Publications by authors named "Cindy Feng"

Background: Depression is a highly prevalent and disabling mental health problem. Self-help has been strongly advocated for dealing with depression. Built upon the research on risk prediction modeling and risk communication, we developed a coach-guided, personalized depression risk communication tool (PDRC) for sharing information about individualized depression risk and evidence-based self-help strategies.

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Purpose: To estimate the prevalence, consequences of, and factors associated with poor vision health knowledge among students, parents, and teachers in rural China.

Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted with 17,902 students among 251 primary schools in rural China. The primary outcomes were eyeglasses ownership and wear rates, measured by self-reported eyeglasses ownership and wear status.

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Objectives: There is conflicting published evidence that unemployment impacts workplace safety. Some studies suggest that the workplace injury rate decreases during economic contractions, while others propose an increased rate of injuries during periods of economic contractions. This study investigated the association between unemployment rates and traumatic work-related non-fatal injury (WRNFI) in Saskatchewan, 2007-2018, in order to provide new insight into injury prevention.

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Purpose: Depression is a growing public health concern around the world. For adolescents, depression not only impedes healthy development, but is negatively associated with academic performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the prevalence of adolescent depressive symptoms in a sample of rural primary and junior high school students.

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Background: The association between sleep patterns and young students' mental health, which is crucial for their development, remains understudied in rural China. Therefore, the relationship between sleep patterns and mental health among primary and junior high school students in rural China was examined.

Method: A total of 1592 primary and junior high school students from rural areas of Gansu Province were surveyed, and the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS) was utilized to assess mental health, alongside self-reported data on their daily sleep patterns.

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Background: Patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) constitute a highly heterogeneous population, with varying risks for New-onset Psychiatric Disorders (NPDs). The objectives of this study were to identify TBI phenotypes and determine how NPDs differ among these phenotypes.

Methods: Hospitalized TBI patients from 2003 to 2019 were obtained from the provincial trauma registry.

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Background: This paper examines the prevalence, correlates, and developmental consequences of divorce among junior high school students in rural China. Specifically, we investigate the connections between parental divorce and student mental health and academic performance, while also examining whether a student's living arrangement after divorce influences these outcomes.

Methods: Data were collected from 17,955 students across 122 rural junior high schools in China on their mental health, characteristics, and academic performance.

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Article Synopsis
  • Observational studies are essential for understanding health inequities, but it's unclear how well they report equity-related factors in their design and analysis.
  • The authors reviewed 16,828 articles from 2020 to 2022, selecting 320 studies to analyze their focus on populations facing inequities and data collection methods.
  • Findings showed that while many studies acknowledged health equity, only a small percentage effectively reported key design aspects related to equity, indicating a significant gap in the methodology of health equity research.
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Objectives: This study aims to assess the impact of COVID-19 related risk factors on self-reported increases in depression among Canadian adults during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic levels. We aim to investigate the interactive effects of stressors, including social isolation, financial stress, and fear of catching COVID-19, on mental health outcomes. Our study aims to provide insights for the development of prevention and intervention strategies to address the mental health effects of the pandemic by examining the psychological changes attributable to the pandemic and its impact.

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Background: Emergency psychiatric care, unplanned hospital admissions, and inpatient health care are the costliest forms of mental health care. According to Statistics Canada (2018), almost 18% (5.3 million) of Canadians reported needing mental health support.

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Understanding the ethnic gap in protective behavior and its explanatory factors is a promising step for reducing pandemic-induced disparities. However, no studies have endeavored to identify the factors contributing to a gap in protective behaviors between Han and minority ethnicities during COVID-19 pandemic in rural China. We aimed to analyze the gap in protective behaviors between Han and minority residents in rural China.

