Effects of blood pressure on brain microstructure and cognition in healthy older adults

Hypertension represents one of the major modifiable health concerns in the U.S., with over one-third of adults classified as hypertensive, and another one-third meeting the classification for pre-hypertensive. Older adults are at the highest risk for hypertension. Although results have been mixed, a majority of the literature suggests that hypertension is associated with increased cognitive decline in older adults, particularly in frontally-mediated cognition such as executive functioning, processing speed, and attention. White matter hyperintensities (WMHs) and altered white matter microstructure are two consequences of hypertension that are thought to mediate the relationship between hypertension and cognitive aging. The goals of this study were to examine the impact of hypertension on two major white matter tracts that connect posterior regions of the brain with the frontal lobe and WMHs, to identify whether baseline blood pressure, baseline white matter tract integrity and baseline WMH volume contribute to frontally-mediated cognitive performance at a baseline visit, and to examine the longitudinal changes in white matter integrity and cognition in individuals who were hypertensive at baseline compared to baseline normotensives. Sixty older adults with both baseline and 3-year follow-up cognitive and imaging data were analyzed. Results indicated no significant relationships between blood pressure and white matter integrity or cognition at baseline or longitudinally. However, results suggested significant relationships between lower white matter integrity and worse cognitive performance on tests of executive functioning and processing speed. Although blood pressure did not significantly contribute to brain aging in this sample of healthy older adults, future work might identify other possible factors that could influence the relationship between aging and cognitive decline

Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability Practices on Brand Trust and Purchase Intention in the Wine Industry

The wine industry continues to grow and is expected to reach 429 billion U.S. dollars by 2023 (Oloruntoba, 2020) and is a major contributor to environmental degradation. The wine industry plays a role in soil degradation, water pollution, waste disposal, and land/vegetation damage. The wine-making process creates emissions and depletes oxygen in the environment, which is linked with increased death rates of aquatic organisms. The wine industry impacts crop growth, the solubility of metals in soil, increases toxicity of water, and generates destructive algal bloom. The industry has been slow to adopt sustainable practices and has been subject to less scrutiny than other industries. Although consumer preference studies have shown that customers care about sustainability and corporate social responsibility, little research existed on consumer preferences in the wine industry. To better understand if more companies in the wine industry should adopt higher sustainability and socially responsible behaviors, this body of research explored the impact of corporate social responsibility and sustainability on brand trust and purchase intention in the wine industry. The research was conducted with participants who drink or purchase wine, and the results indicate that both corporate social responsibility and sustainability impact consumers\u27 brand trust and purchase intention in the wine industry. This study is important for business leaders to better understand their consumers’ preferences and accordingly make critical changes in their business strategies. It is also important for academia to further research on developing topics in the industry and for consumers to help expand awareness on socially responsible and sustainable companies

Anticipating ocean acidification's economic consequences for commercial fisheries

Author Posting. © IOP Publishing, 2009. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of IOP Publishing for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Environmental Research Letters 4 (2009): 024007, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/4/2/024007.Ocean acidification, a consequence of rising anthropogenic CO2 emissions, is poised to change marine ecosystems profoundly by increasing dissolved CO2 and decreasing ocean pH, carbonate concentration, and calcium carbonate mineral saturation state worldwide. These conditions hinder growth of calcium carbonate shells and skeletons by many marine plants and animals. The first direct impact on humans may be through declining harvests and fishery revenues from shellfish, their predators, and coral reef habitats. In a case study of U.S. commercial fishery revenues, we begin to constrain the economic effects of ocean acidification over the next 50 years using atmospheric CO2 trajectories and laboratory studies of its effects, focusing especially on mollusks. In 2007, the $3.8 billion U.S. annual domestic ex-vessel commercial harvest ultimately contributed$34 billion to the U.S. gross national product. Mollusks contributed 19%, or $748 million, of the ex-vessel revenues that year. Substantial revenue declines, job losses, and indirect economic costs may occur if ocean acidification broadly damages marine habitats, alters marine resource availability, and disrupts other ecosystem services. We review the implications for marine resource management and propose possible adaptation strategies designed to support fisheries and marine-resource-dependent communities, many of which already possess little economic resilience.This work was supported by NASA grant NNG05GG30G and a generous grant from the WHOI Development Office

