Author Interviews, BMJ, Pediatrics, Social Issues / 22.11.2016
Involved Fathers Have Positive Impact on Pre-Adolescent Children
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
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Dr. Charles Opondo[/caption]
Charles Opondo, BPharm MSc PhD.
Researcher in Statistics and Epidemiology
National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit
Nuffield Department of Population Health
University of Oxford
Oxford
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Our study measured fathers’ involvement in their child’s upbringing in infancy by looking at their emotional response to their child (e.g. feeling confident with the child, making a strong bond with the child), how involved they were in childcare (e.g. changing nappies, playing, night feeding, and also general care tasks around the house such as meal preparation) and their feelings of being a secure in their role as a parent (e.g. feeling included by mother in childcare, not feeling inexperienced with children).
We found that the children of fathers who scored highly in terms of their emotional response and feeling like a secure parent were less likely to have symptoms of behavioural problems when they were 9 or 11 years.
However, fathers being more involved in direct childcare did not seem to affect the child’s risk of having later behavioural problems.
Dr. Charles Opondo[/caption]
Charles Opondo, BPharm MSc PhD.
Researcher in Statistics and Epidemiology
National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit
Nuffield Department of Population Health
University of Oxford
Oxford
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Our study measured fathers’ involvement in their child’s upbringing in infancy by looking at their emotional response to their child (e.g. feeling confident with the child, making a strong bond with the child), how involved they were in childcare (e.g. changing nappies, playing, night feeding, and also general care tasks around the house such as meal preparation) and their feelings of being a secure in their role as a parent (e.g. feeling included by mother in childcare, not feeling inexperienced with children).
We found that the children of fathers who scored highly in terms of their emotional response and feeling like a secure parent were less likely to have symptoms of behavioural problems when they were 9 or 11 years.
However, fathers being more involved in direct childcare did not seem to affect the child’s risk of having later behavioural problems.
Ghenet Besera[/caption]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Ghenet Besera, MPH
National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion
CDC
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: The Title X program, established in 1970, offers confidential family planning and related preventive services to both men and women. While most clients are women, Title X also promotes use of services by men through delivery of male-focused services. Men’s family planning needs include services not only related to contraception, but also related to preconception care, infertility, and STD/ HIV services, which affect their reproductive health and overall health.
Dr. Kelli Komro[/caption]
Kelli A. Komro, MPH, PhD, Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
Behavioral Sciences and Health Education
Jointly Appointed, Epidemiology
Rollins School of Public Health
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Dr. Komro: Epidemiologists have done a thorough job describing the income-health gradient, which shows a clear association between income and health. That is, as income increases, exposure to health risks and premature mortality decreases. Each step down on the income ladder decreases one’s health for many reasons related to material resources, physical environment exposures and social circumstances.
The income to health association begins at birth, and more than one in four women giving birth in the U.S. are below the poverty level, putting nearly 1 million babies at risk each year. Low-income mothers are more likely to give birth prematurely, to have low birth weight babies, and to suffer the death of their infant during the post-neonatal period (28 to 364 days old).
Given the importance of the income-health gradient, we set out to test the health effects of policies that are designed to increase economic security among low-income families. Our main question is: Do policies designed to reduce poverty and improve family economic security also improve health?
One relevant policy is minimum wage laws. A federal minimum wage was first enacted in 1938. The real value (in 2015 dollars) of the federal minimum wage reached a high of $10.85 in 1968. The current federal rate is $7.25. Many cities and states have passed minimum wage laws that are higher than the federal rate, and currently there is a range of minimum wage increases under active public and policymaker discussion.
Given that some states pass minimum wage standards and others do not, and that laws within states change over time, we took advantage of all the changes that have occurred to design a natural experiment. Our natural experiment examined the effects of state minimum wage laws on infant health.
Dr Robb Rutledge[/caption]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr Robb Rutledge
UCL Institute of Neurology and
Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research
University College London
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Rutledge: As we get older, dopamine levels in the brain gradually decline.
Dopamine has long been associated with risk taking and we have
recently found that it is related specifically to how willing people
are to take risks for potential rewards. It is widely believed that
older people are risk averse, but this is controversial, and it is
unknown whether age-related changes in dopamine are responsible for
changes in risk taking. In this study, we tested over 25,000 people
using a smartphone app called The Great Brain Experiment where players
tried to win as many points as they could by choosing between safe and
risky options. We found that older people were less willing to takes
risks for potential rewards than young people, the same situations
dopamine is known to be involved in.
