Are There Disparities in Health Information Access Among New Mexico Practitioners? Results of a Study

We designed an exploratory study to find out what information resources are available to New Mexico health care practitioners not currently affiliated with the University of New Mexico. We conducted semi-structured interviews of a purposive sample of physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, physician assistants, and pharmacists at the location of their practice in all quadrants of the state, including public health clinics. The interview included nine open-ended questions, which were approved by the UNM Human Research Protections Office. Interviews were recorded on an iPad, transcribed, and coded using nVivo (QSR International), a qualitative data coding software package. Fifty-one practitioners particiipated. Their responses indicate that New Mexico pracitioners not affiliated with UNM: are satisfied with their access to information resources to support clinical decision making; are not satisfied with information resources for their patients; would like access to a wider variety of information resources for both clinical information and for their patients.https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hslic-posters-presentations/1044/thumbnail.jp

Low-Cost Air Quality Monitoring Tools: From Research to Practice (A Workshop Summary).

In May 2017, a two-day workshop was held in Los Angeles (California, U.S.A.) to gather practitioners who work with low-cost sensors used to make air quality measurements. The community of practice included individuals from academia, industry, non-profit groups, community-based organizations, and regulatory agencies. The group gathered to share knowledge developed from a variety of pilot projects in hopes of advancing the collective knowledge about how best to use low-cost air quality sensors. Panel discussion topics included: (1) best practices for deployment and calibration of low-cost sensor systems, (2) data standardization efforts and database design, (3) advances in sensor calibration, data management, and data analysis and visualization, and (4) lessons learned from research/community partnerships to encourage purposeful use of sensors and create change/action. Panel discussions summarized knowledge advances and project successes while also highlighting the questions, unresolved issues, and technological limitations that still remain within the low-cost air quality sensor arena

MEDLINE Metric: A method to assess medical students' MEDLINE search effectiveness

Medical educators advocate the need for medical students to acquire information management skills, including the ability to search the MEDLINE database. There has been no published validated method available to use for assessing medical students' MEDLINE information retrieval skills. This research proposes and evaluates a method, designed as the MEDLINE Metric, for assessing medical students' search skills. MEDLINE Metric consists of: (a) the development, by experts, of realistic clinical scenarios that include highly constructed search questions designed to test defined search skills; (b) timed tasks (searches) completed by subjects; (c) the evaluation of search results; and (d) instructive feedback. A goal is to offer medical educators a valid, reliable, and feasible way to judge mastery of information searching skill by measuring results (search retrieval) rather than process (search behavior) or cognition (knowledge about searching). Following a documented procedure for test development, search specialists and medical content experts formulated six clinical search scenarios and questions. One hundred and forty-five subjects completed the six-item test under timed conditions. Subjects represented a wide range of MEDLINE search expertise. One hundred twenty complete cases were used, representing 53 second-year medical students (44%), 47 fourth-year medical students (39%), and 20 medical librarians (17%). Data related to educational level, search training, search experience, confidence in retrieval, difficulty of search, and score were analyzed. Evidence supporting the validity of the method includes the agreement by experts about the skills and knowledge necessary to successfully retrieve information relevant to a clinical question from the MEDLINE database. Also, the test discriminated among different performance levels. There were statistically significant, positive relationships between test score and level of education, self-reported previous MEDLINE training, and self-reported previous search experience. The findings from this study suggest that MEDLINE Metric is a valid method for constructing and administering a performance-based test to identify mastery in searching the MEDLINE database. The test's reliability needs to be established

A hemispherical, high-solid-angle optical micro-cavity for cavity-QED studies

We report a novel hemispherical micro-cavity that is comprised of a planar integrated semiconductor distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) mirror, and an external, concave micro-mirror having a radius of curvature $50\mathrm{\mu m}$. The integrated DBR mirror containing quantum dots (QD), is designed to locate the QDs at an antinode of the field in order to maximize the interaction between the QD and the cavity. The concave micro-mirror, with high-reflectivity over a large solid-angle, creates a diffraction-limited (sub-micron) mode-waist at the planar mirror, leading to a large coupling constant between cavity mode and QD. The half-monolithic design gives more spatial and spectral tuning abilities, relatively to fully monolithic structures. This unique micro-cavity design will potentially enable us to both reach the cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) strong coupling regime and realize the deterministic generation of single photons on demand.Comment: 15 pages, 17 figures, final versio

