Developing a Citizen Social Science approach to understand urban stress and promote wellbeing in urban communities

This paper sets out the future potential and challenges for developing an interdisciplinary, mixed-method Citizen Social Science approach to researching urban emotions. It focuses on urban stress, which is increasingly noted as a global mental health challenge facing both urbanised and rapidly urbanising societies. The paper reviews the existing use of mobile psychophysiological or biosensing within urban environments—as means of ‘capturing’ the urban geographies of emotions. Methodological reflections are included on primary research using biosensing in a study of workplace and commuter stress for university employees in Birmingham (UK) and Salzburg (Austria) for illustrative purposes. In comparing perspectives on the conceptualisation and measurement of urban stress from psychology, neuroscience and urban planning, the difficulties of defining scientific constructs within Citizen Science are discussed to set out the groundwork for fostering interdisciplinary dialogue. The novel methods, geo-located sensor technologies and data-driven approaches to researching urban stress now available to researchers pose a number of ethical, political and conceptual challenges around defining and measuring emotions, stress, human behaviour and urban space. They also raise issues of rigour, participation and social scientific interpretation. Introducing methods informed by more critical Citizen Social Science perspectives can temper overly individualised forms of data collection to establish more effective ways of addressing urban stress and promoting wellbeing in urban communities

Investigation of prognostic markers in endemic Burkitt lymphoma

Peer-reviewed Oral PresentationThis free journal suppl. entitled: Special Issue: Fifth International Symposium on Childhood, Adolescent and Young Adult Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma Abstracts, 22 October 2015, Varese, ItalyBACKGROUND: Non-anaplastic peripheral T-cell lymphomas (PTCL) are rare in the pediatric population and little is known about outcome and treatment options. OBJECTIVES: The present study is a joint, international, retrospective review of reported cases of PTCL in patients below 18 years, with focus on treatment options and outcome. Design/Methods: Only cases reviewed by national or international reference pathologists have been included. RESULTS: Until now, 122 patients diagnosed between 1995 and 2015 have been included in the study. The frequency of PTCL in the population-based reports (western Europe) was around 1%, which is lower than reported in older publications where Alk+ ALCL were included in this group. Patients were treated according to different treatment regimens, classified as B-cell type, T-cell type or other. pOS at 5 years for the group was at 54% and pEFS at 45%. 28 patients were reported to have a pre-existing disease and this group of patients had worse outcome with pOS at 5 years of 29%. PTCL NOS was the largest subtype, with 53 patients, followed by extranodal NK/T-cell lymphoma, nasal type (n = 21), hepatosplenic T-cell lymphoma (n = 16) and subcutaneous panniculitis-like T-cell lymphoma (n = 12). Patients with subcutaneous panniculitis-like T-cell lymphoma had a good outcome with a p OS at 5 years of 83% while patients with hepatosplenic T-cell lymphoma were reported with only pOS of only 16%. There was no clear difference in outcome between patients treated with a B-cell type or a T-cell type of treatment but in general outcome after CHOP/CHOEP appeared to be inferior. CONCLUSION: PTCL is a heterogeneous group of diseases where PTCL NOS is the largest subgroup. Pre -existing medical condition was reported in 25% of the cases and was associated with a poor treatment result. There is a clear need for disease-based treatment recommendation for this group of patients.link_to_OA_fulltex

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and pre-existing conditions: spectrum, clinical characteristics and outcome in 213 children and adolescents

Children and adolescents with pre-existing conditions such as DNA repair defects or other primary immunodeficiencies have an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. However, large-scale data on patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and their entire spectrum of pre-existing conditions are scarce. A retrospective multinational study was conducted by means of questionnaires sent out to the national study groups or centers, by the two largest consortia in childhood non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the European Intergroup for Childhood non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, and the international Berlin-Frankfurt-Munster Study Group. The study identified 213 patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and a pre-existing condition. Four subcategories were established: a) cancer predisposition syndromes (n=124, 58%); b) primary immunodeficiencies not further specified (n=27, 13%); c) genetic diseases with no increased cancer risk (n=40, 19%); and d) non-classifiable conditions (n=22, 10%). Seventy-nine of 124 (64%) cancer predispositions were reported in groups with more than 20 patients: ataxia telangiectasia (n=32), Nijmegen breakage syndrome (n=26), constitutional mismatch repair deficiency (n=21). For the 151 patients with a known cancer risk, 5-year event-free survival and overall survival rates were 40%+/-4% and 51%+/-4%, respectively. Five-year cumulative incidences of progression/relapse and treatment-related death as a first event were 22%+/-4% and 24%+/-4%, respectively. Ten-year incidence of second malignancy was 24%+/-5% and 7-year overall survival of the 21 patients with a second malignancy was 41%+/-11%. Patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and pre-existing conditions have an inferior survival rate with a large proportion of therapy-related deaths compared to patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and no pre-existing conditions. They may require special vigilance when receiving standard or modified/reduced-intensity chemotherapy or when undergoing allogeneic stem cell transplantation

Use of the pathfinder network scaling to measure online customer reviews: A theme park study

We use pathfinder network scaling (PENETS) approach to measure and evaluate theme park visitors' online reviews. PFNETS as an effective tool of big data analytics can be used to identify unobserved meaningful interrelationships between concepts. Although there are many research analyzing online reviews, this study is the first attempt to use an analytical approach of PFNETS to explore online reviews in theme park visitor experiences. The article collects 14,142 effective reviews of the world's first Disneyland in California from TripAdvisor. Using parallel and similarity comparison in pathfinder scaling, four individually but fully connected networks were generated to reveal different visitors' experiences in different segments. The findings indicate the dissimilarity of concept relatedness between different segments and revealed the knowledge gap of marketing to different segments in theme parks