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In 2019, we launched the Northern Arizona Paleoindian Project to expand on findings from the Rock Art Ranch (RAR) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU; NSF#1262184). The REU recovered 24 Paleoindian artifacts in association with drainages. Expansion of the research required mitigation of the patchwork landownership in the area, which encouraged a collector-collaboration model following Pitblado (2014) and Douglass et alia (2017). We held public events in collaboration with a network of agencies, avocational groups, collectors, and landowners to assess potential for Paleoindian archaeology in the area. In March 2020, however, the COVID-19 pandemic halted our efforts, allowing us to evaluate our project and practice. We find that tapping into existing local networks of responsible resource stewards (RRS) can greatly accelerate project development. We also find that private collections are endangered, and preserving this portion of the archaeological record requires documentation and long-term curation. Most importantly, we find that archaeologists working with collectors are uniquely positioned to build bridges between Indigenous communities, RRS, and professional archaeologists to help stabilize legacy collections and that this focus should drive collector-collaboration research design. Ultimately, the project must move toward a community-based participatory research design to seek equitable and culturally appropriate curation plans for local legacy collections.
Antibiotics are frequently prescribed in nursing homes; national data describing facility-level antibiotic use are lacking. The objective of this analysis was to describe variability in antibiotic use in nursing homes across the United States using electronic health record orders.
Methods:
A retrospective cohort study of antibiotic orders for 309,884 residents in 1,664 US nursing homes in 2016 were included in the analysis. Antibiotic use rates were calculated as antibiotic days of therapy (DOT) per 1,000 resident days and were compared by type of stay (short stay ≤100 days vs long stay >100 days). Prescribing indications and the duration of nursing home-initiated antibiotic orders were described. Facility-level correlations of antibiotic use, adjusting for resident health and facility characteristics, were assessed using multivariate linear regression models.
Results:
In 2016, 54% of residents received at least 1 systemic antibiotic. The overall rate of antibiotic use was 88 DOT per 1,000 resident days. The 3 most common antibiotic classes prescribed were fluoroquinolones (18%), cephalosporins (18%), and urinary anti-infectives (9%). Antibiotics were most frequently prescribed for urinary tract infections, and the median duration of an antibiotic course was 7 days (interquartile range, 5–10). Higher facility antibiotic use rates correlated positively with higher proportions of short-stay residents, for-profit ownership, residents with low cognitive performance, and having at least 1 resident on a ventilator. Available facility-level characteristics only predicted a small proportion of variability observed (Model R2 version 0.24 software).
Conclusions:
Using electronic health record orders, variability was found among US nursing-home antibiotic prescribing practices, highlighting potential opportunities for targeted improvement of prescribing practices.
Antibiotics are among the most common medications prescribed in nursing homes. The annual prevalence of antibiotic use in residents of nursing homes ranges from 47% to 79%, and more than half of antibiotic courses initiated in nursing-home settings are unnecessary or prescribed inappropriately (wrong drug, dose, or duration). Inappropriate antibiotic use is associated with a variety of negative consequences including Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI), adverse drug effects, drug–drug interactions, and antimicrobial resistance. In response to this problem, public health authorities have called for efforts to improve the quality of antibiotic prescribing in nursing homes.
Despite the substantial investment by Australian health authorities to improve the health of rural and remote communities, rural residents continue to experience health care access challenges and poorer health outcomes. Health literacy and community engagement are both considered critical in addressing these health inequities. However, the current focus on health literacy can place undue burdens of responsibility for healthcare on individuals from disadvantaged communities whilst not taking due account of broader community needs and healthcare expectations. This can also marginalize the influence of community solidarity and mobilization in effecting healthcare improvements.
Objective:
The objective is to present a conceptual framework that describes community literacy, its alignment with health literacy, and its relationship to concepts of community engaged healthcare.
Findings:
Community literacy aims to integrate community knowledge, skills and resources into the design, delivery and adaptation of healthcare policies, and services at regional and local levels, with the provision of primary, secondary, and tertiary healthcare that aligns to individual community contexts. A set of principles is proposed to support the development of community literacy. Three levels of community literacy education for health personnel have been described that align with those applied to health literacy for consumers. It is proposed that community literacy education can facilitate transformational community engagement. Skills acquired by health personnel from senior executives to frontline clinical staff, can also lead to enhanced opportunities to promote health literacy for individuals.
Conclusions:
The integration of health and community literacy provides a holistic framework that has the potential to effectively respond to the diversity of rural and remote Australian communities and their healthcare needs and expectations. Further research is required to develop, validate, and evaluate the three levels of community literacy education and alignment to health policy, prior to promoting its uptake more widely.
Sleep apnea is one of the most common sleep disorders and it is related to multiple negative health consequences. Previous studies have shown that sleep apnea is influenced by genetic factors. However, studies have not investigated the genetic and environmental influences of symptoms of sleep apnea in young adults. Furthermore, the underpinnings of the relationship between apnea symptoms and internalizing/externalizing problems are unknown. The objectives of this study were to estimate the magnitude of: (1) genetic and environmental influences on self-reported apnea symptoms; (2) the relationship between self-reported apnea symptoms and internalizing/externalizing traits; (3) genetic and environmental influences on the associations between self-reported apnea symptoms, internalizing behaviors and externalizing behaviors.
Methods
In a twin/sibling study, univariate and multivariate models were fitted to estimate both individual variance and sources of covariance between symptoms of sleep apnea and internalizing/externalizing behaviors.
