Author Interviews, Education, Outcomes & Safety / 16.03.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Furman S. McDonald MD MPH Lead author of the research and Senior Vice President for Academic and Medical Affairs American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Would you briefly explain how the MOC examination works? Response: To earn Board Certification from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), doctors take an exam after completing a medical education training program accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education to demonstrate they have the knowledge to practice in a specialty. Previously, ABIM conducted research that showed that physicians who passed a certification exam were five times less likely to be disciplined by a state licensing board than those who do not become certified. After becoming board certified, physicians can participate in ABIM’s Maintenance of Certification (MOC) program, which involves periodic assessments and learning activities to support doctors in staying current with medical knowledge through their careers. ABIM has been in conversations across the medical community and many people have expressed interest in whether performance on the MOC exams doctors take is also associated with important outcomes relevant to patients. For this study, my ABIM colleagues and I studied whether there was any association between Internal Medicine MOC exam performance and disciplinary actions by state licensing boards. We studied MOC exam results and any reported disciplinary actions for nearly 48,000 general internists who initially certified between 1990 and 2003.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Race/Ethnic Diversity, Social Issues / 07.03.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Patricia Louie, MA PhD Student, Department of Sociology University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?   Response: While most physicians believe that they treat patients equally, research shows that racial inequality pervades the U.S. health care system (Feagin and Bennefield 2014; Williams 2012). Because these inequities persist even after demographic and other socio-economic differences are taken into consideration scholars have started to look at the representation of race in the medical curriculum. The idea is that medical curriculum creates both implicit and explicit connections between race and disease. We build on this body of work by investigating the representation of race (White, Black and Person of Color) and skin tone (light, medium and dark) in the images of four preclinical anatomy textbooks - Atlas of Human Anatomy, Bates’ Guide to Physical Examination & History Taking, Clinically Oriented Anatomy, and Gray’s Anatomy for Students.  Skin tone is important. The majority of medical imagery consists of decontextualized images of body parts where skin tone, which may be related to disease presentation, is the only phenotypical marker. If doctors associate light skin tones with White patients, this may also influence how doctors think about who is a “typical” patient, particularly for the type of disease that is shown in that image. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Kidney Disease, Pediatrics / 25.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Kerry Chen Centre for Kidney Research, The Kids Research Institute The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney School of Public Health, The University of Sydney Sydney, New South Wales, Australia MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Chronic kidney disease is a major public health issue, with end-stage disease often requiring a combination of complex medication regimens, dialysis and/or transplant surgery. In children, the major causes of CKD are genetic and congenital. The consequences of CKD in children can be long-term and debilitating especially as they transition into adulthood, affecting their physical, intellectual and emotional well-being. To better understand these changes, the Kids Health and Wealth Study (KCAD) is the largest longitudinal cohort study of children and adolescents with CKD in Australia and New Zealand. Spread across 5 paediatric nephrology centres so far, the KCAD Study takes a life-course approach to collecting and analysing data pertaining to the interactions between reduced renal function and associated clinical, socio-economic, quality of life, psychological, cognitive and educational outcomes in children, especially as they progress in CKD stage and also as they transition into adulthood. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Infections, Pediatrics / 23.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Ole Köhler-Forsberg, PhD Student Department of Clinical Medicine - Psychosis Research Unit Aarhus University MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Prior studies have demonstrated that serious illnesses, for example severe infections such as measles, rubella or meningitis, which we vaccinate against, affect the brain and thereby the child's ability to learn. From this we know that illnesses and in particular infections to some degree have an influence on our brains. In this study, we decided to look at how children perform following the less severe infections that many of them frequently experience during their childhood. After all, this is the largest group of children, but this has not been studied previously in such a large population. Basically, we found that among 598,553 Danes born 1987-1997, the less severe infections treated with anti-infective agents during childhood did not affect the child´s ability to perform well in school, nonetheless whether 5, 10 or 15 prescriptions had been prescribed. On the other hand, we found that children who had been admitted to hospital as a result of severe infections had a lower chance of completing 9th grade. The decisive factor is therefore the severity of the disease, but not necessarily the number of sick days.   (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Gender Differences / 15.