Development of a Cohort Analytics Tool for Monitoring Progression Patterns in Cardiovascular Diseases: Advanced Stochastic Modeling Approach.

Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death worldwide. CVDs are chronic, with complex progression patterns involving episodes of comorbidities and multimorbidities. When dealing with chronic diseases, physicians often adopt a "watchful waiting" strategy, and actions are postponed until information is available.

'Walk Buds': A walking intervention to increase physical activity, physical fitness, and emotional wellbeing, in 9-13 year old children with intellectual disabilities. Results of a clustered randomised feasibility trial.

Background: Children with intellectual disability are less physically active and more sedentary than typically developing peers. To date no studies have tested the feasibility of a school-based walking intervention for children with Intellectual Disability.

Method: A clustered randomised controlled trial (cRCT), with an embedded process evaluation, was used to test the feasibility of a school-based walking intervention.

Impact of redefining statistical significance on P-hacking and false positive rates: An agent-based model.

In recent years, concern has grown about the inappropriate application and interpretation of P values, especially the use of P<0.05 to denote "statistical significance" and the practice of P-hacking to produce results below this threshold and selectively reporting these in publications. Such behavior is said to be a major contributor to the large number of false and non-reproducible discoveries found in academic journals.

'Walk Buds': A walking programme to increase physical activity, physical fitness and emotional wellbeing, in 9-13 yr old children with intellectual disability. A study protocol for a clustered RCT.

Background: Young people with intellectual disabilities are traditionally less physically fit compared to their non-disabled peers. While the health benefits of increasing physical activity are evident, there remains a lack of evidence on how to increase physical activity and reduce sedentary behaviour in young people with intellectual disabilities. Walking interventions, including those delivered in school settings, have been found to significantly increase physical activity levels of young people without disabilities.

The academic journey of students with specific learning difficulties undertaking pre-registration nursing programmes in the UK: A retrospective cohort study.

Background: The prevalence of nursing students with specific learning difficulties enrolled on pre-registration nursing programmes and the impact that this diagnosis has on their programme outcomes are currently unknown.

Objectives: The aim of this paper is to report on data that explored and compared the academic journey of students with and without learning difficulties on pre-registration nursing degree programmes.

Design: A retrospective cohort design.

Barriers and facilitators of physical activity in adolescents with intellectual disabilities: An analysis informed by the COM-B model.

Background: Adolescents with intellectual disabilities are insufficiently physically active. Where interventions have been developed and delivered, these have had limited effectiveness, and often lack a theoretical underpinning.

Aim: Through application of the COM-B model, our aim is to explore the factors influencing adolescent physical activity within schools.

An exploration of the predictive validity of selection criteria on progress outcomes for pre-registration nursing programmes-A systematic review.

Aim: To identify the selection methods currently being used for pre-registration nursing programmes and to assess the predictive power that these methods have on students' success.

Background: Research into selection methods in nursing education is beginning to emerge, yet it is unclear which methods are most predictive of students' success.

Design: A systematic review of the literature.

Political economy of renewable resource federalism.

The authority to manage natural capital often follows political boundaries rather than ecological. This mismatch can lead to unsustainable outcomes, as spillovers from one management area to the next may create adverse incentives for local decision making, even within a single country. At the same time, one-size-fits-all approaches of federal (centralized) authority can fail to respond to state (decentralized) heterogeneity and can result in inefficient economic or detrimental ecological outcomes.

Reducing training frequency from 3 or 4 sessions/week to 2 sessions/week does not attenuate improvements in maximal aerobic capacity with reduced-exertion high-intensity interval training (REHIT).

In the present randomised-controlled trial we investigated the effect of reduced-exertion high-intensity interval training (REHIT) training frequency (2, 3, or 4 sessions/week for 6 weeks) on maximal aerobic capacity in 42 inactive individuals (13 women; mean ± SD age: 25 ± 5 years, maximal aerobic capacity: 35 ± 5 mL·kg·min). Changes in maximal aerobic capacity were not significantly different between the 3 groups (2 sessions/week: +10.2%; 3 sessions/week: +8.

The effect of sport for LIFE: all island in children from low socio-economic status: a clustered randomized controlled trial.

Background: School-based interventions offer the opportunity to increase physical activity, health-related quality of life (HRQOL) and nutritional behaviours, yet methodological limitations hinder current research, particularly among under-represented children from low socio-economic status (SES). The aim was to determine the effect of a 12-week physical activity programme, Sport for LIFE: All Island (SFL:AI), on physical activity levels, HRQOL, and nutritional attitudes and behaviours in children of low SES across the island of Ireland.

Methods: A 2 (groups) × 4 (data collection points) clustered randomised controlled trial was conducted comprising an intervention group who received SFL:AI for 12 weeks, and a waiting-list control condition.

Every Minute Counts: Patterns and Times of Physical Activity Participation in Children From Socially Disadvantaged Areas in Ireland.

: The purpose of this study was to investigate daily physical activity (PA) patterns of 8- to 9-year-old Irish children from socially disadvantaged areas. : Children (N = 408) were asked to wear an ActiGraph accelerometer for a minimum of 4 days. Based on mean daily moderate- to vigorous-intensity PA accumulation, participants were grouped into sex-specific quartiles (Q4, most active; Q1, least active).

Anticipated Task Difficulty Provokes Pace Conservation and Slower Running Performance.

