Leadership Practices of State Associations: Does State President Leadership Style Encourage Membership?

Background: This research addressed the “graying” of the professional state occupational therapy association as new clinicians are more frequently making the decision not to join. It is particularly relevant for boards who are attempting to establish and retain members. Method: To assess the leadership styles of presidents of state occupational therapy associations and to examine the impact of leadership style on membership status, this research examined the self-perceived leadership styles of state occupational therapy association presidents, as measured by the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI), a tool developed by Kouzes and Posner, authors of the Exemplary Leadership Model. It served to answer the following research questions: Is there a statistical difference between the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) score of state occupational therapy association presidents and the normed mean score of the LPI? And, is there a correlation between LPI mean scores of state occupational therapy association presidents and the respective state association’s membership representation of licensed occupational therapists and student therapists? This quantitative study used survey research design. Results: Sixty percent of state presidents participated. Evidence from this study indicates that state occupational therapy association presidents lead primarily from a transformational leadership style. In addition, those states whose presidents lead from this style demonstrate an overall higher membership status level than those who do not. Conclusion: The results of this study indicate that transformational leadership is related to increased membership status and is relevant to associations as they choose their leaders

Four-gene pan-African blood signature predicts progression to tuberculosis

Rationale: Contacts of patients with tuberculosis (TB) constitute an important target population for preventive measures because they are at high risk of infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis and progression to disease. Objectives: We investigated biosignatures with predictive ability for incident TB. Methods: In a case–control study nested within the Grand Challenges 6-74 longitudinal HIV-negative African cohort of exposed household contacts, we employed RNA sequencing, PCR, and the pair ratio algorithm in a training/test set approach. Overall, 79 progressors who developed TB between 3 and 24 months after diagnosis of index case and 328 matched nonprogressors who remained healthy during 24 months of follow-up were investigated. Measurements and Main Results: A four-transcript signature derived from samples in a South African and Gambian training set predicted progression up to two years before onset of disease in blinded test set samples from South Africa, the Gambia, and Ethiopia with little population-associated variability, and it was also validated in an external cohort of South African adolescents with latent M. tuberculosis infection. By contrast, published diagnostic or prognostic TB signatures were predicted in samples from some but not all three countries, indicating site-specific variability. Post hoc meta-analysis identified a single gene pair, C1QC/TRAV27 (complement C1q C-chain / T-cell receptor-α variable gene 27) that would consistently predict TB progression in household contacts from multiple African sites but not in infected adolescents without known recent exposure events. Conclusions: Collectively, we developed a simple whole blood–based PCR test to predict TB in recently exposed household contacts from diverse African populations. This test has potential for implementation in national TB contact investigation programs