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: David C. Geary, Ph.D. Curators' Distinguished Professor Thomas Jefferson Fellow Department of Psychological Sciences Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program University of Missouri Columbia, MO 65211-2500  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?   Response:   We were interested in international variation in the percentage of women who obtain college degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, focusing on degrees in inorganic areas, such as physics and computer science (topics that do not deal with living things).  There is no sex difference in the life sciences, but there is in these fields. The gap is about 3 to 1 in the U.S. and has been stable for decades. We wanted to link international variation in these degrees to student factors, including their best subject (e.g., science vs. reading) and their interests in science, as well as to more general factors such as whether the country provided strong economic opportunities and its rating on gender equality measures. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, JAMA, Occupational Health, UCSF / 13.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Christina Mangurian, MD, MAS Associate Professor of Psychiatry Vice Chair for Diversity, Department of Psychiatry UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences Director, UCSF Public Psychiatry Fellowship at ZSFG Core Faculty, UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: We examined paid family and childbearing leave policies at top-10 medical schools across the US. Despite recommendation from national medical societies for 12 weeks paid childbearing leave because of the benefits to both infant and mother, the average leave at these top schools of medicine was only around 8 weeks. In addition, most policies are very difficult to understand, and are at the discretion of departmental leadership – both of which put women at a disadvantage at getting leave they deserve. Additionally, family leave was only available to the parent that identifies as the "primary caregiver" at five universities, disallowing cooperative parenting. (more…)
Author Interviews, BMJ, Education, Nutrition, Pediatrics, Weight Research / 13.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Lt. Governor Brown Visits Hamilton Elem_Mid School to Highlight Summer Meals Program” by Maryland GovPics is licensed under CC BY 2.0Peymané Adab, MD University of Birmingham in England MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Childhood obesity is an increasing problem worldwide. In the UK, the proportion of children who are very overweight doubles during the primary school years. Furthermore during this period inequalities emerge. At school entry there is little difference in the likelihood of being overweight between groups. However on leaving primary school, children from minority ethnic groups and those from more deprived, compared to more affluent backgrounds are more likely to be overweight. Excess weight in children is linked with multiple health, emotional and social problems.  As children spend a lot of time at school, it seems intuitive that they are an ideal setting for prevention interventions. Although a number of studies have investigated the evidence for school obesity prevention programmes, the results have been mixed and methodological weaknesses have prevented recommendations being made. As a result we undertook a major high quality trial to evaluate an intervention that had been developed in consultation with parents, teachers and the relevant community. The 12 month programme  had four components. Teachers at participating schools were trained to provide opportunities for regular bursts of physical activity for children, building up to an additional 30 minutes each school day. There was also a workshop each term, where parents came in to cook a healthy meal (breakfast, lunch of dinner) with their children. In conjunction with a local football club, Aston Villa, children participated in a six-week healthy eating and physical activity programme. Finally, parents were provided with information about local family physical activity opportunities. We involved around 1500 year 1 children (aged 5-6 years) from 54 state run primary schools in the West Midlands. At the start of the study, we measured their height and weight and other measures of body fat, asked the children to complete a questionnaire about their wellbeing, to note everything they ate for 24 hours, and to wear an activity monitor that recorded how active they were. After this, the schools were randomised to either receive the programme or not. We then repeated the measures 15 and 30 months later. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education / 31.01.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Learning a New Language” by Joel Penner is licensed under CC BY 2.0Phillip Hamrick, Ph.D. Assistant Professor || Second Language Acquisition Principal Investigator TESL Program Chair Department of English Kent State University MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: For a long time, language scientists (e.g., linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists) have debated the degree to which language relies on unique brain systems (those that are used for language and nothing else) or more general-purpose brain systems that we use for other things (e.g., memory, controlling attention, categorization, etc.). Our study quantitatively synthesized the results of several other studies using a technique called meta-analysis. We found that declarative and procedural memory abilities, which are fundamental for learning lots of different things (e.g., anything from facts about geography to how to play a musical instrument), are linked to language in specific ways. Importantly, these findings held up in both children learning their first language and adults learning second languages. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, JAMA, Pediatrics / 30.01.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “preschool joy” by kristin :: prairie daze is licensed under CC BY 2.0Arthur J. Reynolds, PhD Institute of Child Development University of Minnesota, Minneapolis  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?   Response: Educational attainment is the leading social determinant of health. Higher attainment measured by years of education or postsecondary attainment is linked to lower cardiovascular disease risk; lower rates of smoking, diabetes, and hypertension; and higher economic well-being. Evidence on the long-term effects of early childhood programs on educational attainment is mixed. Some studies show impacts on high school graduation but not college attainment, the reverse pattern, or no measurement into adulthood. No studies of large-scale public programs have assessed impacts beyond young adulthood. Whether duration of participation over ages 3 to 9 is linked to mid 30s attainment also has not been investigated. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Genetic Research / 26.01.2018

