School Professional Needs to Support Student Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic

School closures due to COVID-19 left students in Michigan without physical access to school mental health professionals (SMHPs) and other supports typically available in schools. This report examines the needs of SMHPs across Michigan during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and how those needs informed programming and resources provided by a University of Michigan school mental health training and implementation program. In April 2020, a web-based survey asking about student and SMHP mental health was sent to 263 SMHPs who had previously participated in this program. 155 SMHPs (58.9%) responded. Nearly half of SMHPs reported their students’ most pressing needs were support for self-care, anxiety, depression, and traumatic stress. Some SMHPs also met screening criteria themselves for depression and/or anxiety. This survey provided an overview of SMHPs’ concerns early in the COVID-19 pandemic and drove development of new COVID-19-related resources designed to support SMHPs

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Depression and Anxiety Symptoms Among Kenyan adolescents: Prevalence Rates and Associations with Socio-demographic and Psycho-social Factors During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: Research dedicated to youth mental health problems in low – resource countries is an urgent and critical global health priority. Prior to COVID-19, only a handful of studies had estimated the prevalence rates of youth depression and anxiety and identified the associations between these problems with socio-demographic and psychosocial variables. As COVID-19 has emerged as a stressor for youth mental health, new studies on youth mental health during and post COVID-19 may yield important research, policy, and practice implications. Here, we assessed the prevalence of depression and anxiety symptoms and their associations with psychosocial and sociodemographic variables in a large sample of school-going youths in Kenya. Method: Measures of depression (PHQ-8) and anxiety (GAD-7), social support, perseverance, optimism, perceived control, connectedness, happiness, purpose in life, and gratitude were administered to 1,498 Kenyan adolescents (55.47% male) aged 13-to-21 years (M age = 16.33) in mid-2021 when schools re-opened after the COVID–19 school closures. Results: Some 42.46% and 37.56% youths met the clinical cut-off for elevated depression and anxiety symptoms, respectively. Adolescents whose academic performance was not satisfactory endorsed higher depressive and anxiety symptoms. Female adolescents and those who lived with a single parent endorsed higher depressive and anxiety symptoms, respectively. Subjective wellbeing and perceived control were negatively associated with depressive symptoms. Conclusion: The prevalence of depression and anxiety symptoms among Kenyan adolescents has remained steady when compared to pre-pandemic studies. However, symptoms were high when compared to those of adolescents in other countries during COVID-19. This study also identified potential important risk and protective factors

Implementation of speech pathology telepractice services for clinical swallowing assessment: an evaluation of service outcomes, costs and consumer satisfaction

Introduction Timely assessment of swallowing disorders (dysphagia) by speech pathologists helps minimise patient risk, optimise quality of life, and limit healthcare costs. This study involved a multi-site implementation of a validated model for conducting adult clinical swallowing assessments via telepractice and examined its service outcomes, costs and consumer satisfaction. Methods Five hub-spoke telepractice services, encompassing 18 facilities were established across a public health service. Service implementation support, including training of the telepractice speech pathologists (T-SP) and healthcare support workers in each site, was facilitated by an experienced project officer. New referrals from spoke sites were managed by the hub T-SP as per published protocols for dysphagia assessments via telepractice. Data was collected on existing service models prior to implementation, and then patient demographics, referral information, session outcomes, costs and patient and T-SP satisfaction when using telepractice. Results The first 50 sessions were analysed. Referrals were predominantly for inpatients at spoke sites. Telepractice assessments were completed successfully, with only minor technical issues. Changes to patient management (i.e. food/fluid changes post assessment) to optimise safety or progress oral intake, was required for 64% of patients. Service and cost efficiencies were achieved with an average 2-day reduction in waiting time and an average cost benefit of $218 per session when using the telepractice service over standard care. High clinician and patient satisfaction was reported. Conclusion Telepractice services were successfully introduced across multiple sites, and achieved service and cost benefits with high consumer satisfaction

Germline elongator mutations in Sonic Hedgehog medulloblastoma

Cancer genomics has revealed many genes and core molecular processes that contribute to human malignancies, but the genetic and molecular bases of many rare cancers remains unclear. Genetic predisposition accounts for 5 to 10% of cancer diagnoses in children(1,2), and genetic events that cooperate with known somatic driver events are poorly understood. Pathogenic germline variants in established cancer predisposition genes have been recently identified in 5% of patients with the malignant brain tumour medulloblastoma(3). Here, by analysing all protein-coding genes, we identify and replicate rare germline loss-of-function variants across ELP1 in 14% of paediatric patients with the medulloblastoma subgroup Sonic Hedgehog (MBSHH)(.)ELP1 was the most common medulloblastoma predisposition gene and increased the prevalence of genetic predisposition to 40% among paediatric patients with MBSHH. Parent-offspring and pedigree analyses identified two families with a history of paediatric medulloblastoma. ELP1-associated medulloblastomas were restricted to the molecular SHH alpha subtype(4) and characterized by universal biallelic inactivation of ELP1 owing to somatic loss of chromosome arm 9q. Most ELP1-associated medulloblastomas also exhibited somatic alterations in PTCH1, which suggests that germline ELP1 loss-of-function variants predispose individuals to tumour development in combination with constitutive activation of SHH signalling. ELP1 is the largest subunit of the evolutionarily conserved Elongator complex, which catalyses translational elongation through tRNA modifications at the wobble (U-34) position(5,6). Tumours from patients with ELP1-associated MBSHH were characterized by a destabilized Elongator complex, loss of Elongator-dependent tRNA modifications, codon-dependent translational reprogramming, and induction of the unfolded protein response, consistent with loss of protein homeostasis due to Elongator deficiency in model systems(7-9). Thus, genetic predisposition to proteome instability may be a determinant in the pathogenesis of paediatric brain cancers. These results support investigation of the role of protein homeostasis in other cancer types and potential for therapeutic interference.Germline mutations in the Elongator complex gene ELP1 predispose individuals to the development of childhood medulloblastoma