Impact of Black Shale Weathering on Sediment Quality

Weathering of black shales leads to elevated metal concentrations in both surface water and stream sediments. In spite of the recent focus on black shales, few data exist on the ecological impacts of this process particularly on aquatic organisms. The key objective of this study was to determine the impact of trace metal concentrations in sediments upon aquatic organisms. To achieve the above objective, stream sediment samples were collected from streams draining black shale and limestone (used as a reference stream) lithologies located in central Arkansas between June 2003 and January 2004. Trace metal concentrations were measured by the dynamic reaction cell inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS; Perkin Elmer DRC II) following EPA 6020 methodology. Sediment samples were tested for toxicity using standard EPA protocols. The trace metal concentrations in sediments and acute toxicity test findings using midge larvae, Chironomus tentans with endpoints measured as growth and survival is presented. Our results showed that there are significant differences in survival of the midge larvae among the study sites and also among the different sampling occasions. Percent survival of the midge larvae in the sediments derived from black shales was lower than that observed in the limestone-derived stream sediments. Significant differences in growth of the midge larvae were also observed among the sites with the control and reference stream sediments having higher growth than the black shale stream sediments. Though our measured metal concentrations in the black shale-derived sediments were below the Effects Range-Low, there is a great potential of metal accumulation in the fine sediment fraction particularly during baseflow regimes. At the time, metals can be concentrated in the fine sediment fraction due to the low discharge and less dilution. The study thus far has shown that the black shale metal-enriched stream sediments have both lethal and sublethal effects on aquatic organisms and higher organisms through food chain transfer

β-adrenergic-mediated dynamic augmentation of sarcolemmal CaV 1.2 clustering and co-operativity in ventricular myocytes.

Key pointsPrevailing dogma holds that activation of the β-adrenergic receptor/cAMP/protein kinase A signalling pathway leads to enhanced L-type CaV 1.2 channel activity, resulting in increased Ca2+ influx into ventricular myocytes and a positive inotropic response. However, the full mechanistic and molecular details underlying this phenomenon are incompletely understood. CaV 1.2 channel clusters decorate T-tubule sarcolemmas of ventricular myocytes. Within clusters, nanometer proximity between channels permits Ca2+ -dependent co-operative gating behaviour mediated by physical interactions between adjacent channel C-terminal tails. We report that stimulation of cardiomyocytes with isoproterenol, evokes dynamic, protein kinase A-dependent augmentation of CaV 1.2 channel abundance along cardiomyocyte T-tubules, resulting in the appearance of channel 'super-clusters', and enhanced channel co-operativity that amplifies Ca2+ influx. On the basis of these data, we suggest a new model in which a sub-sarcolemmal pool of pre-synthesized CaV 1.2 channels resides in cardiomyocytes and can be mobilized to the membrane in times of high haemodynamic or metabolic demand, to tune excitation-contraction coupling.AbstractVoltage-dependent L-type CaV 1.2 channels play an indispensable role in cardiac excitation-contraction coupling. Activation of the β-adrenergic receptor (βAR)/cAMP/protein kinase A (PKA) signalling pathway leads to enhanced CaV 1.2 activity, resulting in increased Ca2+ influx into ventricular myocytes and a positive inotropic response. CaV 1.2 channels exhibit a clustered distribution along the T-tubule sarcolemma of ventricular myocytes where nanometer proximity between channels permits Ca2+ -dependent co-operative gating behaviour mediated by dynamic, physical, allosteric interactions between adjacent channel C-terminal tails. This amplifies Ca2+ influx and augments myocyte Ca2+ transient and contraction amplitudes. We investigated whether βAR signalling could alter CaV 1.2 channel clustering to facilitate co-operative channel interactions and elevate Ca2+ influx in ventricular myocytes. Bimolecular fluorescence complementation experiments reveal that the βAR agonist, isoproterenol (ISO), promotes enhanced CaV 1.2-CaV 1.2 physical interactions. Super-resolution nanoscopy and dynamic channel tracking indicate that these interactions are expedited by enhanced spatial proximity between channels, resulting in the appearance of CaV 1.2 'super-clusters' along the z-lines of ISO-stimulated cardiomyocytes. The mechanism that leads to super-cluster formation involves rapid, dynamic augmentation of sarcolemmal CaV 1.2 channel abundance after ISO application. Optical and electrophysiological single channel recordings confirm that these newly inserted channels are functional and contribute to overt co-operative gating behaviour of CaV 1.2 channels in ISO stimulated myocytes. The results of the present study reveal a new facet of βAR-mediated regulation of CaV 1.2 channels in the heart and support the novel concept that a pre-synthesized pool of sub-sarcolemmal CaV 1.2 channel-containing vesicles/endosomes resides in cardiomyocytes and can be mobilized to the sarcolemma to tune excitation-contraction coupling to meet metabolic and/or haemodynamic demands

