Social Issues
06 Mar Sense of Purpose in Life Reduces Cardiovascular Risk
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Randy Cohen, MD, MS, FACC
Division of Cardiology
Mt. Sinai St. Luke's Hospital
New York, NY
MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study?
Dr. Cohen: Psychosocial conditions such as depression, anxiety, chronic stress and social isolation have strong associations with heart disease and mortality. Recently, however, attention has focused on positive emotions, psychological health and their collective impact on overall health and well-being. Purpose in life is considered a basic psychological need, and has been defined as a sense of meaning and direction in one’s life which gives the feeling that life is worth living. We performed a meta-analysis of prospective studies evaluating the relationship between having a sense of purpose in life, mortality and cardiovascular disease.
MedicalResearch: What are the main findings?
Dr. Cohen: We identified 10 prospective studies involving over 137,000 subjects and found that possessing a sense of purpose in life was associated with a 23% reduced risk for all-cause mortality and a 19% reduced risk for cardiovascular disease events.
01 Mar Significant Repercussions When Spouse Stops Driving
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Angela L. Curl PhD MSW
School of Social Work
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO
MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Curl: Often people think of stopping driving as just effecting one person: the person who stops driving. In reality, for married couples driving cessation affects both spouses. Using longitudinal data (1998-2010) from 1,457 married couples participating in the Health and Retirement Study, we found that husbands and wives who are no longer able to drive are less likely to work, and less likely to engage in formal volunteering (for charitable organizations) and informal volunteering (helping friends and neighbors not-for-pay). Having a spouse in the household who is still able to drive does reduce these negative consequences a little, but not entirely. Furthermore, the spouse who continues to drive is also less likely to continue working or volunteering following the driving cessation of their partner, presumably because he/she is providing transportation or social support to the non-driver.
13 Feb Science Can Help You With Your On-line Dating
MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Professor Khalid Khan Women's Health Research Unit Multi-disciplinary Evidence Synthesis Hub The Blizard Institute Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Prof. Khan: My co-author talked me into helping him with his online dating and so we embarked on this project. We were fascinated to see if there was any scientific evidence which could help people in their online pursuit of love - and to our surprise there was lots of attraction and persuasion research. There were 86 published studies on attraction and persuasion which met our criteria, and these covered literature in psychology, sociology, and computer behavioural and neurocognitive sciences. Their design features included randomisation in 28 studies, cohort follow-up in 13 studies, cross-sectional evaluation in 37 studies, qualitative analysis in 5 studies and systematic review in 3 studies. We found that Success in converting initial online contact to a first date is not a complex formula. It relates to simple factors such as a fluent headline, truthfulness of profile, and reciprocity in communication. Just like when you meet someone in real life, simple actions such as showing interest in the other person (commenting on something in their profile rather than just talking about yourself) goes a long way.07 Feb Study Addresses Health Insurance Needs of Homeless Young Adults
MedicalResearch.com
Hailey Winetrobe, MPH, CHES
Project Manager
NIDA Transitions to Housing Study
School of Social Work
University of Southern California
MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Homeless young adults are a very vulnerable population with high healthcare needs. However, because of their housing instability and very low income, many homeless young adults may not have health insurance and/or access to healthcare services. Prior research regarding this population’s health insurance coverage was mostly outdated. Additionally, with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), homeless young adults may now qualify for health insurance coverage (i.e., if there is a relationship, by being a dependent on their parent’s health insurance until 26 years old; and via Medicaid expansion in states choosing to expand). As such, this study aimed to update homeless young adults’ rates of health insurance coverage prior to the full implementation of the ACA (i.e., before Medicaid expansion) and to determine if there was an association between insurance and use of healthcare services.
We found that 70% of homeless young adults did not have health insurance in the prior year. Of those with health insurance, 46% reported coverage through their parents, and 34% through Medicaid (not mutually exclusive). Over half (52%) of the sample received healthcare in the prior year. Furthermore, in a multivariable logistic regression model controlling for demographic characteristics, homeless young adults with health insurance, compared to their peers who did not have health insurance, had 11 times the odds of receiving healthcare in the prior year.
