Feasibility Testing of the Alert for AFib Intervention.

Improving early detection and treatment of atrial fibrillation (AF) is critical because untreated AF is a major contributor to stroke and heart failure. We sought to generate knowledge about the feasibility of conducting a randomized controlled trial to test the effect of the Alert for AFib intervention on knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about treatment-seeking for signs and symptoms of AF. Adults ≥65 years old (96% White) at risk for developing AF were randomized to receive the Alert for AFib intervention ( n = 40) or an attention control session ( n = 40). Feasibility goals for recruitment, participant retention, adherence, perceived satisfaction and burden, and intervention fidelity were met. From baseline to study completion, knowledge ( p = .005) and attitudes ( p < .001) about treatment-seeking improved more in the intervention group compared with the control group. Results support testing the effectiveness of the Alert for AFib intervention in a large trial

UB Breakthroughs Summer 2016

The UB Breakthroughs newsletter for summer of 2016. This issue contains articles discussing Dr. Faezipour's research into a smartphone app for skin cancer detection, Dr. Katsifis' research into the mutagenic and carcinogenic effects of heavy metals, Dr. Oberleitner’s research into the link between social isolation and exclusion and physical and emotional pain, Dr. Lee’s classes and camps teaching college and high school students big data analytics, professor Good’s study into teaching chiropractic warm-up with resistance bands, professor Brett’s research into the safety and efficacy of electro-acupuncture, Dr. Picardi’s research into employee and employer perceptions and how to create better matches in employment, Dr. Richmond’s new book examining African-American student activism in the northeast from the 1960s through 2015, Dr. Xiong’s new MEMS-based sensor for detecting miniscule air pollutants, UB’s 3-D Printing and Advanced Manufacturing Center, Dr. Wei’s study of China and international relations regarding the South China Sea, and Dr. Pallis’ support of the UB CanSat Competition team

Changes in elderly women's health-related quality of life following discontinuation of hormone replacement therapy

BACKGROUND: Many women have discontinued hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in view of recent findings. The goal of this study was to determine if HRT discontinuation is associated with changes in health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in elderly women. METHODS: We studied women enrolled in Pennsylvania's Pharmaceutical Assistance Contract for the Elderly (PACE) program, linking prescription claims with data from a longitudinal mail survey. HRQOL measures included the number of days out of the last 30 that physical health was not good and analogous measures for mental health, pain, and interference with activities, as well as a composite "healthy days" measure developed by CDC. Longitudinal analyses focused on 2,357 women who completed surveys in both 2002 and 2003, and who used HRT at baseline (mean age = 75.5, range = 65–102). Propensity scores were used to match HRT continuers and discontinuers according to HRT type, demographics, and baseline HRQOL. Analysis of covariance was used to compare HRQOL change in continuers and discontinuers. RESULTS: Between 2002 and 2003, 43% of HRT users discontinued therapy. Analysis of covariance to examine HRQOL change revealed complex interactions with age. Discontinuers aged 65–74 reported greater increases in days in which mental health was not good (p < .05), fewer "healthy days" (p < .05), more days in which health interfered with activities (p < .01), and more days with pain (p < .01). Among women aged 75–84, HRT discontinuers reported more days in which physical health was not good (p < .01); no other significant effects were observed in this group. Relative to HRT continuers, discontinuers aged 85 and older experienced apparent HRQOL improvements following cessation, with fewer days in which physical health was not good (p < .01), fewer days of poor mental health (p < .05), and more "healthy days" (p < .01). CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that there are substantial age differences in response to HRT discontinuation. While women aged 65–74 experienced apparent declines in HRQOL following HRT cessation, women aged 85 and older experienced relative improvements. The HRQOL declines observed among younger women underscore the importance of communication between clinicians and patients throughout the discontinuation process. These results also demonstrate the value of HRQOL surveillance as a component of health program administration

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

Building a transdisciplinary expert consensus on the cognitive drivers of performance under pressure: An international multi-panel Delphi study

