Interprofessional training enhances collaboration between nursing and medical students: A pilot study.

Background: Effective collaboration among healthcare providers is an essential component of high-quality patient care. Interprofessional education is foundational to ensuring that students are prepared to engage in optimal collaboration once they enter clinical practice particularly in the care of complex geriatric patients undergoing surgery.

Study Design: To enhance interprofessional education between nursing students and medical students in a clinical environment, we modeled the desired behavior and skills needed for interprofessional preoperative geriatric assessment for students, then provided an opportunity for students to practice skills in nurse/physician pairs on standardized patients.

A trans-university center for global health.

Can the challenge of improving health engage university faculty and students across all disciplines to more deeply understand the world and its people in order to make it a better place? Faculty and staff at the University of Virginia's (UVa) Center for Global Health (CGH) think it can. The authors argue that by working to understand, teach, and improve the human condition, universities can engage multiple disciplines, help reverse the "brain drain," and even change perspectives.The transuniversity Center for Global Health (CGH) at UVa employs three components for addressing global health issues: (1) scholars: sending UVa students abroad to conduct international fieldwork focused on global health, (2) fellows: inviting international colleagues selected by collaborating institutions abroad to work and train at UVa and return to become leaders in their home institutions, and (3) curricula: supporting and developing global health-related curricula throughout the university.

Early childhood diarrhea predicts impaired school performance.

Objective: Diarrhea is a leading cause of mortality worldwide; however, its long-term morbidity is poorly understood. Recently, early childhood diarrhea (ECD) has been associated with impaired physical fitness, growth and cognitive function 6 to 9 years later. We studied the effects of ECD on school functioning in a shantytown in northeastern Brazil.

Limitations in verbal fluency following heavy burdens of early childhood diarrhea in Brazilian shantytown children.

The effects of heavy burdens of diarrhea in the first 2 years of life on specific executive control function like verbal fluency are not well understood. In previous studies, we have shown associations of early childhood diarrhea (ECD) with nonverbal intelligence and school functioning. Therefore, we postulated that ECD might affect early neuropsychological development leading to long-term deficits in normal cognitive development.

APOE4 protects the cognitive development in children with heavy diarrhea burdens in Northeast Brazil.

Polymorphisms in the apolipoprotein E (APOE) have constituted the major rationale to identify potential risk groups for developing late-onset Alzheimer's disease and help to predict recovery of cognitive function after brain injury. However, the APOE impact on cognitive development in children living in poor areas of the developing world, where we have discovered profound significant associations of early childhood diarrhea (at 0-2 y) with lasting impairments of growth, cognition, and school performance, is not known. Therefore, we conducted APOE genotyping in 72 Brazilian shantytown children under active surveillance since birth, using purified DNA extracted from buccal cell samples.

Magnitude and impact of diarrheal diseases.

Among the increasingly unacceptable costs of the diseases of poverty are the largely unmeasured but potentially huge human and economic long-term costs of common tropical infectious diseases, especially those such as repeated dehydrating and malnourishing diarrheal diseases (and enteric infections, even without overt liquid stools) that are so prevalent in the developmentally critical first year or two of early childhood. We review here the high costs of diseases of poverty, increasing diarrhea morbidity (despite decreasing mortality), and new emerging evidence for long-term consequences of early childhood diarrhea on growth and on physical and cognitive development, effects that may translate into costly impairment of human potential and productivity.

Early childhood diarrhea is associated with diminished cognitive function 4 to 7 years later in children in a northeast Brazilian shantytown.

Diarrhea is well recognized as a leading cause of childhood mortality and morbidity in developing countries; however, possible long-term cognitive deficits from heavy diarrhea burdens in early childhood remain poorly defined. To assess the potential long-term impact of early childhood diarrhea (in the first 2 years of life) on cognitive function in later childhood, we studied the cognitive function of a cohort of children in an urban Brazilian shantytown with a high incidence of early childhood diarrhea. Forty-six children (age range, 6-10 years) with complete diarrhea surveillance during their first 2 years of life were given a battery of five cognitive tests.

Updating the DALYs for diarrhoeal disease.

Estimates of global disease burden remain high on the international research and policy agenda as a forum for ranking health priorities. Within this, the quality of life or years lived with varying degrees of disability has been recognized as an important outcome that should be considered alongside estimates of mortality. Recent studies into the long-term consequences of diarrhoeal diseases on physical and mental development suggest that the disability adjusted life year calculations for these conditions could require updating.