“Reading is fun!” by Isaac Wedin is licensed under CC BY 2.0MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Bruno Sauce, PhD and Louis D. Matzel, PhD Department of Psychology, Program in Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience Rutgers University New Jersey, USA  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Scientists have known for decades that intelligence has a high heritability, which means that much of the individual differences in IQ we see in people are due to genetic differences. Heritability is a value that ranges from 0.0 (meaning no genetic component) to 1.0 (meaning that the trait is completely heritable). For example, the heritability of breast cancer is estimated at 0.27; the heritability of body mass index is 0.59; and the heritability of major depression is 0.40. In comparison, the heritability of IQ is estimated to be as high as 0.8 – quite a high value! More recently, however, there have been studies showing that intelligence has a high malleability: the studies cover cognitive gains consequent to adoption/immigration, changes in IQ’s heritability across life span and socioeconomic status, gains in IQ over time from societal and scientific progress, the slowdown of age-related cognitive decline, the gains in intelligence from early education, differences in average IQ between countries due to wealth and development, and gains in intelligence that seem to happen from working memory training. Intelligence being both highly heritable and highly malleable is seemingly paradoxical, and this paradox has been the source of continuous controversy among scientists. Why does it matter? Because IQ predicts many important outcomes in life, such as academic grades, income, social mobility, happiness, marital stability and satisfaction, general health, longevity, reduced risk of accidents, and reduced risk of drug addiction (among many other outcomes). A clear understanding of the genetic and environmental causes of variation in intelligence is critical for future research, and its potential implications (and applications) for society are immense. (more…)
Author Interviews, CDC, Education, Pediatrics, Sleep Disorders / 26.01.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “He isn't sleeping, he is mad. When we don't get our way pouting always works (okay.. It's worth a try at least!) #kids #dad #father #family #funny #like #parenting #photooftheday #instaphoto #instacute” by dadblunders is licensed under CC BY 2.0Anne G. Wheaton, Ph.D. Epidemiologist Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Division of Population Health Epidemiology and Surveillance Branch Atlanta, GA  30341-3717 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Insufficient sleep among children and adolescents is associated with an increased risk for obesity, diabetes, injuries, poor mental health, and attention and behavior problems. In previous reports, CDC had found that, nationwide, approximately two thirds of U.S. high school students report sleeping <8 hours per night on school nights. CDC conducted this study to provide state-level estimates of short sleep duration on school nights among middle school and high school students using age-specific recommendations from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM). AASM has recommended that children aged 6–12 years should regularly sleep 9–12 hours per 24 hours and teenagers aged 13–18 years should sleep 8–10 hours per 24 hours for optimal health. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Gender Differences / 24.01.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Prof. Amani El-Alayli PhD Eastern Washington University MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: This research was conducted on the premise that people tend to view women as more nurturing, and also set higher standards for women to behave in a nurturing manner. The same pattern has been observed in past research examining how students view their female professors.  Female professors are expected to be more nurturing, such as being more available outside of the classroom, as compared to their male professors.  In the present research, we investigated whether these higher expectations of nurturing behavior would cause students to be more likely to ask things of their female professors, consequently placing higher work demands on them.  In our survey of male and female professors across the country, we indeed found that female professors received more requests for standard work demands (e.g., office hours visits or assistance with course-related matters), as well as special favor requests (e.g., requests to re-do an assignment for a better grade or asking for some form of exception, extended deadline, or alternative assignment), compared to male professors. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Pediatrics / 18.01.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Reading” by Kate Ter Haar is licensed under CC BY 2.0Dr. Jon Quach, PhD Postdoctoral research fellow Royal Childrens Hospital's Centre for Community Child Health Murdoch Children’s Research Institute  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: The reading practices of mothers and fathers was assessed in 405 families in Melbourne when children were 2, and child had their language and literacy skills assessed when they were 4 years old. We found fathers reading practices were associated with better language outcomes 2 years later, even after accounting for mothers reading and key family demographics  (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, NYU, Pediatrics, Pediatrics / 02.01.