Publications by authors named "Bragg M"

Article Synopsis
  • A study investigated how prenatal dietary patterns affect child outcomes related to autism, analyzing data from up to 6084 participants across 14 cohorts.
  • Results showed that higher scores on healthy eating indices were linked to lower scores on the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), indicating a potential connection between better prenatal diets and social behaviors in children.
  • However, there were no significant links found between prenatal diets and official autism diagnoses, suggesting that while diet may influence some traits, more research is needed to clarify its effects on autism-related conditions.
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  • Seedling disease management relies on accurately identifying pathogens, and a recent study focused on isolating oomycetes from diseased cotton roots to determine the associated species.
  • Culture-independent methods like PCR and high-throughput sequencing were used alongside traditional culture-based methods to identify oomycete species, revealing crucial data about their presence and abundance.
  • The combined findings from both methods provided a detailed understanding of oomycetes related to cotton seedling disease, which is vital for future research and may encourage similar studies in other regions.
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Background: Weight stigma is a fundamental cause of health inequality. Body positivity may be a counterbalance to weight stigma. Social media is replete with weight-stigmatizing content and is a driver of poor mental health outcomes; however, there remains a gap in understanding its potential to mitigate the prevalence and impact of harmful messaging and to promote positive effects on a large scale.

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  • Unhealthy food and beverage marketing contributes significantly to weight gain among young people, particularly impacting Black and Latinx communities.* -
  • As companies adopt immersive virtual reality (VR) technologies for marketing, there is a growing concern about their potential effects on consumption behaviors, especially among marginalized groups.* -
  • The discussion highlights the need for regulations and further research on VR marketing practices to understand their implications and address health disparities linked to diet-related illnesses.*
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As part of a program evaluation of the New York City Test & Trace program (T2)-one of the largest such programs in the USA-we conducted a study to assess how implementing organizations (NYC Health + Hospitals, government agencies, CBOs) communicated information about the T2 program on Twitter. Study aims were as follows: (1) quantify user engagement of posts ("tweets") about T2 by NYC organizations on Twitter and (2) examine the emotional tone of social media users' T2-related tweets in our sample of 1987 T2-related tweets. Celebrities and CBOs generated more user engagement (0.

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Importance: The mainstream use of chatbots requires a thorough investigation of their readability and quality of information.

Objective: To identify readability and quality differences in information between a free and paywalled chatbot cancer-related responses, and to explore if more precise prompting can mitigate any observed differences.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cross-sectional study compared readability and information quality of a chatbot's free vs paywalled responses with Google Trends' top 5 search queries associated with breast, lung, prostate, colorectal, and skin cancers from January 1, 2021, to January 1, 2023.

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Background: Nudges offer a promising tool to reduce sugary drink intake among children who are most at risk for diet-related disease.

Objective: To examine the impact of online store nudges on purchases of sugary drinks for children in lower-income households.

Methods: Caregivers with lower-income were recruited to an online shopping experiment and instructed to spend $10-$30 on three beverages for their child aged 1-5 years.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigated how maternal nutrient intake affects the relationship between air pollution and autism-related traits in children.
  • The research included 126 mothers with previous autism diagnoses in their families and utilized sophisticated statistical models to analyze nutrient intake and pollutant exposure.
  • Findings showed no significant joint effects of nutrition and pollution on autism-related traits, suggesting a need for further research in larger, more diverse populations.
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  • Social media is a major platform for sharing cancer-related information among patients, families, and health professionals, but it also poses a significant risk of spreading misinformation.
  • Misinformation includes inaccurate data about cancer risks, unproven treatments, and misleading content that often gains more attention than accurate information, impacting public health attitudes and behaviors.
  • Combating this misinformation requires cooperation from various stakeholders, including social media platforms, health experts, and the public, emphasizing the need for evidence-based content and health literacy efforts.
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Food and nonalcoholic beverage marketing is implicated in poor diet and obesity in children. The rapid growth and proliferation of digital marketing has resulted in dramatic changes to advertising practices and children's exposure. The constantly evolving and data-driven nature of digital food marketing presents substantial challenges for researchers seeking to quantify the impact on children and for policymakers tasked with designing and implementing restrictive policies.

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The red wolf () is a critically endangered canid that exists solely because of the establishment of the population in the late 1980s. Yet, the population under human care suffers from gastrointestinal (GI) disease in captivity. While the cause of GI disease is unknown, it is speculated that environmental factors can influence GI health of zoo-managed red wolves.

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Importance: Menu labeling has been implemented in restaurants in some US jurisdictions as early as 2008, but the extent to which menu labeling is associated with calories purchased is unclear.

Objective: To estimate the association of menu labeling with calories and nutrients purchased and assess geographic variation in results.

