Publications by authors named "Ashley Isaia"

X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) is a rare inherited neurological disorder that poses considerable challenges for clinical management throughout the lifespan. Although males are generally more severely affected than females, the time course and presentation of clinical symptoms are otherwise difficult to predict. Opportunities to improve outcomes for individuals with ALD are rapidly expanding due to the introduction of newborn screening programs for this condition and an evolving treatment landscape.

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Differences in how individuals navigate and interact with physical space have clear implications for when and where they are exposed to environmental characteristics. To address this reality, we propose and test a novel method with a sample of Chicago adolescents that links individual GPS coordinates with locations of environmental characteristics as a strategy to increase precision in the measurement of environmental exposures. We use exposure to violent crime as an example and link the GPS coordinates of 51 youth collected over a one-week period during the summer of 2016 to locations and times of violent crime.

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While early exposure to poverty has been linked to decrements in children's behavior through underlying pathways of parenting stress and depression, extant research has typically relied on the use of objective measures of socioeconomic status (SES) to test these associations. However, children's development may be shaped by the ways that parents perceive social class, which may operate independently and differentially from objective SES. Using structural equation modeling, the present study explores relationships between parents' ratings of subjective social status (SSS), objective indicators of SES (income-to-needs ratio, education, employment status), and young children's (ages 0-3) behavior problems among 173 low-income families living in an urban area in the northeast United States.

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Background: Accurate assessment of pediatric bipolar disorder (BD) is important for allocating appropriate treatment, but it is complicated by significant heterogeneity in symptom presentation and high rates of comorbidity. Investigating clinical subtypes of the disorder may help to clarify diagnostic boundaries and inform targeted treatment. This study used a full diagnostic instrument to examine symptom patterns among youth with BD.

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Objectives Encouraging key parenting behaviors in early infancy may help decrease income-related developmental disparities. In this study we assessed whether a brief, primary care-based program (Sit Down and Play; SDP) could be successful in impacting key parenting behaviors that promote early childhood development. Methods An ethnically diverse group of predominantly low-income caregivers of children 2-6 months of age were enrolled, interviewed, and randomized to intervention (n = 20) or control (n = 20) groups.

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We tested whether analogical training could help children learn a key principle of elementary engineering-namely, the use of a diagonal brace to stabilize a structure. The context for this learning was a construction activity at the Chicago Children's Museum, in which children and their families build a model skyscraper together. The results indicate that even a single brief analogical comparison can confer insight.

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Childhood and adolescent adversity is of great interest in relation to risk for psychopathology, and interview measures of adversity are thought to be more reliable and valid than their questionnaire counterparts. One interview measure, the Childhood Trauma Interview (CTI; Fink et al., 1995), has been positively evaluated relative to similar measures, but there are some psychometric limitations to an existing scoring approach that limit the full potential of this measure.

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