21 Jan Tool Helps Chronic Kidney Disease Patients Make Dialysis Decisions
MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Suma Prakash MD, MSc, FRCPC Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology Case Western Reserve University MetroHealth Medical Center Cleveland, Ohio Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Prakash: Patients with advanced chronic kidney disease are often faced with difficult decisions of having to choose between options to replace their kidney function. Many patients may not be ready to make treatment decisions since most people don’t want to need a chronic medical treatment. The behavioural stage of change model originally used to help people with smoking cessation has been used to help patients make decisions about self-care with diabetes and undergo cancer screening. It has not been studied in patients with chronic kidney disease. As patients progress through the stages, they are more ready to make decisions. Focusing on better understanding the decision making process from patients’ perspectives allows us as medical professionals to help patients make timely decision about their options.20 Jan Aggressive Behaviors in Preschool Children Linked To Later Conduct Disorders
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Ji Su Hong, MD
Department of Psychiatry
Washington University School of Medicine St. Louis, MO
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Ji Su Hong: The estimated prevalence of preschool conduct disorder is 3.9%-6.6%. Approximately 1 out of 20 preschoolers has conduct disorder. Disruptive behaviors are common in the preschool period of development. However, to date we have not had scientific data to help guide clinicians to distinguish between normal disruptive behaviors in preschoolers and behaviors that are markers of later Conduct disorder at school age.
There were common misbehaviors which were found in preschoolers with mental health problems as well as healthy preschoolers. Those were losing temper, low intensity destruction of property and deceitfulness/stealing.
Preschoolers who exhibited high-intensity defiant behavior, aggression toward people or animals, high-intensity destruction of property, peer problems and deceitfulness, including stealing, were more likely to have preschool conduct disorder and they were more likely to be diagnosed with a conduct disorder at school-age.
12 Jan Socioeconomic Status Affects Long Term Childhood Leukemia Survival
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Professor Eleni Petridou
Preventive Medicine & Epidemiology, Department of Hygiene
Epidemiology and Medical Statistics,
Athens University Medical School Athens Greece
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Prof. Petridou: Impressive gains in survival from childhood leukemia have been achieved during the last decades mainly on account of advancements in treatment of the disease. Yet, these big improvements do not seem to be equally shared by all sick children. Disparities in the survival of children suffering leukemia who live in high versus low-income countries, as well as among different racial groups pointed to socio-economic status (SES) of the family as a factor that might adversely affect the outcome. SES, however, is a multifaceted variable comprising economic, social and professional components, which cannot be easily assessed. Therefore, an array of area of residence- and individual family- based proxy indices have been used in order to investigate the association between SES and overall or event-free survival from childhood leukemia. We have intensively searched for published articles around the globe and also analyzed primary data kindly provided by the US National Cancer Institute Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Program (SEER) for the period 1973-2010 as well as the Nationwide Registry for Childhood Hematological Malignancies (NARECHEM) in Greece for the period 1996-2011. This study is the first meta-analysis summing up the findings of 29 individual studies and quantifying the adverse effect in the survival due to SES differentials among 60 000 afflicted children. According to the findings, lower socio-economic status children suffering, at least, the more common Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) type have nearly two fold higher death rates compared to those of high socio-economic status. Of note, the SEER data show that the survival gap was wider in the USA with increased risk of death from ALL in the lower SES children (by 20-82%) and widening during the last 40 years time period.
31 Jul Civilian Stress Linked To Problem Drinking In Military
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Magdalena Cerdá, DrPH MPH
Assistant Professor, Department of Epidemiology
Mailman School of Public Health
Columbia University
New York, NY 10032-3727
Medical Research: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Cerdá: We evaluated 1,095 Ohio National Guard soldiers, who had primarily served in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2008 and 2009 to determine the effect of civilian stressors and deployment-related traumatic events and stressors on post-deployment alcohol use disorder.
Participants were interviewed three times over 3 years about alcohol use disorder, exposure to deployment-related traumatic events like land mines, vehicle crashes, taking enemy fire, and witnessing casualties, and about experiences of civilian life setbacks since returning from duty, including job loss, legal problems, divorce, and serious financial and legal problems.
We found that having at least one civilian stressor or a reported incident of sexual harassment during deployment raised the odds of alcohol use disorders. In contrast, combat-related traumatic events were only marginally associated with alcohol problems.