Dr. Zhenmei Zhang[/caption]
Zhenmei Zhang, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI48824
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Dr. Zhang: Blacks are especially hard hit by cognitive impairment and dementia. Recent estimates of dementia prevalence and incidence were substantially higher for blacks than whites. Reducing racial/ethnic disparities in dementia has been identified as a national priority by the National Alzheimer’s Project Act, which was signed into law by President Obama in 2011. So I really want to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the origins and pathways through which racial disparities in cognitive impairment is produced. If we have a better understanding of the factors contributing to racial disparities in cognitive impairment in later life, more effective interventions can be conducted to reduce the racial disparities.
Dr. Jill Cameron[/caption]
Jill Cameron, PhD
Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator
Associate Professor,
Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy
Rehabilitation Sciences Institute
Faculty of Medicine,
University of Toronto
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Cameron: In the world of critical illness, a lot of research has focused on helping people to survive – and now that more people are surviving, we need to ask ourselves, what does quality of life and wellbeing look like afterwards for both patients and caregivers? The aim of our research was to identify factors associated with family caregiver health and wellbeing during the first year after patients were discharged from the Intensive Care Unit. We examined factors related to the patient and their functional wellbeing, the caregiving situation including the impact it has on caregivers everyday lives, and caregiver including their sense of control over their lives and available social support. We used Pearlin’s Caregiving Stress Process model to guide this research.
From 2007-2014, caregivers of patients who received seven or more days of mechanical ventilation in an ICU across 10 Canadian university-affiliated hospitals were given self-administered questionnaires to assess caregiver and patient characteristics, caregiver depression symptoms, psychological wellbeing, and health-related quality of life. Assessments occurred seven days and three, six and 12-months after ICU discharge.
The study found that most caregivers reported high levels of depression symptoms, which commonly persisted up to one year and did not improve in some. Caregiver sense of control, impact on caregivers’ everyday lives, and social support had the largest relationships with the outcomes. Caregivers’ experienced better health outcomes when they were older, caring for a spouse, had higher income, better social support, sense of control, and caregiving had less of a negative impact on their everyday lives. No patient characteristics or indicators of illness severity were associated with caregiver outcomes.
Poor caregiver outcomes may compromise patients’ rehabilitation potential and sustainability of home care. Identifying risk factors for caregiver distress is an important first step to prevent more suffering and allow ICU survivors and caregivers to regain active and fulfilling lives.
Dr. Tyler VanderWeele[/caption]
Dr. Tyler VanderWeele PhD
Professor of Epidemiology
Department of Epidemiology
Department of Biostatistics
Harvard T. H. Chan
School of Public Health
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. VanderWeele: There have been some prior studies on religious service attendance and mortality. Many of these have been criticized for poor methodology including the possibility of reverse causation – that only those who are healthy can attend services, so that attendance isn’t necessarily influencing health. We tried to address some of these criticisms with better methodology. We used repeated measures of attendance and health over time to address this, and a very large sample, and controlled for an extensive range of common causes of religious service attendance and health. This was arguably the strongest study on the topic to date and addressed many of the methodological critiques of prior literature. We found that compared with women who never attended religious services, women who attended more than once per week had 33% lower mortality risk during the study period. Those who attended weekly had 26% lower risk and those who attended less than once a week had 13% lower risk.
Dr. Erica Spatz[/caption]
Erica Spatz, MD, MHS
Assistant Professor, Section of Cardiovascular Medicine
Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation
Yale University School of Medicine/Yale-New Haven Hospital
New Haven, CT 06520
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Spatz: Rates of heart attack have declined during the last 15 years. But whether communities of different economic status or in different geographic regions experienced similar declines is unknown, especially as efforts to prevent cardiovascular disease and manage heart attacks may not have been equally successful in communities with different resource capacity.
Our study shows that trends in the incidence of and mortality from heart attack were similar in low, average and high income communities. However, low-income communities had higher hospitalization rates than average and high income communities throughout the 15 year study period. Interestingly mortality rates were similar.
Dr. Joan Luby[/caption]