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Adriana Weisleder, PhD Research scientist, Department of Pediatrics NYU Langone Medical Center New York  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: An estimated 250 million children in low- and middle-income countries do not reach their developmental potential due to poverty. Many programs in the US, such as Reach Out and Read and Video Interaction Project, have shown success in reducing poverty-related disparities in early child development by promoting parent-child interactions in cognitively stimulating activities such as shared bookreading. This randomized study sought to determine whether a program focused on supporting parent-child shared bookreading would result in enhanced child development among 2- to 4-year-old children in a low-resource region in northern Brazil. Families in the program could borrow children’s books on a weekly basis and could participate in monthly parent workshops focused on reading aloud. Findings showed that participating families exhibited higher quantity and quality of shared reading interactions than families in a control group, and children showed higher vocabularies, working memory, and IQ. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Social Issues / 22.12.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “working class” by arileu is licensed under CC BY 2.0Igor Grossmann, Ph.D. Director, Wisdom and Culture Laboratory Associate Professor of Psychology University of Waterloo, Canada Associate Editor, Emotion MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Our Wisdom & Culture laboratory studies the concepts of wisdom and cultural factors. For wisdom, we specifically focus on pragmatic reasoning that can help people to better understand and navigate uncertain contexts – strategies that philosophers for millennia discussed as “epistemic virtues.” In our prior work, my colleagues and I have observed that wisdom tends to be lower in situations when self-interests are salient, and higher when one adopted an socially-sensitive interdependent mindset. In other work by myself and several other labs, consistent finding emerged showing that lower social class tends to be more socially interdependent, whereas middle class (both in the US, Russia, and even China) tends to be more self-focused. This led to the present research, which combines prior insights to examine how wise reasoning varies across social classes. Because lower class situation involves more uncertainty and more resource-scare life circumstances, we questioned whether these situations would also evoke more wise reasoning from people who are in them. Higher class situations are assumed to provide conditions that benefit people in every way. But in so doing, they may also encourage entitlement, self-focus and thereby intellectual humility and open-mindedness – key features of a wise thought. As such, our studies show that it turns out that middle class conditions are not beneficial in at least one way – they may discourage reasoning wisely. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Neurology, Pediatrics / 13.12.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Kaisa Lohvansuu, PhD Postdoctoral Researcher Jyväskylä Centre for Interdisciplinary Brain Research Department of Psychology University of Jyväskylä  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Developmental dyslexia, a specific reading disability, has a strong genetic basis: The risk of having developmental dyslexia at school age is eight times higher than usual if either of the parents has reading difficulty. It has been known that dyslexia and also family risk for dyslexia are strongly associated with a speech perception deficit, but the underlying mechanism of how the impaired speech processing leads to reading difficulties has been unclear. (more…)
Alzheimer's - Dementia, Author Interviews, BMJ, Education, Karolinski Institute / 10.12.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with:

Susanna C. Larsson, PhD Associate Professor, Karolinska Institutet, Institute of Environmental Medicine, Stockholm, Sweden

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The causes of Alzheimer’s disease are largely unknown and there are currently no medical treatments that can halt or reverse its effects. This has led to growing interest in identifying risk factors for Alzheimer’s that are amenable to modification. Several observational studies have found that education and various lifestyle and vascular risk factors are associated with the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, but whether these factors actually cause Alzheimer’s is unclear.

We used a genetic epidemiologic method known as ‘Mendelian randomization’. This method involves the use of genes with an impact on the modifiable risk factor – for example, genes linked to education or intelligence – and assessing whether these genes are also associated with the disease. If a gene with an impact on the modifiable risk factor is also associated with the disease, then this provides strong evidence that the risk factor is a cause of the disease.

MedicalResearch.com:  What are the main findings?

Response: Our results, based on aggregated genetic data from 17 000 Alzheimer’s disease patients and 37 000 healthy controls, revealed that genetic variants that predict higher education were clearly associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease. A possible explanation for this link is ‘cognitive reserve’, which refers to the ability to recruit and use alternative brain networks or structures not normally used to compensate for brain ageing. Previous research has shown that high education increases this reserve.

We found suggestive evidence for possible associations of intelligence, circulating vitamin D, coffee consumption, and smoking with risk of Alzheimer’s disease. There was no evidence for a causal link with other modifiable factors, such as vascular risk factors.