Purpose: Models of self-paced endurance performance suggest that accurate knowledge of the exercise end-point influences pace-related decision making. No studies have examined the effects of anticipated task difficulty during equidistant endurance activities. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of anticipated task difficulty on pacing, psychological, and physiological responses during running time trials.

Extremely short duration interval exercise improves 24-h glycaemia in men with type 2 diabetes.

Purpose: Reduced-exertion high-intensity interval training (REHIT) is a genuinely time-efficient exercise intervention that improves aerobic capacity and blood pressure in men with type 2 diabetes. However, the acute effects of REHIT on 24-h glycaemia have not been examined.

Methods: 11 men with type 2 diabetes (mean ± SD: age, 52 ± 6 years; BMI, 29.

Decreasing sprint duration from 20 to 10 s during reduced-exertion high-intensity interval training (REHIT) attenuates the increase in maximal aerobic capacity but has no effect on affective and perceptual responses.

Recent studies have demonstrated that modifying the "classic" 6 × 30-s "all-out" sprint interval training protocol by incorporating either shorter sprints (6 × 10-s or 15-s sprints) or fewer sprints (e.g., 2 × 20-s sprints; reduced-exertion high-intensity interval training (REHIT)) does not attenuate the training-induced improvements in maximal aerobic capacity.

Testing the psychometric properties of Kidscreen-27 with Irish children of low socio-economic status.

Background: Kidscreen-27 was developed as part of a cross-cultural European Union-funded project to standardise the measurement of children's health-related quality of life. Yet, research has reported mixed evidence for the hypothesised 5-factor model, and no confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) has been conducted on the instrument with children of low socio-economic status (SES) across Ireland (Northern and Republic).

Method: The data for this study were collected as part of a clustered randomised controlled trial.

On the Effectiveness of Social Norms Intervention in College Drinking: The Roles of Identity Verification and Peer Influence.

Background: The application of social norms theory in the study of college drinking centers on the ideas that incorrect perceptions of drinking norms encourage problematic drinking behavior and that correcting misperceptions can mitigate problems. The design and execution of social norms interventions can be improved with a deeper understanding of causal mechanisms connecting misperception to drinking behavior.

Methods: We develop an agent-based computational simulation that uses identity control theory and peer influence (PI) to model interactions that affect drinking.

Parameter Estimation for Gene Regulatory Networks from Microarray Data: Cold Shock Response in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

We investigated the dynamics of a gene regulatory network controlling the cold shock response in budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The medium-scale network, derived from published genome-wide location data, consists of 21 transcription factors that regulate one another through 31 directed edges. The expression levels of the individual transcription factors were modeled using mass balance ordinary differential equations with a sigmoidal production function.

Habitat specialization in tropical continental shelf demersal fish assemblages.

The implications of shallow water impacts such as fishing and climate change on fish assemblages are generally considered in isolation from the distribution and abundance of these fish assemblages in adjacent deeper waters. We investigate the abundance and length of demersal fish assemblages across a section of tropical continental shelf at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia, to identify fish and fish habitat relationships across steep gradients in depth and in different benthic habitat types. The assemblage composition of demersal fish were assessed from baited remote underwater stereo-video samples (n = 304) collected from 16 depth and habitat combinations.

Forecasting the effect of the Amethyst initiative on college drinking.

Background: A number of college presidents have endorsed the Amethyst Initiative, a call to consider lowering the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA). Our objective is to forecast the effect of the Amethyst Initiative on college drinking.

Methods: A system model of college drinking simulates MLDA changes through (i) a decrease in heavy episodic drinking (HED) because of the lower likelihood of students drinking in unsupervised settings where they model irresponsible drinking (misperception), and (ii) an increase in overall drinking among currently underage students because of increased social availability of alcohol (wetness).

Heavy episodic drinking on college campuses: does changing the legal drinking age make a difference?

Objective: This article extends the compartmental model previously developed by Scribner et al. in the context of college drinking to a mathematical model of the consequences of lowering the legal drinking age.

Method: Using data available from 32 U.

Ecosystem Modeling of College Drinking: Parameter Estimation and Comparing Models to Data.

Recently we developed a model composed of five impulsive differential equations that describes the changes in drinking patterns (that persist at epidemic level) amongst college students. Many of the model parameters cannot be measured directly from data; thus, an inverse problem approach, which chooses the set of parameters that results in the "best" model to data fit, is crucial for using this model as a predictive tool. The purpose of this paper is to present the procedure and results of an unconventional approach to parameter estimation that we developed after more common approaches were unsuccessful for our specific problem.

A systems approach to college drinking: development of a deterministic model for testing alcohol control policies.

Objective: The misuse and abuse of alcohol among college students remain persistent problems. Using a systems approach to understand the dynamics of student drinking behavior and thus forecasting the impact of campus policy to address the problem represents a novel approach. Toward this end, the successful development of a predictive mathematical model of college drinking would represent a significant advance for prevention efforts.

Statistical considerations and techniques for understanding physiological data, modeling, and treatments.

Comparing models with data always forces us to deal with uncertainty. This uncertainty may take many different forms and involve multiple scales of resolution in the model and in the experiment. In this paper, we discuss issues surrounding the development of deterministic dynamic models of mean behavior and the associated statistical models of the difference between model and experiment.