Child and Parent Influences on Food Purchases: Contributions to Obesity

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2015. Major: Nursing. Advisor: Jayne Fulkerson. 1 computer file (PDF); xiv, 224 pages.Background Currently, affordability of healthful diets for families is disputed in the research literature. Additionally, no research to date has comprehensively-operationalized or investigated how a set of social-contextual food purchasing influence constructs of parents and children (i.e., cooking ability, concern for nutrition, cost, family food preferences, social pressure, store access, and time) is associated with home food environment, child dietary, and parent and child weight outcomes. Aims (1) Systematically review affordability of a healthful diet in the United States. (2) Develop new purchasing influence measures. (3) Assess possible sociodemographic differences in the new measures. (4) Evaluate relationships between the new measures and home food environment, child dietary, and parent and child weight outcomes. (5) Examine how the new measures explain variance of outcomes when accounting for known potentially influential variables. Design/Sample Aim 1: A systematic data search and evaluation of market basket survey (MBS) research. Aims 2-5: Secondary-data analysis of baseline data of families in the HOME Plus trial. Method Aim 1. MBS methodology, price and affordability findings, and limitations were systematically reviewed. Aim 2-5. Guided by research literature and the social ecological framework, exploratory factor analysis was used to operationalize the purchasing influence constructs. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were used to assess relationships between new measures and outcomes. Results Aim 1. Diets meeting dietary recommendations are potentially unaffordable for low-income families, especially if purchased from small/medium-sized stores. Aim 2-5. Nineteen social-contextual food-purchasing influence measures were developed. In bivariate, multivariate, and hierarchical blocked regression models, many measures within the time, cooking ability, store access, and nutrition concern constructs were significantly associated with home food environment outcomes and to a lesser extent with dietary and weight outcomes. Conclusion Affordability of a healthful diet was called into question for low-income American families. Purchasing influence research findings indicate many social-contextual food-purchasing influences were associated with home food environments. Future, more highly powered research should validate measures and consider longitudinal evaluation and potential intervention, especially related to the time, cooking ability, concern for nutrition, and store access constructs, to improve home food environments, and ultimately, dietary intake and obesity

Education pathways, mentoring and future intentions of nurse and midwifery consultants in a NSW Health District

Clinical Nurse and Midwifery Consultants (CNC/CMCs) play an important role within NSW Health Services. They are required to function within five domains of practice: clinical service and consultancy, clinical leadership, research, education, and clinical services planning and management. This study engaged with one Health District’s current CNC/CMC network members with a view to informing the development of a strategy for career and succession planning. One hundred CNC/CMCs were invited to participate in an online survey and in one of three focus groups. The survey explored: the participants’ demographics, their educational pathways prior to and during the role, the relationship of this education to the five domains of CNC/CMC practice, their priorities for their own future education needs, the education priorities they suggested for other aspiring CNC/CMCs, and who was mentoring into their role. The focus group added further clarity to the survey data. The survey was completed by 61% of invitees and 19% attended the focus groups. The findings identified an experienced workforce, with 25% of CNC/CMCs intending to leave over the next five years, yet only 20% mentoring others. Nearly half (47%) of the participants held or were working towards a Master’s degree. A third of these Master’s degrees were considered by the participants to support knowledge in all five of the CNC/CMCs’ domains of practice, in comparison to only 11% of graduate certificates. The focus-group participants expressed the view that the Master’s qualification supported them to meet the domains of the CNC/CMC role, and suggested that aspiring CNC/CMCs should aim for this level of education. When considering their own personal educational needs, the CNC/CMCs prioritised service planning and management and research, but they felt that aspiring CNC/CMCs should prioritise the development of clinical knowledge, followed by clinical leadership.Article submitted: 21/6/18Article accepted: 10/1/19Publish date: 15/2/1

The 3D OrbiSIMS—label-free metabolic imaging with subcellular lateral resolution and high mass-resolving power

We report the development of a 3D OrbiSIMS instrument for label-free biomedical imaging. It combines the high spatial resolution of secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS; under 200 nm for inorganic species and under 2 μm for biomolecules) with the high mass-resolving power of an Orbitrap (>240,000 at m/z 200). This allows exogenous and endogenous metabolites to be visualized in 3D with subcellular resolution. We imaged the distribution of neurotransmitters—gamma-aminobutyric acid, dopamine and serotonin—with high spectroscopic confidence in the mouse hippocampus. We also putatively annotated and mapped the subcellular localization of 29 sulfoglycosphingolipids and 45 glycerophospholipids, and we confirmed lipid identities with tandem mass spectrometry. We demonstrated single-cell metabolomic profiling using rat alveolar macrophage cells incubated with different concentrations of the drug amiodarone, and we observed that the upregulation of phospholipid species and cholesterol is correlated with the accumulation of amiodarone