Results
Our results show that genetic influences account for 40% of the variance in sleep apnea symptoms. Moreover, there are modest associations between depression, anxiety and externalizing behaviors with apnea symptoms (ranging from r = 0.22–0.29). However, the origins of these associations differ. For example, whereas most of the covariation between symptoms of depression and sleep apnea can be explained by genes (95%), there was a larger role for the environment (53%) in the association between symptoms of anxiety and sleep apnea.
Conclusions
Genetic factors explain a significant proportion of variance in symptoms of apnea and most of the covariance with depression.
OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Deep brain stimulation is currently being evaluated as an experimental therapy for various psychiatric disorders, as well as being investigated as a method for mapping emotional brain functions. This growing area of research requires sensitive measures to quantify effects of stimulation on emotional processing. The current study examined the effects of acute stimulation to 2 limbic regions—the subcallosal cingulate (SCC) and the amygdala—on bias in the perception and evaluation of emotional facial expressions. We hypothesized that transient electrical stimulation to the limbic system would produce acute reductions in negative bias, consistent with its antidepressant effects in patients with severe depression. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: The current study uses a novel affective bias task, developed to rapidly and covertly quantify emotional state. Over 4–6 minutes, patients rate the intensity and valence of static images of emotional facial expressions. We examined effects of electrical brain stimulation in 2 groups: patients with treatment-refractory depression undergoing SCC DBS therapy, and epilepsy patients undergoing amygdala stimulation via stereo-EEG electrodes during inpatient intracranial monitoring. DBS patients completed the task under stimulation and sham conditions during monthly visits over the first 6 months of therapy, as well as daily during a 1 week, blinded period of DBS discontinuation at the 6-month time point. Epilepsy patients completed the task under stimulation and sham conditions at a single visit. Mixed linear models and paired-samples t-test were used to investigate effects of stimulation as well as depression scale scores on affective bias ratings. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Four SCC DBS patients showed significant effects of stimulation (p<0.0001) and depressive state (p<0.0001) on affective bias scores across 6 months of chronic DBS therapy, where emotional faces were perceived as less sad with stimulation ON, as well as during visits in which patients were nondepressed (typically later in the treatment course). Furthermore, 2 DBS patients showed rapid negative shifts in bias following acute blinded discontinuation of chronic stimulation, an effect which persisted over the 1-week period of discontinuation (t29=−2.58, p=0.015), in the absence of any self-reported change in mood. Likewise, 6 epilepsy patients showed significant positive shifts in affective bias with acute amygdala stimulation (t5=−4.75, p=0.005). Current analyses are investigating electrophysiological, autonomic and facial motor correlates to affective bias in these patients. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Affective bias has revealed rapid, significant changes with stimulation at 2 limbic targets—one a white matter hub and one a nuclear subcortical structure—suggesting the task’s utility as an emotional outcome measure in brain stimulation studies. These stimulation-sensitive measures may provide a new metric to track treatment response to deep brain stimulation therapy for affective disorders. Future studies will determine whether affective bias can predict neuropsychiatric complications in patients undergoing stimulation mapping of brain circuitry ahead of resection surgery for epilepsy.
Transit timing variations (TTV) in multi-transiting systems enables precise characterizations of low-mass planets and their orbits. The range of orbital periods and incident fluxes with detailed TTV constraints complements the radial velocity sample for low-mass planets, pushing exoplanet characterization to the regime sub-Earth size planets and out to Mercury-like distances. This has revealed an astonishing diversity in the density of super-Earth mass planets. We summarize these and other contributions to exoplanet science from TTVs.
Current theories of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) place considerable emphasis on the role cognitive distortions such as self-blame, hopelessness or preoccupation with danger play in the etiology and maintenance of the disorder. Previous studies have shown that cognitive distortions in the early aftermath of traumatic events can predict future PTSD severity but, to date, no studies have investigated the neural correlates of this association.
Method
We conducted a prospective study with 106 acutely traumatized subjects, assessing symptom severity at three time points within the first 3 months post-trauma. A subsample of 20 subjects additionally underwent a functional 4-T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan at 2 to 4 months post-trauma.
Results
Cognitive distortions proved to be a significant predictor of concurrent symptom severity in addition to diagnostic status, but did not predict future symptom severity or diagnostic status over and above the initial symptom severity. Cognitive distortions were correlated with blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal strength in brain regions previously implicated in visual processing, imagery and autobiographic memory recall. Intrusion characteristics accounted for most of these correlations.
Conclusions
This investigation revealed significant predictive value of cognitive distortions concerning concurrent PTSD severity and also established a significant relationship between cognitive distortions and neural activations during trauma recall in an acutely traumatized sample. These data indicate a direct link between the extent of cognitive distortions and the intrusive nature of trauma memories.
Clinical prediction rules are decision-making tools that incorporate three or more variables from the history, physical examination or simple tests. They help clinicians make diagnostic or therapeutic decisions by standardizing the collection and interpretation of clinical data. There is growing interest in the methodological standards for their development and validation. This article describes the methods used to derive the Canadian C-Spine Rule and provides a valuable reference for investigators planning to develop future clinical prediction rules.
This paper is Part I of a 2-part series to describe the background and methodology for the Canadian C-Spine Rule study to develop a clinical decision rule for rational imaging in alert and stable trauma patients. Current use of radiography is inefficient and variable, in part because there has been a lack of evidence-based guidelines to assist emergency physicians. Clinical decision rules are research-based decision-making tools that incorporate 3 or more variables from the history, physical examination or simple tests. The Canadian CT Head and C-Spine (CCC) Study is a large collaborative effort to develop clinical decision rules for the use of CT head in minor head injury and for the use of cervical spine radiography in alert and stable trauma victims. Part I details the background and rationale for the development of the Canadian C-Spine Rule. Part II will describe in detail the objectives and methods of the Canadian C-Spine Rule study.
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