New Voices at the Civic Table: Facilitating Personal and Social Change

· This article describes six pilot initiatives of the Alliance for Children and Families -- New Voices at the Civic Table (New Voices), a philanthropy-funded effort to challenge human service organizations to integrate civic engagement as a permanent part of their infrastructure. · All six New Voices models included common elements: leadership training, civic education, experiential learning, participatory decision-making, networking, and reflective evaluation. · Each also reflected one of four primary variations to civic engagement based on their community needs and demands: self-efficacy, constituent involvement, mobilizing, and organizing. · Results demonstrate that civic engagement in human services not only produces a means for promoting social change but also changes the way participants see themselves in the community

Associations of Sociodemographic Characteristics and PMTCT Knowledge among a Sample of Women of Childbearing Age in Zimbabwe by Childbirth Status: A Descriptive Epidemiologic Analysis

Introduction: Associations of knowledge and sociodemographic characteristics of individuals for risk of HIV have been documented; however, it remains to be clarified whether these relationships apply to examining women’s knowledge regarding vertical transmission risk of HIV on the basis of having delivered a child. The present study explores associations of sociodemographic risk and prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) knowledge among a sample of women of childbearing age in Zimbabwe stratified by childbirth status. Aim: The purpose of this study was to examine differences of sociodemographic characteristics and knowledge of HIV transmission among women of child-bearing age included in the 2015 Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) based on HIV-blood test result. Methods:Eligibility criteria for inclusion in the study were: female sex, aged 15-49, with HIV-blood test results. Secondary analyses (Chi-square and logistic regression) were conducted using data from the 2015 Zimbabwe DHS wave of data. Statistical tests between selected sociodemographic variables (age, educational attainment, wealth index, and childbirth status) and knowledge of HIV transmission related to childbirth, breastfeeding, drugs to avoid, and known HIV-blood test result were conducted to compare women with HIV to those without. Results: 8,433 female sex, aged 15-49, and known HIV-blood test result met the inclusion criteria and were included in the study sample. 18.02% of the sample were HIV+. Results of the analyses found that educational attainment and wealth index were significantly associated with knowledge of HIV transmission during pregnancy; age, wealth index, childbirth status, and HIV-blood test result were significantly associated with knowledge of drugs taken to avoid HIV transmission to baby during pregnancy; and age, educational attainment, childbirth status, and HIV-blood test result were significantly associated with knowledge of HIV transmitted to baby by breastfeeding. Conclusion: This study revealed that age, educational attainment, wealth index, childbirth status, and HIV-blood test result were associated with knowledge of HIV transmission outcomes of interest among women of childbearing age in Zimbabwe. There is also a need for further research on innovative strategies aimed at increasing HIV knowledge among certain sub-groups of women who lack the knowledge in regards to prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV

Drug-Induced Cardiotoxicity of Oncological Agents: Monitoring Parameters, Prevention, and Future Chemotherapy

The goal of this article is to educate pharmacists of the impact of cardiotoxicity on chemotherapy regimens including key cancer agents, monitoring parameters, prevention, and the future of chemotherapy

Lovastatin for adult patients with dengue: protocol for a randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Dengue is the most important vector-borne viral infection of man, with approximately 2 billion people living in areas at risk. Infection results in a range of manifestations from asymptomatic infection through to life-threatening shock and haemorrhage. One of the hallmarks of severe dengue is vascular endothelial disruption. There is currently no specific therapy and clinical management is limited to supportive care. Statins are a class of drug initially developed for lipid lowering. There has been considerable recent interest in their effects beyond lipid lowering. These include anti-inflammatory effects at the endothelium. In addition, it is possible that lovastatin may have an anti-viral effect against dengue. Observational data suggest that the use of statins may improve outcomes for such conditions as sepsis and pneumonia. This paper describes the protocol for a randomised controlled trial investigating a short course of lovastatin therapy in adult patients with dengue. METHODS/DESIGN: A randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial will investigate the effects of lovastatin therapy in the treatment of dengue. The trial will be conducted in two phases with an escalation of dose between phases if an interim safety review is satisfactory. This is an exploratory study focusing on safety and there are no data on which to base a sample size calculation. A target sample size of 300 patients in the second phase, enrolled over two dengue seasons, was chosen based on clinical judgement and feasibility considerations. In a previous randomised trial in dengue, about 10% and 30% of patients experienced at least one serious adverse event or adverse event, respectively. With 300 patients, we will have 80% power to detect an increase of 12% (from 10% to 22%) or 16% (from 30% to 46%) in the frequency of adverse events. Furthermore, this sample size ensures some power to explore the efficacy of statins. DISCUSSION: The development of a dengue therapeutic that can attenuate disease would be an enormous advance in global health. The favourable effects of statins on the endothelium, their good safety profile and their low cost make lovastatin an attractive therapeutic candidate. TRIAL REGISTRATION: International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number ISRCTN03147572

