Building social capital through breastfeeding peer support: Insights from an evaluation of a voluntary breastfeeding peer support service in North-West England

Background: Peer support is reported to be a key method to help build social capital in communities. To date there are no studies that describe how this can be achieved through a breastfeeding peer support service. In this paper we present findings from an evaluation of a voluntary model of breastfeeding peer support in North-West England to describe how the service was operationalized and embedded into the community. This study was undertaken from May, 2012 to May, 2013. Methods: Interviews (group or individual) were held with 87 participants: 24 breastfeeding women, 13 peer supporters and 50 health and community professionals. The data contained within 23 monthly monitoring reports (January, 2011 to February 2013) compiled by the voluntary peer support service were also extracted and analysed. Results: Thematic analysis was undertaken using social capital concepts as a theoretical lens. Key findings were identified to resonate with ’bonding’, ‘bridging’ and ‘linking’ forms of social capital. These insights illuminate how the peer support service facilitates ‘bonds’ with its members, and within and between women who access the service; how the service ‘bridges’ with individuals from different interests and backgrounds, and how ‘links’ were forged with those in authority to gain access and reach to women and to promote a breastfeeding culture. Some of the tensions highlighted within the social capital literature were also identified. Conclusions: Horizontal and vertical relationships forged between the peer support service and community members enabled peer support to be embedded into care pathways, helped to promote positive attitudes to breastfeeding and to disseminate knowledge and maximise reach for breastfeeding support across the community. Further effort to engage with those of different ethnic backgrounds and to resolve tensions between peer supporters and health professionals is warranted

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Confounding conventional wisdom: political not principled differences in the transatlantic regulatory relationship

The transatlantic complaints over hormone-treated beef and genetically modified organisms before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) seem to confirm two separate but related conventional wisdoms about the transatlantic economic relationship: that it is highly conflictual and that many of the conflicts are rooted in profoundly different approaches to regulation. This article argues that neither of the two conventional wisdoms is accurate. Rather, it contends that they are products of two, compounding analytical shortcomings: one methodological, one empirical. The methodological shortcoming takes the form of an implicit selection bias. While WTO complaints are high profile they are rare and extreme examples; it is, therefore, unsound to generalise from them to the regulatory relationship as a whole. The empirical shortcoming has to do with neither the beef hormones nor the GMO dispute demonstrating what it is purported to. The article thus serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on obvious cases and the need to question whether evidence really does support a prevailing popular narrative

Building research capital to facilitate research

The National Institute for Health Research, Research Design Service (NIHR RDS) was set up to increase the number and proportion of high quality applications for funding for applied and patient focused health and social care research. Access to specialist expertise and collaboration between researchers and health practitioners at the proposal development stage is crucial for high quality applied health research. In this essay we develop the concept of 'research capital' to describe the wide range of resources and expertise required to develop fundable research projects. It highlights the key role the RDS plays supporting researchers to broker relationships to access the requisite 'research capital'. © 2013 Green and Rein; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

"It's making contacts" : notions of social capital and implications for widening access to medical education

Acknowledgements Our thanks to the Medical Schools Council (MSC) of the UK for funding Study A; REACH Scotland for funding Study B; and Queen Mary University of London, and to the medical school applicants and students who gave their time to be interviewed. Our thanks also to Dr Sean Zhou and Dr Sally Curtis, and Manjul Medhi, for their help with data collection for studies A and B respectively. Our thanks also to Dr Lara Varpio, Uniformed Services University of the USA, for her advice and guidance on collating data sets and her comments on the draft manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Inflammation causes remodeling of mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase mediated by the bifunctional gene C15orf48