(more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Pediatrics / 29.11.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Sonia Kandel PhD Professor at the GIPSA-Lab Université Grenoble Alpes  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: How do we recall a word’s spelling from memory? How do we execute the movements to produce letters? A series of studies conducted by Professor Sonia Kandel at the GIPSA-Lab/University of Grenoble Alpes in France provide evidence indicating that writing is a linguistic process that affects the way we execute the manual movements when we write. For example, the movements involved in writing T-H-R are easier to execute in a word that is pronounced as it is spelled, (e.g. “thrill”) than in a word that is orthographically irregular (e.g. “through”). What happens with writing when spelling processes are impaired like, in dyslexia and dysgraphia? (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, JAMA, Karolinski Institute, Mental Health Research / 16.11.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Ana Pérez-Vigil MD Department of Clinical Neuroscience Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Research Center Karolinska Institutet MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Everyone who regularly works with persons who have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has seen that their patients often struggle with school work. It is not uncommon for these individuals to have poor school attendance and severe patients can be out of the education system altogether. This applies to persons of all ages, from school children to young adults who may be at university. On the other hand there is a group of patients who, against all odds, working 10 times as hard as everybody else, manage to stay in education and eventually get a degree. So we have long suspected that OCD has a detrimental impact on the person’s education, with all the consequences that this entails (worse chances to enter the labour market and have a high paid job). But we did not really know to what extent OCD impacts education. So we wanted to know what is the actual impact of OCD on educational attainment using objectively collected information from the unique Swedish national registers. Previous work had been primarily based on small clinical samples from specialist clinics, using either self or parent report and cross-sectional designs. Previous work also tended not to control for important confounders such as psychiatric comorbidity or familial factors (genetic and environmental factors that could explain both OCD and the outcomes of interest). (more…)
Author Interviews, Cost of Health Care, Education, JAMA / 14.11.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Victoria Valencia, MPH Assistant Director for Healthcare Value Dell Medical SchoolThe University of Texas at Austin MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: We were surprised to find that despite the common anecdote that resident physicians in teaching environments order more lab tests, there was a lack of empirical data to support the claim that more lab tests are ordered for patients at teaching hospitals than at non-teaching hospitals. Our study of 43,329 patients with pneumonia or cellulitis across 96 hospitals  in the state of Texas found that major teaching hospitals order significantly more lab tests than non-teaching hospitals.  We found this to be true no matter how we looked at the data, including when restricting to the least sick patients in our dataset. We also found that major teaching hospitals that ordered more labs for pneumonia tended to also more labs for cellulitis, indicating there is some effect from the environment of the teaching hospital that affects lab ordering overall. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Heart Disease, Pediatrics / 13.11.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Young girl learning Hands-Only CPR at the American Heart Association Hands-Only CPR training kiosk at Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport. copyright American Heart Association 2017 Photos by Tommy Campbell PhotographyMimi Biswas M.D., MHSc University of California Riverside School of Medicine and Riverside Community Hospital  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: This started as  My son's science project. He wanted to make a video game to teach CPR based on a science fair website. It grew to teaching the whole 6th grade using the AHA CPR training kit alone vs adding the video game or music, staying alive, to help with compression rate.  We found that a 12 year can easily learn the basic concepts of calling for help and starting hands only CPR and they can physically perform effective CPR at this age. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Pediatrics, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 31.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Angeline Lillard PhD Professor of Psychology University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Montessori education was developed in the first half of the last century, but has been subject to little formal research. Prior research on its outcomes was problematic in using poor control groups, very small samples, demographically limited samples, a single school or classroom, or poor quality Montessori, or data from just a single time point and limited measurements. This study addressed all these issues: it collected data 4 times over 3 years from 141 children, experimental children were in 11 classrooms at 2 high quality Montessori schools at which the control children were waitlisted and admission was done by a randomized lottery, family income ranged from $0-200K, groups were demographically equivalent at the start of the study, and many measures were taken. