdfDescription of IASSIST2018_CDE_Poster.pdf : Poster presentation at IASSIST & CARTO 2018 Annual Meetin

Steroid receptor coactivator-1 modulates the function of Pomc neurons and energy homeostasis

Hypothalamic neurons expressing the anorectic peptide Pro-opiomelanocortin (Pomc) regulate food intake and body weight. Here, we show that Steroid Receptor Coactivator-1 (SRC-1) interacts with a target of leptin receptor activation, phosphorylated STAT3, to potentiate Pomc transcription. Deletion of SRC-1 in Pomc neurons in mice attenuates their depolarization by leptin, decreases Pomc expression and increases food intake leading to high-fat diet-induced obesity. In humans, fifteen rare heterozygous variants in SRC-1 found in severely obese individuals impair leptin-mediated Pomc reporter activity in cells, whilst four variants found in non-obese controls do not. In a knock-in mouse model of a loss of function human variant (SRC-1L1376P), leptin-induced depolarization of Pomc neurons and Pomc expression are significantly reduced, and food intake and body weight are increased. In summary, we demonstrate that SRC-1 modulates the function of hypothalamic Pomc neurons, and suggest that targeting SRC-1 may represent a useful therapeutic strategy for weight loss.Peer reviewe

NAHDAP: Building on the Rich Metadata from Decades of Substance Abuse Studies: The Potential for Common Data Elements (CDEs) to Enhance the Identification of Health Data across Different Research Projects

Continued analyses of key datasets are extremely important to building understanding of the underlying causes of substance use and addiction, and multiply the benefits of our nation’s investment in this science. ICPSR and the National Addiction and HIV Data Archive Program (NAHDAP) disseminate data from hundreds of NIH-funded research studies, as well as data collected with support from other agencies and foundations, many with questions about health outcomes or status that are not easily discovered with current search protocols which can be either too narrow or too broad. With funding from NIDA, we are working to increase the use of these extant data for health research by making these variables easier to identify. This is of great benefit the research community, providing improved discoverability of relevant health concepts within and, more importantly, across the multiple studies maintained in our repositories.OBSSR/NIHhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145466/1/NAHDAP_Presentation_SPR_2018.pp

The Teaching of Empathy for High School and College Students: Testing Rogerian Methods with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index

The teachability of empathy is discussed with particular regard to developmental issues. One hundred and four high school and college students were administered Davis\u27s (1980) Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) both before and after a standard course of Rogerian-based peer facilitation skills training. The IRI offers four independent subscales which measure the cognitive and affective components of empathy. Statistically significant findings indicate greater developmental readiness for learning empathic communication in the college sample, particularly for subscales measuring Empathic Concern and Perspective Taking. A group of untrained college students taking a course in behavioral psychology showed no progress on any IRI subscales. Although college females began with higher empathy scores, both genders were equally teachable. Implications for prevention and counseling readiness are discussed, along with suggestions for future research

Improved imputation of low-frequency and rare variants using the UK10K haplotype reference panel

\ua9 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.Imputing genotypes from reference panels created by whole-genome sequencing (WGS) provides a cost-effective strategy for augmenting the single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) content of genome-wide arrays. The UK10K Cohorts project has generated a data set of 3,781 whole genomes sequenced at low depth (average 7x), aiming to exhaustively characterize genetic variation down to 0.1% minor allele frequency in the British population. Here we demonstrate the value of this resource for improving imputation accuracy at rare and low-frequency variants in both a UK and an Italian population. We show that large increases in imputation accuracy can be achieved by re-phasing WGS reference panels after initial genotype calling. We also present a method for combining WGS panels to improve variant coverage and downstream imputation accuracy, which we illustrate by integrating 7,562 WGS haplotypes from the UK10K project with 2,184 haplotypes from the 1000 Genomes Project. Finally, we introduce a novel approximation that maintains speed without sacrificing imputation accuracy for rare variants