Surveillance of response to PARP inhibitors using characterized Extracellular Vesicles

https://openworks.mdanderson.org/sumexp22/1019/thumbnail.jp

Dancer Screening Clinic

Dance students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) do not have access to sports medicine specialists, thus a pro-bono dance clinic was created as a service-learning project by the UNLV Department of Physical Therapy (UNLVPT) in 2018. In the second year of the service-learning project, three graduate students from the UNLVPT program, under the supervision of a clinical faculty member, have continued to provide free dance specific injury prevention screenings and management to students within the UNLV Department of Dance. To improve clinic operation and services, the group emphasized communication and accessibility as areas of growth. Injury prevention screenings consisted of analysis of dance specific movements, joint integrity, cardiovascular performance, lower body strength, and an eating attitudes survey. Additionally, dance students could schedule for a comprehensive physical therapy examination and subsequent treatment sessions for any acute or chronic injury. Treatment interventions included manual therapy and therapeutic exercise. Emphasis was placed on patient education for injury prevention. Dancers were also provided home exercise programs specific to the objective findings during examination. From the Fall 2019 to Spring 2020 semester, 3 screenings, 7 initial evaluations and 8 treatment sessions were completed. Due to COVID-19, the dance clinic ceased its in-person services and thus the project pivoted to provide educational resources for the dancers. Despite challenges from COVID-19, the clinic provided an opportunity for dance students to be exposed to dance specific orthopedic conditions and screenings, as well as demonstrate the ability for the service-learning project to grow from previous cohorts to continue providing a needed and valuable service to an underserved population at UNLV

New record of the seagrass species Halophila major (Zoll.) Miquel in Vietnam: evidence from leaf morphology and ITS analysis

The seagrass Halophila major (Zoll.) Miguel is reported for the first time from Vietnam. It was found growing with other seagrass species nearshore, 4-6 m deep at Tre Island, Nha Trang Bay. Leaf morphology and phylogenetic analysis based on ribosomal internal transcribed spacer sequences confirmed the identification. There was very little sequence differentiation among samples of H. major collected in Vietnam and other countries in the Western Pacific region. A very low evolutionary divergence among H. major populations was found.Leibniz University Hannover,Government of Vietna

Exposing Provenance Metadata Using Different RDF Models

A standard model for exposing structured provenance metadata of scientific assertions on the Semantic Web would increase interoperability, discoverability, reliability, as well as reproducibility for scientific discourse and evidence-based knowledge discovery. Several Resource Description Framework (RDF) models have been proposed to track provenance. However, provenance metadata may not only be verbose, but also significantly redundant. Therefore, an appropriate RDF provenance model should be efficient for publishing, querying, and reasoning over Linked Data. In the present work, we have collected millions of pairwise relations between chemicals, genes, and diseases from multiple data sources, and demonstrated the extent of redundancy of provenance information in the life science domain. We also evaluated the suitability of several RDF provenance models for this crowdsourced data set, including the N-ary model, the Singleton Property model, and the Nanopublication model. We examined query performance against three commonly used large RDF stores, including Virtuoso, Stardog, and Blazegraph. Our experiments demonstrate that query performance depends on both RDF store as well as the RDF provenance model