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Pediatrics, Sleep Disorders / 12.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jack Peltz, Ph.D. Clinical assistant professor in Psychiatry Rochester Medical Center MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Approximately 90% of high-school aged adolescents get either insufficient sleep during school nights or barely meet the required amount of sleep (ie, 8–10 hours) expected for healthy functioning.(1) In fact, sleep problems and insufficient sleep are so pervasive for adolescents that they could be considered an epidemic due to their adverse impact on adolescent mental and physical health.(2–5) As a result,addressing insufficient adolescent sleep represents a critical point of study and intervention. The growing body of evidence suggests that later school start times (SST), 8:30 AM or later as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatricians,6 convey multiple benefits on adolescents, including improved sleep, better mental and physical health, and improved academic outcomes.(7–10) This research, however, has focused on the direct effects of delaying school start times, or specifically how moving SST back directly predicts changes in an outcome (eg, mental health, academic achievement). This type of analysis precludes examining the important role that SST might play as a condition or context under which other sleeprelated processes take place. For instance, earlier school start times might exacerbate the impact of sleep-related processes on adolescent behavioral health outcomes. Thus, incorporating school start times as a larger contextual variable that might moderate models of sleep and adolescent functioning represents a gap in the literature and a unique opportunity to advance conceptual models. Accordingly, the current study examines the moderating role of school start times on the associations between sleep hygiene, sleep quality, and mental health. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Gender Differences, Mental Health Research, Sexual Health, Social Issues / 03.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Oliver Ferlatte PhD Men's Health Research Program University of British Columbia Vancouver , British Columbia , Canada MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Suicide, like many other health inequities, is unevenly distributed among the population, with marginalized groups being most affected. In Canada, suicide has been found to particularly affect gay and bisexual men, aboriginal people and people living in rural and remote communities. While the populations affected by suicide are not mutually exclusive – for example someone can be a bisexual Aboriginal man living in a remote community – much of the suicide prevention literature tends to treat these groups as such. Moreso, very little attention is given in suicide prevention research to diversity within groups: for example, we know very little about which gay and bisexual men are most at risk of attempting suicide. This situation creates a vacuum of knowledge about suicide among gay and bisexual and deprives us of critical information for the development of effective suicide prevention activities. We therefore investigated in a survey of Canadian gay and bisexual men (Sex Now Survey), which gay and bisexual men are at increased risk of reporting a recent suicide attempt. The large sample of gay and bisexual men with 8493 participants allows for this unique analysis focused on the multiple, intersecting identities of the survey participants. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Karolinski Institute, Pediatrics, Psychological Science / 22.09.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Malin Bergström PhD Center for Health Equity Studies Karolinska Institutet   MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The increase in children who move between their parent's homes after a divorce is one of the major changes in children's life circumstances during the last decade. Spending equal amounts of time in both parents' homes means that these children move fifty times a year. Child experts have claimed this to be stressful and potentially harmful to children's attachment relations to their mothers. Especially for children this young the practice of joint physical custody has been questioned. (more…)
Author Interviews, CDC, Education, Pediatrics / 13.09.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Catherine N. Rasberry, PhD Health Scientist, Division of Adolescent and School Health CDC Atlanta MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: For many years, researchers have documented links between health-related behaviors and educational outcomes such as letter grades, test scores, and other measures of academic achievement. However, many of those studies are becoming out-of-date or have used samples that were not nationally representative. The aim of this study was to see if previous findings held in a current, national sample of high school students. Consistent with previous studies, our findings revealed that regardless of sex, race/ethnicity and grade-level, high school students who received mostly A’s, mostly B’s, or mostly C’s had higher levels of most protective health-related behaviors and lower levels of most health-related risk behaviors. For example, we found that:
  • Students who reported receiving mostly Ds and Fs, were nine times more likely than students who received mostly As to report having ever injected any illegal drugs.
  • Also, students who reported receiving mostly Ds and Fs were more than four times more likely than students who received mostly As to report that they had four or more sexual partners.
  • Conversely, students who reported receiving mostly As were twice as likely as students who received mostly Ds and Fs to report eating breakfast every day in the past week.
