Seasonal and recurrent intensive care unit admissions for acute severe asthma in children

Life-threatening attacks of asthma requiring intensive care unit (ICU) management at Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital in Cape Town were noted to occur in some patients in the same or adjacent months of different years. A retrospective case-controlled study was performed of 21 such 'seasonal' patients who presented to the ICU over a 14-year period. The group tnade up 6,5% of all asthma patients adtnitted to the ICU and their 65 admissions made up 15,6% of all ICU asthma admissions during this period. The control group consisted of patients with recurrent admissions that occurred in 'random' months. The two groups were compared in respect of demographic and clinical data. Patients requiring seasonal adtnissions were shown to form a distinct sub-population of children with severe asthma, some with a family history of fatal asthma, who were less likely to 'outgrow' asthma in childhood, were Inore likely to require Inaintenance steroid therapy for asthtna management, and significantly more often had positive radioallergosorbent tests to Aspergillus and Cladosporium sp. and to grass pollen. A retrospective analysis of dates of severe asthtna attacks Inay identify individual seasonality, which is a risk factor for life-threatening and intractable asthma

Framing in entertainment-education: Effects on processes of narrative persuasion

Nowadays, entertainment-education (E-E) is often used as a persuasive strategy to stimulate prosocial behavior. Although E-E is mostly regarded as a persuasive strategy in itself, in an increasing number of E-E programs several persuasive strategies are used to communicate the educational message to the audience. This study investigates the effects of a strategy widely used in health communication, but not previously studied in the field of E-E: framing. To this means we examined the effect of two different ways an E-E message can be framed: by emphasizing either the losses of not performing the behavior in question or the gains of performing this behavior. A serial multiple mediation model showed that framing affected intention to refrain from drunk cycling via counterarguing and attitude toward drunk cycling; the use of a gain frame decreased counterarguing, which decreased the attitude toward drunk cycling. This subsequently resulted in a higher intention to refrain from this behavior. Implications of these results are discussed

The power of direct context as revealed by eye tracking:A model tracks relative attention to competing editorial and promotional content

Many previous studies on attention have ignored the eye-catching potential of 'direct context'—the entire promotional and editorial content an observer can view at the same time—in print media. In the current study, characteristics of 183 magazine advertisements and their direct context were coded systematically and linked to eye-tracking data, producing more than 19,000 observations. Expanding on earlier research, the authors focused on fixations within an advertisement during the first five seconds and attention paid to the combined main elements of an advertisement. Results showed that direct context diverted visual attention, especially when featuring multiple colors and large amounts of text

The privacy trade-off for mobile app downloads: The roles of app value, intrusiveness, and privacy concerns

Today, mobile app users regularly “pay” for various mobile services, such as social networking or entertainment apps, by accepting app permission requests, thereby sharing personal data with apps. Privacy calculus theory has established that individuals disclose personal information based on a cost-benefit trade-off. In the mobile app context, however, this notion needs more support, because existing studies have only measured costs and benefits or forced a trade-off. Conducting two online experiments among Western European app users (N1 = 183; N2 = 687), this study replicates earlier findings and provides more-profound insights into the boundary conditions of the privacy calculus by showing that app value (i.e., benefits) trumps the costs (i.e., intrusiveness, privacy concerns) in the privacy trade-off