Teaching DBT Skills to DACA Recipients and their Families: Findings from an ECHO Program

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) offers temporary administrative relief from deportation for undocumented immigrant adolescents and young adults who were brought as children to the United States. Accordingly, DACA has contributed to creating a different landscape of opportunities for this group. However, DACA has been and continues to be highly contested in the national political climate. Threats to DACA give rise to considerable anxiety, fear, and distress among its recipients, who face significant barriers to accessing mental health care services. Thus, a group of psychologists partnered with a leading immigrant rights advocacy organization and formed a reciprocal collaboration to understand and meet the mental health needs of undocumented communities. A major focus of the collaboration is to foster learning and support members of the immigrant community in contributing to their own well-being. The collaborative developed and delivered a stand-alone web-based mental health education session to DACA recipients and their families and practitioners serving this population. The session presented the use of dialectical behavioral therapy skills, three emotion regulation and four distress tolerance skills, as a strength-based approach to managing painful emotions and distress. Session content was adapted to include culturally informed examples for each skill. Quantitative and qualitative findings show that those who participated in the web-based program benefited from the education received. Findings also underscored participants’ need for learning culturally sensitive coping strategies for managing stress. We provide recommendations on the delivery of culturally congruent healing interventions for immigrants with a focus on enhancing access among immigrant communities

Electronic Patient-Reported Outcomes in Nephrology: Focus on Hemodialysis

Hemodialysis; ePRO; PROMs; PREMsHemodiàlisi; ePRO; PROMs; PREMsHemodiálisis; ePRO; PROMs; PREMsThe success of hemodialysis (HD) treatments has been evaluated using objective measures of analytical parameters, or machine-measured parameters, despite having available validated instruments that assess patient perspective. There is an emerging interest regarding the use and relevance of patient-related outcomes (PROs). Electronic PROs (ePROs) involve the use of electronic technology, provide rapid access to this information, and are becoming more widely used in clinical trials and studies to evaluate efficacy and safety. Despite the scarce literature, this review suggests that ePROs are useful in providing a more customized and multidimensional approach to patient management and in making better clinical decisions in relevant aspects such as vascular access, duration and frequency of dialysis sessions, treatment of anemia, mental health, fatigue, and quality of life. The purpose of this review is to raise interest in the systematic use of ePROs in HD and to promote the development of studies in this field, which can respond to the gaps in knowledge and contribute to the implementation of the use of ePROs through new technologies, helping to improve the quality of health care

Increased Activities against Biofilms of the Pathogenic Yeast Candida albicans of Optimized Pom-1 Derivatives

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are an alternative group for the therapy of infectious diseases, with activity against a wide range of diverse pathogens. However, classical AMPs have significant side effects in human cells due to their unspecific pore formation in biomembranes. Nevertheless, AMPs are promising therapeutics and can be isolated from natural sources, which include sea and freshwater molluscs. The AMPs identified in these organisms show promising antimicrobial activities, as pathogens are mainly fought by innate defence mechanisms. An auspicious candidate among molluscs is the Cuban freshwater snail Pomacea poeyana, from which the peptides Pom-1 and Pom-2 have been isolated and studied. These studies revealed significant antimicrobial activities for both AMPs. Based on the activities determined, Pom-1 was used for further optimization. In order to meet the emerging requirements of improved anti-biofilm activity against naturally occurring Candida species, the six derivatives Pom-1A to F were developed and investigated. Analysis of the derivatives acting on the most abundant naturally occurring Candida yeast Candida albicans (C. albicans) revealed a strong anti-biofilm activity, especially induced by Pom-1 B, C, and D. Furthermore, a moderate decrease in the metabolic activity of planktonic yeast cells was observed

Evidence Against the Sciama Model of Radiative Decay of Massive Neutrinos

We report on spectral observations of the night sky in the band around 900 angstroms where the emission line in the Sciama model of radiatively decaying massive neutrinos would be present. The data were obtained with a high resolution, high sensitivity spectrometer flown on the Spanish MINISAT satellite. The observed emission is far less intense than that expected in the Sciama model.Comment: 9 pages, accepted to Ap

Laser-Induced Crystallization of Sputtered Unhydrogenated Silicon at Low Temperatures

10-um-thick non-hydrogenated amorphous-silicon (a-Si) films were deposited at relatively high rates (_>10 Å/s) by radio-frequency magnetron sputtering (RFMS) on different large-area buffer-layer-coated glass substrates at deposition temperatures ranging from room temperature (RT) to 300oC. These amorphous samples were subsequently crystallized by means of a continuous-wave diode laser, looking for conditions to reach liquid-phase crystallization. The influence of deposition conditions on the quality of the final micro-crystalline silicon films has been studied

Antimicrobial Peptides Pom-1 and Pom-2 from Pomacea poeyana Are Active against Candida auris, C. parapsilosis and C. albicans Biofilms

Recently two peptides isolated from the Cuban freshwater snail Pomacea poeyana (Pilsbry, 1927) were described to have antimicrobial activity against bacterial pathogens. Here we show considerable activities of Pom-1 and Pom-2 to reduce the viability of C. albicans, C. parapsilosis and the less common species C. auris measured as the decrease of metabolic activity in the resazurin reduction assay for planktonic cells. Although these activities were low, Pom-1 and Pom-2 turned out to be highly potent inhibitors of biofilm formation for the three Candida species tested. Whereas Pom-1 was slightly more active against C. albicans and C. parapsilosis as representatives of the more common Candida species Pom-2 showed no preference and was fully active also against biofilms of the more uncommon species C. auris. Pom-1 and Pom-2 may represent promising lead structures for the development of a classical peptide optimization strategy with the realistic aim to further increase antibiofilm properties and other pharmacologic parameters and to generate finally the first antifungal drug with a pronounced dedication against Candida biofilms

Applications of Direct Injection Soft Chemical Ionisation-Mass Spectrometry for the Detection of Pre-blast Smokeless Powder Organic Additives

Analysis of smokeless powders is of interest from forensics and security perspectives. This article reports the detection of smokeless powder organic additives (in their pre-detonation condition), namely the stabiliser diphenylamine and its derivatives 2-nitrodiphenylamine and 4-nitrodiphenylamine, and the additives (used both as stabilisers and plasticisers) methyl centralite and ethyl centralite, by means of swab sampling followed by thermal desorption and direct injection soft chemical ionisation-mass spectrometry. Investigations on the product ions resulting from the reactions of the reagent ions H3O+ and O2+ with additives as a function of reduced electric field are reported. The method was comprehensively evaluated in terms of linearity, sensitivity and precision. For H3O+, the limits of detection (LoD) are in the range of 41-88 pg of additive, for which the accuracy varied between 1.5 and 3.2%, precision varied between 3.7 and 7.3% and linearity showed R20.9991. For O2+, LoD are in the range of 72 to 1.4 ng, with an accuracy of between 2.8 and 4.9% and a precision between 4.5 and 8.6% and R20.9914. The validated methodology was applied to the analysis of commercial pre-blast gun powders from different manufacturers.(VLID)4826148Accepted versio