IntroductionThe ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including the military, first responders, and competitive sport. Despite recognition that such performance depends on a range of cognitive factors, how common these factors are across performance domains remains unclear. The current study sought to integrate existing knowledge in the performance field in the form of a transdisciplinary expert consensus on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie performance under pressure.MethodsInternational experts were recruited from four performance domains [(i) Defense; (ii) Competitive Sport; (iii) Civilian High-stakes; and (iv) Performance Neuroscience]. Experts rated constructs from the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework (and several expert-suggested constructs) across successive rounds, until all constructs reached consensus for inclusion or were eliminated. Finally, included constructs were ranked for their relative importance.ResultsSixty-eight experts completed the first Delphi round, with 94% of experts retained by the end of the Delphi process. The following 10 constructs reached consensus across all four panels (in order of overall ranking): (1) Attention; (2) Cognitive Control—Performance Monitoring; (3) Arousal and Regulatory Systems—Arousal; (4) Cognitive Control—Goal Selection, Updating, Representation, and Maintenance; (5) Cognitive Control—Response Selection and Inhibition/Suppression; (6) Working memory—Flexible Updating; (7) Working memory—Active Maintenance; (8) Perception and Understanding of Self—Self-knowledge; (9) Working memory—Interference Control, and (10) Expert-suggested—Shifting.DiscussionOur results identify a set of transdisciplinary neuroscience-informed constructs, validated through expert consensus. This expert consensus is critical to standardizing cognitive assessment and informing mechanism-targeted interventions in the broader field of human performance optimization

A new model of bullying in the nursing workplace: organizational characteristics as critical antecedents

Providing a safe work environment where nurses can practice without fear or threat of aggression is acknowledged as a critical global issue for healthcare organizations. Although there has been growing recognition that workplace bullying is one of the most concerning forms of aggression experienced by nurses, to date, there has been little progress in developing explanatory models. In this article, we outline our recently validated model of bullying, which specifies organizational characteristics as critical antecedents. The model has important implications for the management of bullying, identifying that to be effective, interventions need to address features of workplace climate

Bullying as circuits of power: an Australian nursing perspective

It is not possible to understand bullying without considering the concept of power, and yet power has received little systematic attention in the literature on bullying. Framed largely as a manifestation of conflict, or as a consequence of organizational characteristics that trigger unwitting individuals to engage in abusive acts, superficial and clichéd understandings of the power dynamics involved in bullying are commonplace. The focus on conflict-based understandings offers limited insights into less readily observable forms of power that manifest within institutions. In this article, we draw upon Clegg\u27s (1989a) circuits of power framework to map out an alternative understanding of workplace bullying-one that moves beyond the link with conflict. We employ a multidimensional model of bullying and offer interview exemplars from our study of bullying in the Australian nursing workplace. The analysis reveals the complex flows of power associated with bullying and suggests that commonly accepted assumptions and frameworks about workplace bullying have provided limited insight into the phenomenon, while potentially masking inappropriate manifestations of power within institution

The worse you behave, the more you seem to be rewarded!: bullying in nursing as organizational corruption

This paper reports findings from the first, qualitative stage of a large national study of bullying in the Australian nursing workplace.1 The stories reported demonstrate bullying as corrupt practice. The forms of corruption revealed include: the misuse of power, deals being struck, nepotism, and professional misconduct. Corruption in organizations has not previously been linked with or compared to bullying. By exploring bullying as corrupt behaviour this paper challenges the commonly held assumption that bullying can be principally considered as discrete, isolated events that result from the behavior of deviant individuals, organizational pressures, or poor work design. Instead, the narratives reported will reveal the manner in which established relationships and processes between bullies enabled behavior that was predatory, co-operative, and planned, with corrupt activities hidden within legitimate organizational procedures. These findings reveal the dynamics of institutional power relations, and the manner in which actors can engage in corrupt conduct that includes bullying, providing important implications for the management of workplace bullying and further research in this field