Cultural and Dietary Factors Influencing Traditional Latino Meal Patterns: Findings from Focus Group Discussion

Background: Despite a high prevalence of nutrition-related health disparities experienced by Latinos in the United States, there is limited recent information that can be used by health professionals to develop effective nutrition interventions for this diverse population. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to obtain qualitative information regarding usual dietary patterns of Latinos from Pomona, California, and utilize this data in the development of a tailored nutrition intervention. Methods: Latina women ages 30- 70, from a low socio-economic community sample, participated in one of three focus groups, and discussed eating patterns, recipes, and dietary concerns. Participants self-identified as the primary household food purchaser and preparer. Demographics and acculturation were assessed using validated surveys. Results: All participants (n=17) were considered less acculturated to the United States. Participants reported that traditional recipes and family preferences have the greatest influence on foods prepared, however they tend to be less healthy items. Motivators for eating healthy included maintaining family health and preventing weight gain. Barriers included conflicting meal schedules among family members and individual food preferences. Conclusion: To reduce health disparities for Latinos, cultural and dietary factors of communities, along with perceived motivators and barriers to making healthy choices, should be considered when developing tailored nutrition interventions

An Interprofessional Approach to Teaching Advocacy Skills: Lessons from an Academic Medical-Legal Partnership

Medical students and educators recognize that preparing the next generation of health leaders to address seemingly intractable problems like health disparities should include advocacy training. Opportunities to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to effectively advocate at the policy level to promote systems-, community-, and population-level solutions are a critical component of such training. But formal advocacy training programs that develop and measure such skills are scarce. Even less common are interprofessional advocacy training programs that include legal and policy experts to help medical students learn such skills. This 2016–2017 pilot study started with a legislative advocacy training program for preclinical medical students that was designed to prepare them to meet with Capitol Hill representatives about a health justice issue. The pilot assessed the impact of adding an interprofessional education (IPE) dimension to the program, which in this case involved engaging law faculty and students to help the medical students understand and navigate the federal legislative process and prepare for their meetings. Results from the pilot suggest that adding law and policy experts to advocacy-focused training programs can improve medical students’ advocacy knowledge and skills and increase their professional identity as advocates

The Academic Medical-Legal Partnership: Training the Next Generation of Health & Legal Professionals to Work Together to Advance Health Justice

As the national medical-legal partnership (MLP) movement grows, the need for doctors, nurses, social workers, other health professionals, and lawyers who have the knowledge, skills, and experience to collaborate effectively in this holistic healthcare approach is increasing. Given the unique role that institutions of higher education play in training students as they develop their professional identities, members of the Georgetown University Health Justice Alliance sought to build on prior efforts to define the MLP model by focusing on MLPs that exist in academic settings as a specific type of MLP. This report is based on the results of an environmental scan of MLPs that had evidence of engagement with a medical or law school and reflects the core elements of those MLPs as embodied by their objectives, activities, and unique features. The scan started with prior research conducted by the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership, which categorized MLPs based on their targeted patient populations and identified eight core elements of infrastructure shared across MLPs. The Health Justice Alliance research team then collected data on the impact of interprofessional MLP learning on core undergraduate and graduate medical education knowledge, attitudes, and skill competencies sets for students. Other reports and articles describing specific MLP programs that create interprofessional education opportunities for law and medical students to learn and practice together also provided foundational background

The Spitzer Space Telescope Extra-Galactic First Look Survey: 24 micron data reduction, catalog, and source identification

We present the reduction of the 24 micron data obtained during the first cosmological survey performed by the Spitzer Space Telescope (First Look Survey, FLS). The survey consists of a shallow observation of 2.5x2 sq deg centered at 17h18m +59d30m (main survey) and a deeper observation of 1x0.5 sq deg centered at 17h17m +59d45m(verification survey). Issues with the reduction of the 24 micron MIPS data are discussed and solutions to attenuate instrumental effects are proposed and applied to the data. Approximately 17000 sources are extracted with a SNR greater than five. The photometry of the point sources is evaluated through PSF fitting using an empirical PSF derived from the data. Aperture corrections and the absolute calibration have been checked using stars in the field. Astrometric and photometric errors depend on the SNR of the source varying between 0.35-1 arcsec and 5-15%, respectively, for sources detected at 20-5 sigma. The flux of the 123 extended sources have been estimated through aperture photometry. The extended sources cover less than 0.3% of the total area of the survey. Based on simulations, the main and verification surveys are 50% complete at 0.3 and 0.15 mJy, respectively. Counterparts have been searched for in optical and radio catalogs. More than 80% of the 24 micron sources have a reliable optical counterpart down to R=25.5. 16% of the sources have a 20 cm counterpart down to 0.1 mJy and ~ 80% of the radio-infrared associations have a reliable optical counterpart. A residual map is obtained by subtracting point sources detected at the 3-sigma level and interpolating the regions occupied by extended sources. Several galactic clouds with low and intermediate velocities are identified by comparison with neutral Hydrogen data from this field.Comment: 25 pages, 27 figures. 7 figures are given as png to reduce their size. Paper accepted for publication by AJ (June 2006, vol. 131). Full-resolution version of the paper and machine-readable catalogs are available at http://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/fadda/inpress.htm

Guided internet-based transdiagnostic individually tailored Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for symptoms of depression and/or anxiety in college students: A randomized controlled trial