(more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Heart Disease / 31.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Julien Vaucher  Physician and clinical research fellow (joint first author) Department of Internal Medicine Lausanne University Hospital Lausanne, Switzerland MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Since the sixties, traditional studies have found that people who stay longer in the educational system subsequently develop less coronary heart disease. However, whether this association is causal is not clear, partly because randomised controlled trials are practically infeasible in this area. In our study, we used a genetic approach, called Mendelian randomization, that represents the next best thing to do.Based on genetic variants randomized by nature, we were able to randomize individuals according to 162 genetic markers that associate with more or less education. In other words, we used genetic markers, free from condounding factors, as proxies of education to reproduce the conditions of a trial. Then, if the genetic markers also associate together with coronary heart disease, the association between education and coronary heart disease is likely to be causal. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, JAMA, UCLA / 22.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Christian de Virgilio, MD LA BioMed lead researcher and corresponding author for the study He also is the former director of the general surgery residency program Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and the recipient of several teaching awards. MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Recent forecasts have predicted the United States will have a deficit of as many as 29,000 surgeons by 2030 because of the expected growth in the nation’s population and the aging of the Baby Boomers. This expected shortfall in surgeons has made the successful training of the next generation of surgeons even more important than it was before. Yet recent studies have shown that as many as one in five general surgery residents leave their training programs before completion to pursue other specialties. Our team of researchers studied 21 training programs for general surgeons and published our findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association Surgery (JAMA Surgery) on August 16, 2017. What we found was the attrition rate among residents training in general surgery was lower than previously determined – just 8.8% instead of 20% – in the 21 programs we surveyed. Our study also found that program directors’ attitudes and support for struggling residents and resident education were significantly different when the authors compared high- and low-attrition programs. General surgeons specialize in the most common surgical procedures, including abdominal, trauma, gastrointestinal, breast, cancer, endocrine and skin and soft tissue surgeries. General surgery residency training follows medical school and generally requires five to seven years. The programs are offered through universities, university affiliated hospitals and independent programs. In this study, the research team surveyed 12 university-based programs, three program affiliated with a university and six independent programs. In those programs, 85 of the 966 general surgery residents failed to complete their training during the five-year period the research team studied, July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2015. Of those who failed to complete their general surgery training, 15 left during the first year of training; 34 during the second year, and 36 during the third year or later. Notably, we found a nearly seven-fold difference between the training program with the lowest attrition rate, 2.2%, and the one with the highest rate, 14.3%, over the five-year period surveyed. In the programs with lower attrition rates, we found about one in five residents received some support or remediation to help ensure they would complete their https://medicalresearch.com/author-interviews/reduction_in_surgical_residents_work_hours/4475/ In the programs with higher attrition rates, the research team reported that only about one in 15 residents received such remediation. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Pediatrics, Sleep Disorders, University of Michigan / 22.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Galit Dunietz, Ph.D., MPH Epidemiologist, Sleep Disorders Center Department of Neurology University of Michigan Ann Arbor MI MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Insufficient sleep has a negative impact on health, cognition and mood and is linked to motor vehicle accidents. However, sleep loss in adolescents has become an epidemic and arises in part from biological processes that delay sleep and wake timing at the onset of puberty. This biology does not fit well with early school start times (before 8:30 a.m.). Despite recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine to delay school start times, most schools in the U.S. have current start times before 8:30 a.m. In this nationally representative study of US parents of teens, we examined whether parents supported or opposed later school start times (after 8:30 a.m.). We also examined what may have influenced their opinions. We found that only about half of surveyed parents of teens with early school start times supported later school start times. Opinions appeared to depend in part on what challenges and benefits were expected to result from the change. For example, parents who expected an improvement in their teen’s academic performance or sleep quantity tended to support the change, whereas parents that expected negative impact on afterschool activities or transportation opposed delays in school start times.  We also found that parents had misconception about sleep needs of their adolescents, as the majority perceived 7-7.5 hours of sleep as sufficient, or possibly sufficient even at this young age when 8-10 hours are typically recommended. (more…)
Author Interviews, Diabetes, Education, JAMA, Pediatrics / 16.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jane E. Harding, DPhil Liggins Institute The University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Neonatal hypoglycaemia – low blood sugars in newborns – affects up to one in six babies born. It involves a sustained dip in blood sugar levels following birth. Blood glucose is the only fuel for babies’ brains (adults have alternative, back-up sources). So, if left untreated, this condition can cause developmental brain damage and lowered education outcomes later in life. In developed economies, as many as a third of babies born are at risk. Risk factors include being born smaller or larger than usual, preterm babies and babies whose mothers have any form of diabetes – this last a growing group, with the rising incidence of gestational (pregnancy-related) diabetes. We wanted to systematically track a cohort of babies to see if hypoglycaemia in babies affects their long-term health and development. So we designed the CHYLD study – Children with Hypoglycaemia and their Later Development. We are following 614 New Zealand babies born at risk of low blood sugar levels (neonatal hypoglycemia) into childhood to see if the condition affects their later growth and development. Our team includes researchers from the Liggins Institute, the University of Auckland, Waikato Hospital, the University of Canterbury and the University of Waterloo. Half of the babies in the study were diagnosed with, and treated for low blood sugars. Seventy percent received extra, continuous monitoring of their blood sugar levels, which detected in some babies low levels that were not diagnosed by the heel-prick tests. (more…)