Return to Sexual Activity and Modern Family Planning Use in the Extended Postpartum Period: An Analysis of Findings from Seventeen Countries

Unintended pregnancies can lead to poor maternal and child health outcomes. Family planning use during the first year postpartum has the potential to significantly reduce at least some of these unintended pregnancies. This paper examines the relationship of menses return, breastfeeding status, and postpartum duration on return to sexual activityand use of modern family planning among postpartum women. This paper presents results from a secondary data analysis of Demographic and Health Surveys from 17 countries. For postpartum women, the return of menses,breastfeeding status, and postpartum duration are significantly associated with return to sexual activity in at least 10 out of the 17 countries but not consistently associated with family planning use. Only menses return had a significant association with use of modern family planning in the majority of countries. These findings point to the importance of education about pregnancy risk prior to menses return (Afr J Reprod Health 2010; 14[4]: 75-82)

Becoming a mentor: The impact of training and the experience of mentoring university students on the autism spectrum

While it is widely recognised that the number of young adults diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disoders (ASD) is increasing, there is currently limited understanding of effective support for the transition to adulthood. One approach gaining increasing attention in the university sector is specialised peer mentoring. The aim of this inductive study was to understand the impact of peer mentor training on seven student mentors working with university students with an ASD. Kirkpatrick’s model framed a mixed methods evaluation of the mentors’ training and description of their experience. Overall, the training was well received by the mentors, who reported on average a 29% increase in their ASD knowledge following the training. Results from the semi-structured interviews conducted three months after the training, found that mentors felt that the general ASD knowledge they gained as part of their training had been essential to their role. The mentors described how their overall experience had been positive and reported that the training and support provided to them was pivotal to their ability to succeed in as peer mentors to students with ASD. This study provides feedback in support of specialist peer-mentoring programs for university students and can inform recommendations for future programs and research

OptCom: A Multi-Level Optimization Framework for the Metabolic Modeling and Analysis of Microbial Communities

Microorganisms rarely live isolated in their natural environments but rather function in consolidated and socializing communities. Despite the growing availability of high-throughput sequencing and metagenomic data, we still know very little about the metabolic contributions of individual microbial players within an ecological niche and the extent and directionality of interactions among them. This calls for development of efficient modeling frameworks to shed light on less understood aspects of metabolism in microbial communities. Here, we introduce OptCom, a comprehensive flux balance analysis framework for microbial communities, which relies on a multi-level and multi-objective optimization formulation to properly describe trade-offs between individual vs. community level fitness criteria. In contrast to earlier approaches that rely on a single objective function, here, we consider species-level fitness criteria for the inner problems while relying on community-level objective maximization for the outer problem. OptCom is general enough to capture any type of interactions (positive, negative or combinations thereof) and is capable of accommodating any number of microbial species (or guilds) involved. We applied OptCom to quantify the syntrophic association in a well-characterized two-species microbial system, assess the level of sub-optimal growth in phototrophic microbial mats, and elucidate the extent and direction of inter-species metabolite and electron transfer in a model microbial community. We also used OptCom to examine addition of a new member to an existing community. Our study demonstrates the importance of trade-offs between species- and community-level fitness driving forces and lays the foundation for metabolic-driven analysis of various types of interactions in multi-species microbial systems using genome-scale metabolic models