Common mental disorders, such as depression and anxiety, often emerge in college students during the transition into early adulthood. Mental health problems can seriously impact students' functioning, interpersonal relationships, and academic achievement. Actively reaching out to college students with mental health problems and offering them internet-based interventions may be a promising way of providing low-threshold access to evidence-based treatment in colleges. This randomized controlled trial aimed to assess the effectiveness of a guided web-based transdiagnostic individually tailored Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (iCBT) in treating college students with depression and/or anxiety symptoms. Through an online survey that screened college students' mental health, we recruited 100 college students aged ≥18 years who reported mild to moderate depression and/or anxiety symptoms and were attending colleges in the Netherlands. Participants were randomly allocated to guided iCBT (n = 48) or treatment as usual (TAU) control (n = 52). Primary outcomes were symptoms of depression and anxiety measured at post-treatment (7 weeks post-randomization). We also measured all outcomes at 6- and 12-months post-randomization. All analyses were based on the intention-to-treat principle and were repeated using the complete-case sample. We found no evidence of a difference between the effects of guided iCBT and TAU in any of the examined outcomes (i.e., symptoms of depression and anxiety, quality of life, educational achievement, and college dropout) across all time points (p > .05). There was no evidence that effects of iCBT were associated with treatment satisfaction and adherence. More research into transdiagnostic individually tailored iCBT is necessary. Further, future studies should recruit larger samples to investigate possible smaller but clinically relevant effects of internet-based interventions for college students with depression and/or anxiety

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

Dopamine neurons modulate neural encoding and expression of depression-related behaviour

Major depression is characterized by diverse debilitating symptoms that include hopelessness and anhedonia1. Dopamine neurons involved in reward and motivation are among many neural populations that have been hypothesized to be relevant, and certain antidepressant treatments, including medications and brain stimulation therapies, can influence the complex dopamine system. Until now it has not been possible to test this hypothesis directly, even in animal models, as existing therapeutic interventions are unable to specifically target dopamine neurons. Here we investigated directly the causal contributions of defined dopamine neurons to multidimensional depression-like phenotypes induced by chronic mild stress, by integrating behavioural, pharmacological, optogenetic and electrophysiological methods in freely moving rodents. We found that bidirectional control (inhibition or excitation) of specified midbrain dopamine neurons immediately and bidirectionally modulates (induces or relieves) multiple independent depression symptoms caused by chronic stress. By probing the circuit implementation of these effects, we observed that optogenetic recruitment of these dopamine neurons potently alters the neural encoding of depression-related behaviours in the downstream nucleus accumbens of freely moving rodents, suggesting that processes affecting depression symptoms may involve alterations in the neural encoding of action in limbic circuitry

Assessing ADHD symptoms in children and adults:Evaluating the role of objective measures

Background: Diagnostic guidelines recommend using a variety of methods to assess and diagnose ADHD. Applying subjective measures always incorporates risks such as informant biases or large differences between ratings obtained from diverse sources. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that ratings and tests seem to assess somewhat different constructs. The use of objective measures might thus yield valuable information for diagnosing ADHD. This study aims at evaluating the role of objective measures when trying to distinguish between individuals with ADHD and controls. Our sample consisted of children (n = 60) and adults (n = 76) diagnosed with ADHD and matched controls who completed self- and observer ratings as well as objective tasks. Diagnosis was primarily based on clinical interviews. A popular pattern recognition approach, support vector machines, was used to predict the diagnosis. Results: We observed relatively high accuracy of 79% (adults) and 78% (children) applying solely objective measures. Predicting an ADHD diagnosis using both subjective and objective measures exceeded the accuracy of objective measures for both adults (89.5%) and children (86.7%), with the subjective variables proving to be the most relevant. Conclusions: We argue that objective measures are more robust against rater bias and errors inherent in subjective measures and may be more replicable. Considering the high accuracy of objective measures only, we found in our study, we think that they should be incorporated in diagnostic procedures for assessing ADHD

The prevalence of common mental disorders and PTSD in the UK military: using data from a clinical interview-based study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The mental health of the Armed Forces is an important issue of both academic and public interest. The aims of this study are to: a) assess the prevalence and risk factors for common mental disorders and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, during the main fighting period of the Iraq War (TELIC 1) and later deployments to Iraq or elsewhere and enlistment status (regular or reserve), and b) compare the prevalence of depression, PTSD symptoms and suicidal ideation in regular and reserve UK Army personnel who deployed to Iraq with their US counterparts.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Participants were drawn from a large UK military health study using a standard two phase survey technique stratified by deployment status and engagement type. Participants undertook a structured telephone interview including the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) and a short measure of PTSD (Primary Care PTSD, PC-PTSD). The response rate was 76% (821 participants).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The weighted prevalence of common mental disorders and PTSD symptoms was 27.2% and 4.8%, respectively. The most common diagnoses were alcohol abuse (18.0%) and neurotic disorders (13.5%). There was no health effect of deploying for regular personnel, but an increased risk of PTSD for reservists who deployed to Iraq and other recent deployments compared to reservists who did not deploy. The prevalence of depression, PTSD symptoms and subjective poor health were similar between regular US and UK Iraq combatants.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The most common mental disorders in the UK military are alcohol abuse and neurotic disorders. The prevalence of PTSD symptoms remains low in the UK military, but reservists are at greater risk of psychiatric injury than regular personnel.</p