Addressing ocean acidification as part of sustainable ocean development

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Brill for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Ocean Yearbook 27, edited by Aldo Chircop, Scott Coffen-Smout, and Moira McConnell, :29-46. Leiden: Brill (Martinus Nijhoff), 2013. ISBN: 9789004250451.Many of the declarations and outcome documents from prior United Nations international meetings address ocean issues such as fishing, pollution, and climate change, but they do not address ocean acidification. This progressive alteration of seawater chemistry caused by uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is an emerging issue of concern that has potential consequences for marine ecosystems and the humans that depend on them. Addressing ocean acidification will require mitigation of global CO2 emissions at the international level accompanied by regional marine resource use adaptations that reduce the integrated pressure on marine ecosystems while the global community works towards implementing permanent CO2 emissions reductions. Addressing ocean acidification head-on is necessary because it poses a direct challenge to sustainable development targets such as the Millennium Development Goals, and it cannot be addressed adequately with accords or geoengineering plans that do not specifically decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Here, we will briefly review the current state of ocean acidification knowledge and identify several mitigation and adaptation strategies that should be considered along with reductions in CO2 emissions to reduce the near-term impacts of ocean acidification. Our goal is to present potential options while identifying some of their inherent weaknesses to inform decisionmaking discussions, rather than to recommend adoption of specific policies. While the reduction of CO2 emissions should be the number one goal of the international community, it is unlikely that the widespread changes and infrastructure redevelopment necessary to accomplish this will be achieved soon, before ocean acidification’s short-term impacts become significant. Therefore, a multi-faceted approach must be employed to address this growing problem

Narratives can motivate environmental action : the Whiskey Creek ocean acidification story

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2014. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Springer for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Ambio 43 (2014): 592-599, doi:10.1007/s13280-013-0442-2.Even when environmental data quantify the risks and benefits of delayed responses to rapid anthropogenic change, institutions rarely respond promptly. We propose that narratives complementing environmental datasets can motivate responsive environmental policy. To explore this idea, we relate a case study in which a narrative of economic loss due to regionally rapid ocean acidification—an anthropogenic change—helped connect knowledge with action. We pose three hypotheses to explain why narratives might be particularly effective in linking science to environmental policy, drawing from the literature of economics, environmental policy, and cognitive psychology. It seems that yet-untold narratives may hold similar potential for strengthening the feedback between environmental data and policy and motivating regional responses to other environmental problems.2015-09-0

Physician Trading Cards as a Tool to Improve Resident Joy in Medicine while Improving Patient Satisfaction

Introduction: To combat resident physician burnout, wellness programming should include approaches that foster joy to work as a physician. Photograph trading cards have been used to improve patient satisfaction but have not been explored as a way to improve physician work satisfaction. We aimed to use trading cards to improve resident physician identification by patients’ families, as well as measure their effect on the hospital experience for patients and residents. Methods: For a one-month period in 2019, trading cards were piloted with the nine residents assigned to the inpatient pediatrics service. Employing five-point Likert scales, surveys were administered to residents and convenience samples of 100 patients’ families before and after card distribution. Results: Compared to families prior, those given trading cards reported increased perceived importance of physician identification and a greater association with care satisfaction. Families’ ability to identify treating physicians increased from 5% to 66% with card distribution (p Conclusion: Trading cards can be used as a tool to improve resident physician work satisfaction and joy in medicine, while also improving the hospital experience for patients and families