26 Jul Child–Parent Resemblance in Body Weight Weaker in Minorities
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Qi Zhang, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
School of Community and Environmental Health
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA
Medical Research: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Zhang: This study found the child-parent resemblance in body weight status varied by socio-demographics in the U.S. In short, the resemblance in BMI is weaker in minorities, older children and lower socioeconomic groups.
14 Apr Traumatic Stress Effects In Early Life Can Be Transmitted To Offspring
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Prof Dr Isabelle Mansuy
Lab of Neuroepigenetics
University/ETH Zürich
Brain Research Institute
Zürich Switzerland
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Prof. Mansuy: The mains findings are that the transmission of the effects of traumatic stress in early life involves small non-coding RNAs in sperm. The study shows that some microRNAs are in excess in the sperm of adult males subjected to trauma during early postnatal life, but are also altered in the brain and in blood, and that these alterations are associated with behavioral and metabolic symptoms including depressive behaviors, reduced risk assessment and altered glucose/insulin metabolism. Injecting sperm RNA in fertilized oocytes reproduces these symptoms and confirm that RNA are the responsible factors.
11 Apr Poor Urban Dwellers At Greater Risk of Contracting, Dying from AIDS
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Amy Nunn, ScD, MS
Assistant professor (research) of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Brown University School of Public Health
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Answer: The main findings are that people living in poor, mostly-minority urban neighborhoods, where health resources such as HIV testing and linkages to care are often lacking, are at a greater risk of contracting HIV and dying of AIDS. This is not because of differences in behavior. It's because they live in medically underserved areas where HIV incidence is very high and fewer people know their status. Fewer people knowing their status means fewer people on treatment. Fewer people on treatment means it's easier for people to come into contact with the virus, even if they don't engage in any higher risk behavior.
In the paper, my colleagues and I call for increasing the focus of public health efforts on these neighborhoods where the epidemic is concentrated and contributing heavily to racial and economic disparities in AIDS mortality.
09 Apr Indoor Tanning and Eating Disorders Linked in Adolescents
MedicalResearch.com Interview with Stephen M. Amrock, SM Department of Pediatrics New York University School of Medicine New York, NY 10016 MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study? Answer: We analyzed data from a nationally representative survey on youth risk behaviors. After adjusting for other risk taking behaviors, we found that high school adolescents who indoor tan were much more likely to also engage in behaviors typically associated with eating disorders. We also noted that the link between indoor tanning and such harmful weight control behaviors was even stronger among males than females.25 Mar Post-Stroke: What Makes Family Caregivers Happy?
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Jill Cameron, PhD
CIHR New Investigator, Associate Professor,
Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy
Graduate Department of Rehabilitation Science
Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto
Adjunct Scientist, UHN-Toronto Rehabilitation Institute
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Cameron: In our study with 399 stroke survivor, caregiver dyads, caregivers reported more psychological wellbeing when they provided more assistance to stroke survivors who had fewer symptoms of depression, better cognitive functioning, and who had more severe strokes. In addition, caregivers who maintained participation in valued activities, had more mastery, gained personally providing care, were in better physical health, and were older reported more psychological wellbeing.
10 Oct It’s Not Just Politics: People with Extreme Attitudes are Inordinately Convinced They Are Right
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Kaitlin Toner, Ph.D.
Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment
Vanderbilt Climate Change Research Network
Nashville, TN 37240
Dr. Kaitlin Toner, is a postdoctoral researcher at Vanderbilt University.
The study was conducted colleagues Mark Leary, Michael Asher, and Katrina Jongman-Sereno while Dr. Toner was a graduate student at Duke University.
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Toner: The take home message is that people who hold more extreme attitudes also tend to feel superior about those attitudes, whereas people with moderate attitudes aren't as convinced of the superiority of their own beliefs. Although it might seem that this connection between attitude extremity and superiority seems reasonable, there’s no logical reason why people who hold moderate, middle-of-the-road attitudes should not think that their moderate attitudes are superior to other people’s. But they don’t tend to do that; it’s the people with extreme attitudes who are inordinately convinced that they are right.
These findings are important because it sheds some light on how people become so polarized in their opinions: they don't just take a side, but they believe everyone who disagrees with that view must be wrong. Importantly, it's not just one political party who thinks this way, as previous research had suggested, but rather that it happens for both liberal and conservative attitudes. And, given the stalemate in Washington, understanding why people become so entrenched in their views – even when there is often not an objectively correct answer – is more important than ever.
