The impact of Participatory Budgeting on health and wellbeing:A scoping review of evaluations

Background: Participatory budgeting (PB), citizens deliberating among themselves and with officials to decide how to allocate funds for public goods, has been increasingly implemented across Europe and worldwide. While PB is recommended as good practice by the World Bank and the United Nations, with potential to improve health and wellbeing, it is unclear what evaluations have been conducted on the impact of PB on health and wellbeing. Methods: For this scoping review, we searched 21 databases with no restrictions on publication date or language. The search term ‘participatory budget’ was used as the relevant global label for the intervention of interest. Studies were included if they reported original analysis of health, social, political, or economic and budgetary outcomes of PB. We examined the study design, analysis, outcomes and location of included articles. Findings are reported narratively. Results: From 1458 identified references, 37 studies were included. The majority of evaluations (n = 24) were of PB in South America, seven were in Europe. Most evaluations were case studies (n = 23) conducting ethnography and surveys, focussing on political outcomes such as participation in PB or impacts on political activities. All of the quantitative observational studies analysing population level data, except one in Russia, were conducted in South America. Conclusion: Despite increasing interest in PB, evaluations applying robust methods to analyse health and wellbeing outcomes are scarce, particularly beyond Brazil. Therefore, implementation of PB schemes should be accompanied by rigorous qualitative and quantitative evaluation to identify impacts and the processes by which they are realised

Common variants in Alzheimer's disease and risk stratification by polygenic risk scores.

Funder: Funder: Fundación bancaria ‘La Caixa’ Number: LCF/PR/PR16/51110003 Funder: Grifols SA Number: LCF/PR/PR16/51110003 Funder: European Union/EFPIA Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Number: 115975 Funder: JPco-fuND FP-829-029 Number: 733051061Genetic discoveries of Alzheimer's disease are the drivers of our understanding, and together with polygenetic risk stratification can contribute towards planning of feasible and efficient preventive and curative clinical trials. We first perform a large genetic association study by merging all available case-control datasets and by-proxy study results (discovery n = 409,435 and validation size n = 58,190). Here, we add six variants associated with Alzheimer's disease risk (near APP, CHRNE, PRKD3/NDUFAF7, PLCG2 and two exonic variants in the SHARPIN gene). Assessment of the polygenic risk score and stratifying by APOE reveal a 4 to 5.5 years difference in median age at onset of Alzheimer's disease patients in APOE ɛ4 carriers. Because of this study, the underlying mechanisms of APP can be studied to refine the amyloid cascade and the polygenic risk score provides a tool to select individuals at high risk of Alzheimer's disease

Performance of Bio-Rad HIV-1/2 Confirmatory Assay in HIV-1, HIV-2 and HIV-1/2 dually reactive patients - comparison with INNO-LIA and immunocomb discriminatory assays

Background: Being able to discriminate between HIV-1, HIV-2 and HIV-1/2 dual infection is imperative for the appropriate selection of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in regions with high HIV-2 endemicity. Objectives: To evaluate Bio-Rad Geenius HIV-1/2 Confirmatory Assay against INNO-LIA HIV 1/2 Score and ImmunoComb HIV 1/2 BiSpot with an emphasis towards ability to discriminate between HIV-1, HIV-2 and HIV-1/2 dual infection. Material and Methods: 131 samples from ART naïve HIV infected patients in Guinea-Bissau were selected retrospectively and tested with Geenius, INNO-LIA and Immunocomb. HIV-1/2 RNA were measured in all samples and HIV-1/2 DNA in 59 samples. Results: The Geenius reader typed 62 samples as HIV-1 reactive, 37 samples as HIV-2 reactive and 32 samples as HIV-1/2 dually reactive. Geenius manual reading classified 10% more samples as HIV-1/2 dually reactive (n = 35). INNO-LIA typed 63 samples as HIV-1 reactive, 36 samples as HIV-2 reactive and 32 samples as HIV-1/2 dually reactive while Immunocomb classified a large proportion of samples as HIV-1/2 dually reactive (n = 45). The measurement of agreement of the Geenius reader compared with INNO-LIA and Immunocomb was 92.4% and 84.0% respectively while the measurement of agreement of Geenius manual reading compared with INNO-LIA and Immuncomb was 93.1% and 89.3% respectively. Conclusions: Geenius has similar performance characteristics as INNO-LIA, and performs considerably better than Immunocomb, for differentiating between HIV types. This is especially true when using the Geenius reader while manual reading of the Geenius assay seemed to overestimate the numbers of HIV-1/2 dually reactive samples