Pathways to Service Receipt: Modeling Parent Help-Seeking for Childhood Mental Health Problems

Understanding parent appraisals of child behavior problems and parental help-seeking can reduce unmet mental health needs. Research has examined individual contributors to help-seeking and service receipt, but use of structural equation modeling (SEM) is rare. SEM was used to examine parents’ appraisal of child behavior, thoughts about seeking help, and receipt of professional services in a diverse, urban sample (N = 189) recruited from women infant and children offices. Parents of children 11–60 months completed questionnaires about child behavior and development, parent well-being, help-seeking experiences, and service receipt. Child internalizing, externalizing, and dysregulation problems, language delay, and parent worry about child behavior loaded onto parent appraisal of child behavior. Parent stress and depression were positively associated with parent appraisal (and help-seeking). Parent appraisal and help-seeking were similar across child sex and age. In a final model, parent appraisals were significantly associated with parent thoughts about seeking help, which was significantly associated with service receipt

Implications of Notch Signaling in Taste Cell Replacement

Cyclophosphamide (CYP) was one of the first chemotherapy drugs developed and used to treat several types of cancer, by disrupting proliferative cells. Unfortunately, CYP is unable to differentiate between cancerous cells and healthy cells turning over which ultimately kills normally functioning cells, including those of the taste system. This loss of taste cells may result in dysgeusia (altered sense of taste), hypogeusia (reduced taste ability) or ageusia (inability to detect any tastes), eventually leading to malnutrition and poor prognosis for patients. The notch signaling pathway is one of the most important pathways involved in the differentiation and fate of neural stem cells (Hitoshi et al., 2002). A previous study looked at genes expressed in developing circumvallate taste cells and found that notch signaling remains active in adult mice to determine cell lineage as the sensory cells are continuously replaced (Seta, Seta, & Barlow, 2003). The current research uses immunohistochemistry to identify the presence of notch signaling following injury by CYP. It was hypothesized that if Notch1 is involved in taste cell replacement, we predict the Notch1 signal should be amplified following challenge by cyclophosphamide