10 Oct More Fatalities Mean More Donors and Bigger Donations
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Ioannis Evangelidis, Ph.D. candidate
Department of Marketing Management,
Rotterdam School of Management
Erasmus University, Rotterdam
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Answer: We find that donors pay more attention to the number of people killed when donating to a disaster, than to the number of people who are affected (survive but need money). In other words, people are more likely to donate, and donate more money, the more people die in a disaster, but not when more people survive and need assistance.
09 Oct Teenagers: What are the Psychosocial Problems if Parent has Cancer?
Posted at 13:47h
in Author Interviews, Cancer Research, Mental Health Research, Pediatrics, Social Issues
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Elisabeth Jeppesen MPH, PhD-fellow
National Resource Center for Late Effects after Cancer Treatment, Department of Oncology, Oslo University, Hospital, The Norwegian Radiumhospitalet, Oslo, Norway
mobil +47 951 05271
Wisit: Ullernchaussen 70 (Radiumhospitalet)
www.oslo-universitetssykehus.no
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background of this study?
Answer: Each year a considerable number of parents with children younger than 18 years of age are affected by cancer in a parent. Cancer in one of the parents might represent a potentially traumatic event and thereby may be a risk factor for psychosocial problems in the offspring. So far, teenagers’ psychosocial responses to parental cancer have only been studied to a limited extent in controlled trials. Using a trauma theory perspective many studies have shown significant direct associations between parental cancer and psychosocial problems in teenagers. However, the literature also indicates that most children and teenagers have normal stress reactions to such events. In order to identify the need for eventual prevention and intervention among teenagers exposed to such a stressor, we need more empirical knowledge of their psychosocial situation.
18 Sep Social Isolation Linked to Mortality
MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Matthew S. Pantell, MD, MS Department of Pediatrics University of California, San Francisco MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study? Dr. Pantell: First of all, our study confirms the strong association between social isolation and mortality in a nationally representative sample from the US. Furthermore, it shows that, within the same national sample, social isolation is a similarly strong predictor of mortality as compared to smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. Examining individual components of social isolation, our study shows that, among both women and men, not living with a partner and not participating in religious activities frequently are strong individual predictors of mortality. Finally, our work shows that infrequent social contact is associated with mortality among women, and not participating in social clubs/organizations is associated with mortality among men.05 Sep Your Blood Pressure Affected by Spouse’s Social Network
Posted at 10:46h
in Author Interviews, Blood Pressure - Hypertension, Brigham & Women's - Harvard, Medical Research Centers, PLoS, Social Issues
MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Bert Uchino PhD
Department of Psychology and Health Psychology Program
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah,
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Uchino: The main findings from our paper is that independent of one’s own social network quality, the quality of a spouse’s social network was related to daily life ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) levels. More specifically, the more supportive (positive) ties, and the less aversive (negative) or ambivalent (both positive and negative) ties in a spouse’s social network, the lower was one’s own ABP. In addition, looking at the social networks of couples as a whole showed that couples who combined had more supportive ties and less aversive or ambivalent ties showed lower ABP.
03 Sep HIV Prevention: Using Social Networking
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Sean D. Young, PhD, MS
Assistant Professor In-Residence Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine Department of Family Medicine University of California, Los Angeles
Dr. Young: Here's the main take-home point:
There is a lot of excitement about the possibility of using technologies, big data, and mHealth to improve health outcomes and change behavior. However,
1) little work has been done on this topic using sound research methods (for example, studies have asked people to report whether a technology changed behavior rather than objectively measuring whether it actually changed behavior.
05 Jun Welfare Reform, Welfare Time Limits and Mortality
MedicalResearch.com eInterview with:
Peter Muennig, MD, MPH
Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management
Columbia University School of Public Health
NY City, NY
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Answer: We find that one of the welfare time limit experiments that led to welfare reform in the United States in 1996 led to increases in mortality rates among experimental group participants over 14-15 years of follow up.
MedicalResearch.com: Were any of the findings unexpected?
Answer: Yes. Welfare reform led to increases in employment among the experimental group participants. Employment has long been hypothesized to reduce mortality. We examined this experiment to explore whether increases in employment among those exposed to time limits on welfare reduced mortality. We found instead they increased mortality.