Reciprocal links between anxiety sensitivity and obsessive-compulsive symptoms in youth: a longitudinal twin study

Background: Anxiety sensitivity, the tendency to fear the symptoms of anxiety, is a key risk factor for the development anxiety disorders. Although obsessive-compulsive disorder was previously classified as an anxiety disorder, the prospective relationship between anxiety sensitivity and obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) has been largely overlooked. Furthermore, a lack of genetically-informative studies means the aetiology of the link between anxiety sensitivity and OCS remains unclear. Methods: Adolescent twins and siblings (N=1,579) from the G1219 study completed self-report questionnaires two years apart assessing anxiety sensitivity, OCS, anxiety and depression. Linear regression models tested prospective associations between anxiety sensitivity and OCS, with and without adjustment for anxiety and depressive symptoms. A phenotypic cross-lagged model assessed bidirectional influences between anxiety sensitivity and OCS over time, and a genetic version of this model examined the aetiology of these associations. Results: Anxiety sensitivity was prospectively associated with changes in OCS, even after controlling for comorbid anxiety and depressive symptoms. The longitudinal relationship between anxiety sensitivity and OCS was bidirectional, and these associations were predominantly accounted for by non-shared environmental influences. Conclusions: Our findings are consistent with the notion that anxiety sensitivity is a risk factor for OCS during adolescence, but also suggest that experiencing OCS confers risk for heightened anxiety sensitivity. The reciprocal links between OCS and anxiety sensitivity over time are likely to be largely mediated by non-shared environmental experiences, as opposed to common genes. Our findings raise the possibility that interventions aimed at ameliorating anxiety sensitivity could reduce risk for OCS, and vice versa

Assessing positive matrix factorization model fit: a new method to estimate uncertainty and bias in factor contributions at the daily time scale

International audienceA Positive Matrix Factorization receptor model for aerosol pollution source apportionment was fit to a synthetic dataset simulating one year of daily measurements of ambient PM2.5 concentrations, comprised of 39 chemical species from nine pollutant sources. A novel method was developed to estimate model fit uncertainty and bias at the daily time scale, as related to factor contributions. A balanced bootstrap is used to create replicate datasets, with the same model then fit to the data. Neural networks are trained to classify factors based upon chemical profiles, as opposed to correlating contribution time series, and this classification is used to align factor orderings across results associated with the replicate datasets. Factor contribution uncertainty is assessed from the distribution of results associated with each factor. Comparing modeled factors with input factors used to create the synthetic data assesses bias. The results indicate that variability in factor contribution estimates does not necessarily encompass model error: contribution estimates can have small associated variability yet also be very biased. These results are likely dependent on characteristics of the data