Ocean acidification’s potential to alter global marine ecosystem services

Author Posting. © Oceanography Society, 2009. This article is posted here by permission of Oceanography Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Oceanography 22 no. 4 (2009): 172-181.Ocean acidification lowers the oceanic saturation states of carbonate minerals and decreases the calcification rates of some marine organisms that provide a range of ecosystem services such as wild fishery and aquaculture harvests, coastal protection, tourism, cultural identity, and ecosystem support. Damage to marine ecosystem services by ocean acidification is likely to disproportionately affect developing nations and coastal regions, which often rely more heavily on a variety of marine-related economic and cultural activities. Losses of calcifying organisms or changes in marine food webs could significantly alter global marine harvests, which provided 110 million metric tons of food for humans and were valued at US$160 billion in 2006. Some of the countries most dependent on seafood for dietary protein include developing island nations with few agricultural alternatives. Aquaculture, especially of mollusks, may meet some of the future protein demand of economically developing, growing populations, but ocean acidification may complicate aquaculture of some species. By 2050, both population increases and changes in carbonate mineral saturation state will be greatest in low-latitude regions, multiplying the stresses on tropical marine ecosystems and societies. Identifying costeffective adaptive strategies to mitigate the costs associated with ocean acidification requires development of transferable management strategies that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of regional human and marine communities.S. Doney and S. Cooley were supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF ATM-0628582). H. Kite- Powell’s participation in this work was supported in part by the WHOI Marine Policy Center

A code of conduct is imperative for ocean carbon dioxide removal research

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Loomis, R., Cooley, S. R., Collins, J. R., Engler, S., & Suatoni, L. A code of conduct is imperative for ocean carbon dioxide removal research. Frontiers in Marine Science, 9, (2022): 872800, https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2022.872800.As the impacts of rising temperatures mount and the global transition to clean energy advances only gradually, scientists and policymakers are looking towards carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. Attention has increasingly focused on ocean CDR techniques, which enhance or restore marine systems to sequester carbon. Ocean CDR research presents the risk of uncertain impacts to human and environmental welfare, yet there are no domestic regulations aimed at ensuring the safety and efficacy of this research. A code of conduct that establishes principles of responsible research, fairness, and equity is needed in this field. This article presents fifteen key components of an ocean CDR research code of conduct.JC acknowledges funding support from Bezos Earth Fund

Challenges, insights and perspectives associated with using social-ecological science for marine conservation

Here, we synthesize conceptual frameworks, applied modeling approaches, and as case studies to highlight complex social-ecological system (SES) dynamics that inform environmental policy, conservati ..

Nicotine is more addictive, not more cognitively therapeutic in a neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia produced by neonatal ventral hippocampal lesions

Nicotine dependence is the leading cause of death in the United States. However, research on high rates of nicotine use in mental illness has primarily explained this co-morbidity as reflecting nicotine's therapeutic benefits, especially for cognitive symptoms, equating smoking with 'self-medication'. We used a leading neurodevelopmental model of mental illness in rats to prospectively test the alternative possibility that nicotine dependence pervades mental illness because nicotine is simply more addictive in mentally ill brains that involve developmental hippocampal dysfunction. Neonatal ventral hippocampal lesions (NVHL) have previously been demonstrated to produce post-adolescent-onset, pharmacological, neurobiological and cognitive-deficit features of schizophrenia. Here, we show that NVHLs increase adult nicotine self-administration, potentiating acquisition-intake, total nicotine consumed and drug seeking. Behavioral sensitization to nicotine in adolescence prior to self-administration is not accentuated by NVHLs in contrast to increased nicotine self-administration and behavioral sensitization documented in adult NVHL rats, suggesting periadolescent neurodevelopmental onset of nicotine addiction vulnerability in the NVHL model. Delivering a nicotine regimen approximating the exposure used in the sensitization and self-administration experiments (i.e. as a treatment) to adult rats did not specifically reverse NVHL-induced cortical-hippocampal-dependent cognitive deficits and actually worsened cognitive efficiency after nicotine treatment stopped, generating deficits that resemble those due to NVHLs. These findings represent the first prospective evidence demonstrating a causal link between disease processes in schizophrenia and nicotine addiction. Developmental cortical-temporal limbic dysfunction in mental illness may thus amplify nicotine's reinforcing effects and addiction risk and severity, even while producing cognitive deficits that are not specifically or substantially reversible with nicotine