A Win-Win Higher Education Partnership: A Student Service-Learning Experience that Assists with Implementation of an Intervention Program in a Community-Engaged Research Trial

This presentation describes a successful partnership across two institutions to engage nursing students in service-learning experiences as part of a community-engaged research trial. The partnership is an essential component to the implementation of a childhood obesity intervention program and provides students with hands-on experience working with families in a community setting

Service Learning within Community-Engaged Research: Facilitating Nursing Student Learning Outcomes

The objective of this manuscript is to describe a method of integrating baccalaureate nursing student service-learning experiences within a randomized controlled trial conducted in a community setting to facilitate student learning and expose students to the nursing scientist role. Placing students in a research service-learning experience involved several steps beginning with finding a nursing program for potential collaboration where this service-learning opportunity would be a natural fit with course content and formalizing the collaboration between the two institutions. Upon receipt of research grant funding, researchers and course faculty worked to navigate logistics and place students within the service-learning experience. After research training, 35 students assisted with intervention delivery and completed course assignments to document their learning. The collaboration described between a community-engaged research team from a research-intensive university and course faculty from a distant institution could be replicated with all types of nursing research

Variability in nomadism: environmental gradients modulate the movement behaviors of dryland ungulates

Studying nomadic animal movement across species and ecosystems is essential for better understanding variability in nomadism. In arid environments, unpredictable changes in water and forage resources are known drivers of nomadic movements. Water resources vary temporally but are often spatially stationary, whereas foraging resources are often both temporally and spatially variable. These differences may lead to different types of nomadic movements: forage- vs. water-driven nomadism. Our study investigates these two different types of nomadism in relation to resource gradients from mesic steppe to xeric desert environments in Mongolia’s Gobi-Steppe Ecosystem. We hypothesized that in the desert, where water is a key resource, animals are more water-dependent and may show water-driven nomadism with frequent revisits to spatially fixed resources, while in the steppe, animals are less water-dependent and may show forage-driven nomadism, tracking high-quality foraging patches with infrequent revisits to previously used resources. We utilized GPS movement data from 40 individuals of four ungulate species (Mongolian gazelle, goitered gazelle, saiga antelope, and Asiatic wild ass) in the Gobi-Steppe Ecosystem. We calculated displacement distances and recursion metrics and subsequently performed a principal component analysis to quantify the variation in movement patterns. The satellite-derived vegetation greenness served as a proxy for the resource gradient and was associated with variation in movement behaviors described by the first principal component, demonstrating that the variability in movements was closely related to the resource gradient from mesic to xeric habitats.We showed that ungulates in the resource-rich steppe tended to move long distances with few revisits (forage-driven nomadism), while ungulates in the resource-poor desert tended to move shorter distances with more revisits (water-driven nomadism). Our results suggest that xeric and mesic habitats promote different types of nomadic strategies. These results have important implications for conservation strategies: Forage-driven nomads primarily require a high degree of landscape-level permeability, and water-driven nomads additionally require the protection of ephemeral water bodies and actions to maintain the functional connectivity between them. animal movement; arid; forage; nomadism; recursion; resource; ungulate; waterVariability in nomadism: environmental gradients modulate the movement behaviors of dryland ungulatespublishedVersio

Assessment of Mining Extent and Expansion in Myanmar Based on Freely-Available Satellite Imagery

Using freely-available data and open-source software, we developed a remote sensing methodology to identify mining areas and assess recent mining expansion in Myanmar. Our country-wide analysis used Landsat 8 satellite data from a select number of mining areas to create a raster layer of potential mining areas. We used this layer to guide a systematic scan of freely-available fine-resolution imagery, such as Google Earth, in order to digitize likely mining areas. During this process, each mining area was assigned a ranking indicating our certainty in correct identification of the mining land use. Finally, we identified areas of recent mining expansion based on the change in albedo, or brightness, between Landsat images from 2002 and 2015. We identified 90,041 ha of potential mining areas in Myanmar, of which 58% (52,312 ha) was assigned high certainty, 29% (26,251 ha) medium certainty, and 13% (11,478 ha) low certainty. Of the high-certainty mining areas, 62% of bare ground was disturbed (had a large increase in albedo) since 2002. This four-month project provides the first publicly-available database of mining areas in Myanmar, and it demonstrates an approach for large-scale assessment of mining extent and expansion based on freely-available data