Dysregulated mitochondrial function is a hallmark of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. Cytochrome c oxidase (CcO), which mediates the rate-limiting step in mitochondrial respiration, is remodeled during development and in response to changes of oxygen availability, but there has been little study of CcO remodeling during inflammation. Here, we describe an elegant molecular switch mediated by the bifunctional transcript C15orf48, which orchestrates the substitution of the CcO subunit NDUFA4 by its paralog C15ORF48 in primary macrophages. Expression of C15orf48 is a conserved response to inflammatory signals and occurs in many immune-related pathologies. In rheumatoid arthritis, C15orf48 mRNA is elevated in peripheral monocytes and proinflammatory synovial tissue macrophages, and its expression positively correlates with disease severity and declines in remission. C15orf48 is also expressed by pathogenic macrophages in severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Study of a rare metabolic disease syndrome provides evidence that loss of the NDUFA4 subunit supports proinflammatory macrophage functions

Social capital and soil conservation: Evidence from the Philippines

The formation of social capital is hypothesised to enhance collective efforts for soil conservation. The Landcare Program in the Southern Philippines promotes simple conservation practices in upland environments by supporting community landcare groups and municipal landcare associations, thus augmenting social capital. A study was conducted in 2002 to evaluate the Landcare Program, using a mix of quantitative and qualitative techniques. In this paper the relationship between social capital formation and adoption of soil conservation is investigated. It is concluded that, although membership in a local landcare group was not a major factor in adoption, the Landcare Program as a whole created a valuable stock of bridging social capital, with significant benefits for long-term natural resource management

Increasing body mass index from age 5 to 14 years predicts asthma among adolescents: evidence from a birth cohort study

Background:Obesity and asthma are common disorders, and the prevalence of both has increased in recent decades. It has been suggested that increases in the prevalence of obesity might in part explain the increase in asthma prevalence. This study aims to examine the prospective association between change in body mass index (BMI) z-score between ages 5 and 14 years and asthma symptoms at 14 years. Methods:Data was taken from the Mater University Study of Pregnancy and its outcomes (MUSP), a birth cohort of 7223 mothers and children started in Brisbane (Australia) in 1981. BMI was measured at age 5 and 14 years. Asthma was assessed from maternal reports of symptoms at age 5 and 14 years. In this study analyses were conducted on 2911 participants who had information on BMI and asthma at both ages. Results: BMI z-score at age 14 and the change in BMI z-score from age 5 to 14–years were positively associated with asthma symptoms at age 14 years, whereas BMI z-score at age 5 was not associated with asthma at age 14. Adjustment for a range of early-life exposures did not substantially alter these findings. The association between change in BMI z-score with asthma symptoms at 14 years appeared stronger for male subjects compared with female subjects but there was no statistical evidence for a sex difference (P=0.36). Conclusions: Increase in BMI z-score between age 5 and 14 years is associated with increased risk of asthma symptoms in adolescence

Toward General Principles for Resilience Engineering

Maintaining the performance of infrastructure‐dependent systems in the face of surprises and unknowable risks is a grand challenge. Addressing this issue requires a better understanding of enabling conditions or principles that promote system resilience in a universal way. In this study, a set of such principles is interpreted as a group of interrelated conditions or organizational qualities that, taken together, engender system resilience. The field of resilience engineering identifies basic system or organizational qualities (e.g., abilities for learning) that are associated with enhanced general resilience and has packaged them into a set of principles that should be fostered. However, supporting conditions that give rise to such first‐order system qualities remain elusive in the field. An integrative understanding of how such conditions co‐occur and fit together to bring about resilience, therefore, has been less clear. This article contributes to addressing this gap by identifying a potentially more comprehensive set of principles for building general resilience in infrastructure‐dependent systems. In approaching this aim, we organize scattered notions from across the literature. To reflect the partly self‐organizing nature of infrastructure‐dependent systems, we compare and synthesize two lines of research on resilience: resilience engineering and social‐ecological system resilience. Although some of the principles discussed within the two fields overlap, there are some nuanced differences. By comparing and synthesizing the knowledge developed in them, we recommend an updated set of resilience‐enhancing principles for infrastructure‐dependent systems. In addition to proposing an expanded list of principles, we illustrate how these principles can co‐occur and their interdependencies.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156462/2/risa13494_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156462/1/risa13494.pd