Parenting Practices, Racial Socialization, and Adolescent Functioning in African American Families

African American parents’ use of racial socialization messages has been associated with other parenting practices and behaviors as well as adolescent functioning. This study explored the relationships among racial socialization, general parenting practices (e.g., parental monitoring knowledge, harsh parental discipline, and parent-child relationship) and three psychological outcomes (e.g., scholastic competence, self-esteem, and externalizing behaviors) among 103 African American adolescents. Based on linear regressions, adolescents’ scholastic competence was positively associated with cultural socialization and negatively associated with promotion of mistrust, but self-esteem and externalizing behaviors were not linked to any racial socialization dimension. Further, cultural socialization was found to be related to each of the general parenting practices. Implications for research on African American parenting behaviors and adolescents’ functioning are discussed

Lessons learned from engaging men in sexual and reproductive health as clients, partners and advocates of change in the Hoima district of Uganda.

This study examined the impact of a three-year intervention project conducted in the Hoima district of Uganda, which sought to engage men in sexual and reproductive health as clients, equal partners and advocates of change. Structured surveys with 164 self-reported heterosexual men aged 18-54 years were used to assess knowledge and attitudes towards sexual and reproductive health. Data from these were analysed using Stata and SPSS. Additionally, five focus groups were conducted with the female partners and male beneficiaries of the project and with project peer educators. Four interviews were conducted with project staff and male beneficiaries. Data from these and the focus groups were analysed using a thematic approach. Following the intervention, a significantly greater number of men accessed, and supported their partners in accessing sexual health services services, had gained sexual and reproductive health awareness, reported sharing domestic duties and contraceptive decision-making, and displayed a decreased tolerance for domestic violence. It was more difficult to assess men's involvement and behaviours as advocates of change, which sheds light on the complexities of a gender transformative project and the importance of evaluating such projects from both men's and their partners' perspectives and at different levels of the male involvement model in sexual and reproductive health

Pseudokinases: a tribble‐edged sword

Advances in the understanding of the Tribbles family of pseudokinases (TRIB1, TRIB2 and TRIB3) reveal these proteins as potentially valuable biomarkers of disease diagnosis, prognosis, prediction and clinical strategy. In their role as signalling mediators and scaffolding proteins, TRIBs lead to changes in protein stability and activity which impact on diverse cellular processes such as proliferation, differentiation, cell cycle and cell death. We review the role of TRIB proteins as promising therapeutic targets, with an emphasis on their role in cancer and as biomarkers with potential application across diverse pathological processes

The relationships between women’s reproductive factors:a Mendelian randomisation analysis

BACKGROUND: Women’s reproductive factors include their age at menarche and menopause, the age at which they start and stop having children and the number of children they have. Studies that have linked these factors with disease risk have largely investigated individual reproductive factors and have not considered the genetic correlation and total interplay that may occur between them. This study aimed to investigate the nature of the relationships between eight female reproductive factors. METHODS: We used data from the UK Biobank and genetic consortia with data available for the following reproductive factors: age at menarche, age at menopause, age at first birth, age at last birth, number of births, being parous, age first had sexual intercourse and lifetime number of sexual partners. Linkage disequilibrium score regression (LDSC) was performed to investigate the genetic correlation between reproductive factors. We then applied Mendelian randomisation (MR) methods to estimate the causal relationships between these factors. Sensitivity analyses were used to investigate directionality of the effects, test for evidence of pleiotropy and account for sample overlap. RESULTS: LDSC indicated that most reproductive factors are genetically correlated (r(g) range: |0.06–0.94|), though there was little evidence for genetic correlations between lifetime number of sexual partners and age at last birth, number of births and ever being parous (r(g) < 0.01). MR revealed potential causal relationships between many reproductive factors, including later age at menarche (1 SD increase) leading to a later age at first sexual intercourse (beta (B) = 0.09 SD, 95% confidence intervals (CI) = 0.06,0.11), age at first birth (B = 0.07 SD, CI = 0.04,0.10), age at last birth (B = 0.06 SD, CI = 0.04,0.09) and age at menopause (B = 0.06 SD, CI = 0.03,0.10). Later age at first birth was found to lead to a later age at menopause (B = 0.21 SD, CI = 0.13,0.29), age at last birth (B = 0.72 SD, CI = 0.67, 0.77) and a lower number of births (B = −0.38 SD, CI = −0.44, −0.32). CONCLUSION: This study presents evidence that women’s reproductive factors are genetically correlated and causally related. Future studies examining the health sequelae of reproductive factors should consider a woman’s entire reproductive history, including the causal interplay between reproductive factors. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12916-022-02293-5