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Improved survival of preterm low birthweight (LBW) infants due to advances in neonatal care has brought issues such as postnatal development trajectories to the foreground. This study pools evidence from three cluster-randomized experiments evaluating community-based psychosocial stimulation programs conducted from 2014 to 2017 that included 3571 rural Chinese children aged 6-24 months (51.1% male, 96.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study analyzes how the COVID-19 pandemic affected malaria control programs in rural Benin, using interviews with key health informants and an agent-based model to evaluate the impact of service disruptions.
  • - Interviews indicated that while there were some initial disruptions in malaria treatment due to the pandemic, essential malaria control measures were largely maintained through strong collaboration among health practitioners.
  • - Findings stress the importance of effective leadership and community health workers during health emergencies, while also demonstrating the value of combining qualitative insights with mathematical modeling in public health research.
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Malaria and schistosomiasis are two important parasitic diseases that are a particular threat to young children and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria and schistosomiasis prevention and control strategies primarily focus on the distribution of long-lasting insecticidal nets and the delivery of praziquantel tablets to at-risk populations in high burden settings through mass drug administration, respectively. The objective of this scoping review was to identify previous efforts to integrate malaria and schistosomiasis prevention and control programs in the literature and to summarize the strategies and approaches used in these programs following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines.

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Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of death and disability, primarily caused by falls and motor vehicle collisions (MVCs). Although many TBIs are preventable, there is a notable lack of studies exploring the association of geographically defined TBI hotspots with social deprivation. Geographic information systems (GIS) can be used to identify at-risk neighborhoods (hotspots) for targeted interventions.

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Malaria and schistosomiasis are two major parasitic vector-borne diseases that are a particular threat to young children in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the present study, we investigated factors that are associated with malaria, schistosomiasis, and co-infection among school-aged children, using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach. A cross-sectional study was conducted in January 2022 in Misungwi, Tanzania, that sampled 1,122 children aged 5 to 14 years old for malaria and schistosomiasis infection.

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Predicting rare events is a challenging task due to limited data and imbalanced datasets. This special issue explores methodological advancements in prediction and modeling for rare events. The research showcased in this issue aims to provide valuable insights and strategies to enhance the accuracy of rare event prediction and modeling.

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Objectives: To evaluate the support from the available guidance on reporting of health equity in research for our candidate items and to identify additional items for the Strengthening Reporting of Observational studies in Epidemiology-Equity extension.

Study Design And Setting: We conducted a scoping review by searching Embase, MEDLINE, CINAHL, Cochrane Methodology Register, LILACS, and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information up to January 2022. We also searched reference lists and gray literature for additional resources.

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Globally, negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on malaria prevention and control efforts have been caused by delayed distributions of long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLIN), decreased outpatient attendance, and disruptions to malaria testing and treatment. Using a mixed methods approach, we aimed to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on community-level malaria prevention and health-seeking practices in Benin more than one year after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We collected data through community-based cross-sectional surveys with 4200 households and ten focus group discussions (FGDs).

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to compare the effectiveness of ambulatory EEG (aEEG) versus routine EEG (rEEG) in detecting interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) and seizures in patients experiencing their first spontaneous seizure.
  • A total of 100 patients underwent three types of EEG assessments, and the aEEG demonstrated a significantly higher sensitivity (72%) compared to rEEG (11% for the first and 22% for the second).
  • Additionally, the presence of IEDs or seizures on aEEG was linked to a greater likelihood of seizure recurrence within a year, highlighting its diagnostic advantage.
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Objective: Primary objectives of this study were to determine presenting complaints, physical examination, clinicopathologic findings, and hospitalization time of dogs with spontaneous hypoadrenocorticism presenting with critical disease; and to compare those end points to dogs with a more stable presentation. Secondary objectives were to evaluate the shock index and to identify precipitating stressors.

Animals: Eighty-four dogs at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine between 1998 and 2018 were included.

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Background: Addressing persistent and pervasive health inequities is a global moral imperative, which has been highlighted and magnified by the societal and health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Observational studies can aid our understanding of the impact of health and structural oppression based on the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, age and other factors, as they frequently collect this data. However, the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) guideline, does not provide guidance related to reporting of health equity.

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Background: Mental health disorders are a common sequelae of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and are associated with worse health outcomes including increased mental health care utilization. The objective of this study was to determine the association between TBI and use of mental health services in a population-based sample.

Methods: Using data from a national Canadian survey, this study evaluated the association between TBI and mental health care utilization, while adjusting for confounding variables.

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In many epidemiological and environmental health studies, developing an accurate exposure assessment of multiple exposures on a health outcome is often of interest. However, the problem is challenging in the presence of multicollinearity, which can lead to biased estimates of regression coefficients and inflated variance estimators. Selecting one exposure variable as a surrogate of multiple highly correlated exposure variables is often suggested in the literature as a solution to handle the multicollinearity problem.

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