Design, Setting, And Participants: A cohort study was conducted with a quasi-experimental design using actual transaction data from Taco Bell restaurants from calendar years 2007 to 2014 US restaurants with menu labeling matched to comparison restaurants using synthetic control methods.

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Background: Longitudinal measures of diet spanning pregnancy through adolescence are needed from a large, diverse sample to advance research on the effect of early-life nutrition on child health. The Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program, which includes 69 cohorts, >33,000 pregnancies, and >31,000 children in its first 7-y cycle, provides such data, now publicly available.

Objectives: This study aimed to describe dietary intake data available in the ECHO Program as of 31 August, 2022 (end of year 6 of Cycle 1) from pregnancy through adolescence, including estimated sample sizes, and to highlight the potential for future analyses of nutrition and child health.

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Background: Inadequate differentiated diagnostic features of predominantly colonic inflammatory bowel diseases i.e., ulcerative colitis and Crohn's colitis, may lead to inexact diagnosis of "indeterminate colitis".

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Measures of attention and memory were evaluated in 6- to 9-month-old infants from two diverse contexts. One sample consisted of African infants residing in rural Malawi (N = 228, 118 girls, 110 boys). The other sample consisted of racially diverse infants residing in suburban California (N = 48, 24 girls, 24 boys).

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Colonic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) encompasses ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's colitis (CC). Patients with IBD are at increased risk for colitis-associated colorectal cancer (CACRC) compared to the general population. CACRC is preceded by IBD, characterized by highly heterogenous, pharmacologically incurable, pertinacious, worsening, and immune-mediated inflammatory pathologies of the colon and rectum.

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Milk production is an ancient adaptation that unites all mammals. Milk contains a microbiome that can contribute to offspring health and microbial-immunological development. We generated a comprehensive milk microbiome dataset (16S rRNA gene) for the class Mammalia, representing 47 species from all placental superorders, to determine processes structuring milk microbiomes.

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Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected people's ability to buy, sell, and obtain items that they use in their daily lives. It may have had a particularly negative effect on the ability of people who use illicit opioids to obtain them because the networks they relied on are illicit and not part of the formal economy. Our objective in this research was to examine if, and how, disruptions related to COVID-19 of illicit opioid markets have affected people who use illicit opioids.

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Purpose Of Review: Protecting children from unhealthful food marketing is a global priority policy for improving population diets. Monitoring the nature and extent of children's exposure to this marketing is critical in policy development and implementation. This review summarises contemporary approaches to monitor the nature and extent of food marketing to support policy reform.

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Unhealthy food advertisements ("advertisements" hereafter referred to as "ads") are linked to poor diet and obesity, and food companies disproportionally target Black youth. Little is known about the mechanisms whereby food ads influence diet. One possibility may be racially-targeted ads that appeal to Black youth.

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Choline is an essential micronutrient that may influence growth and development; however, few studies have examined postnatal choline status and children's growth and development in low- and middle-income countries. The aim of this observational analysis was to examine associations of plasma choline with growth and development among Malawian children aged 6-15 months enrolled in an egg intervention trial. Plasma choline and related metabolites (betaine, dimethylglycine and trimethylamine N-oxide) were measured at baseline and 6-month follow-up, along with anthropometric (length, weight, head circumference) and developmental assessments (the Malawi Developmental Assessment Tool [MDAT], the Infant Orienting with Attention task [IOWA], a visual paired comparison [VPC] task and an elicited imitation [EI] task).

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Objective: This study used publicly available Form 990 tax documents to quantify food industry donations to patient advocacy organisations (PAO) dedicated to supporting patients with non-communicable diseases.

Design: Observational, cross-sectional assessment of significant national and international food industry donations to US-based non-communicable disease-focussed PAO between 2000 and 2018. Researchers recorded and categorised the: (1) frequency and value of donations; (2) reason for donation; (3) name and type of PAO recipient and (4) non-communicable disease focus of the PAO.

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Purpose: This descriptive study aimed to (1) compare the number of food and beverage advertisements (ads) located in a Caribbean-American neighborhood and non-Latinx white neighborhood in New York City (NYC), and (2) qualitatively assess and compare the culturally targeted marketing themes of the food and beverage advertisements in both neighborhoods.

Methods: Three research assistants photographed all outdoor food and beverage advertisements (=361) across a 1.6 kilometer distance on a high-retail street in a Caribbean-American neighborhood and a non-Latinx white neighborhood.

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Background: Food companies have increased digital and social media ad expenditures during the COVID-19 pandemic, capitalizing on the coinciding increase in social media use during the pandemic. The extent of pandemic-related social media advertising and marketing tactics have been previously reported. No studies, however, have evaluated how food and beverage companies used COVID-washing on social media posts in the United States or analyzed the nutritional content of advertised food and beverage products.

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