Are advanced methods necessary to improve infant fNIRS data analysis? An assessment of baseline-corrected averaging, general linear model (GLM) and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) based approaches

In the last decade, fNIRS has provided a non-invasive method to investigate neural activation in developmental populations. Despite its increasing use in developmental cognitive neuroscience, there is little consistency or consensus on how to pre-process and analyse infant fNIRS data. With this registered report, we investigated the feasibility of applying more advanced statistical analyses to infant fNIRS data and compared the most commonly used baseline-corrected averaging, General Linear Model (GLM)-based univariate, and Multivariate Pattern Analysis (MVPA) approaches, to show how the conclusions one would draw based on these different analysis approaches converge or differ. The different analysis methods were tested using a face inversion paradigm where changes in brain activation in response to upright and inverted face stimuli were measured in thirty 4-to-6-month-old infants. By including more standard approaches together with recent machine learning techniques, we aim to inform the fNIRS community on alternative ways to analyse infant fNIRS datasets

Use of ultraviolet C (UVC) radiation to inactivate infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus (IHNV) and viral haemorrhagic septicaemia virus (VHSV) in fish processing plant effluent

We determined the stability of infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus (IHNV) and viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus (VHSV) suspended in either fish processing plant effluent blood water (EBW) or culture media and examined the effectiveness of UVC radiation to inactivate IHNV and VHSV suspended in both solutions. Without exposure to UVC, IHNV and VHSV were maintained in 4&deg;C blood water for up to 48 hours without significant reduction in virus titer. However when exposed to UVC radiation using a low pressure mercury vapour lamp collimated beam, IHNV and VHSV were inactivated, and the efficacy of UVC radiation was dependent upon the solution and virus type being treated. A 3-log reduction for VHSV and IHNV in culture media was achieved at 3.28 and 3.84 mJ cm-2, respectively. The UV dose needed for a 3-log reduction of VHSV in EBW was 3.82 mJ cm-2. However, exposure of IHNV in EBW to the maximum UVC dose tested (4.0 mJ cm-2) only led to a 2.26-log-reduction. Factors such as particle size, and possible association of viruses with suspended EBW particulate, were not investigated in this study, but may have contributed to the difference in UVC effectiveness. Future work should emphasize improved filtration methods prior to UV treatment of processing plant EBW at an industrial scale.<br /

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

BMI as a Modifiable Risk Factor for Type 2 Diabetes: Refining and Understanding Causal Estimates Using Mendelian Randomization.

This study focused on resolving the relationship between BMI and type 2 diabetes. The availability of multiple variants associated with BMI offers a new chance to resolve the true causal effect of BMI on type 2 diabetes; however, the properties of these associations and their validity as genetic instruments need to be considered alongside established and new methods for undertaking Mendelian randomization (MR). We explore the potential for pleiotropic genetic variants to generate bias, revise existing estimates, and illustrate value in new analysis methods. A two-sample MR approach with 96 genetic variants was used with three different analysis methods, two of which (MR-Egger and the weighted median) have been developed specifically to address problems of invalid instrumental variables. We estimate an odds ratio for type 2 diabetes per unit increase in BMI (kg/m(2)) of between 1.19 and 1.38, with the most stable estimate using all instruments and a weighted median approach (1.26 [95% CI 1.17, 1.34]). TCF7L2(rs7903146) was identified as a complex effect or pleiotropic instrument, and removal of this variant resulted in convergence of causal effect estimates from different causal analysis methods. This indicated the potential for pleiotropy to affect estimates and differences in performance of alternative analytical methods. In a real type 2 diabetes-focused example, this study demonstrates the potential impact of invalid instruments on causal effect estimates and the potential for new approaches to mitigate the bias caused.Medical Research Council (Grant IDs: MC_UU_12013/1, MC_UU_12013/2, MC_UU_12013/3); University of Bristol; Wellcome Trust (Grant ID: 100114); Medical Research Council (Methodology Research Fellowship, Grant ID: MR/N501906/1); Cancer Research UK (C18281/A19169).This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from American Diabetes Association via http://dx.doi.org/10.2337/db16-041