Publications by authors named "DiDonato S"

Purpose: During the third-year emergency medicine (EM) clerkship, medical students are immersed in traumatic incidents with their patients and clinical teams. Trauma-informed medical education (TIME) applies trauma-informed care (TIC) principles to help students manage trauma. We aimed to qualitatively describe the extent to which students perceived the six TIME domains as they navigated critical incidents during their EM clerkship.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Recent increases in opioid use among pregnant and parenting women highlight the need for effective treatment approaches, yet many face challenges with inpatient care and often drop out of treatment programs.
  • - A study involving 30 pregnant women undergoing methadone initiation revealed themes such as barriers and facilitators to treatment, the transition to outpatient services, and the need for better clinical support.
  • - The findings emphasize the importance of addressing the obstacles identified by participants to improve engagement and outcomes for pregnant individuals with opioid use disorder.
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Objective: This qualitative research was conducted to add to the body of knowledge that supports the benefits of service dogs (SDs), as a tertiary treatment modality, to veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and/or traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Methods: This grounded theory research design utilized open-ended, semi-structured interviews with veterans ( = 10) who were using SDs as a treatment modality for PTSD and/or TBI. Transcripts were analyzed using NVivo qualitative software until data saturation was achieved.

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  • * The study analyzed data from 2016 to 2019 and found that although youth with incarcerated parents were more likely to use mental health services, significant racial and ethnic disparities exist in access, particularly affecting Black and Latinx youth.
  • * Findings highlight the need for increased mental health service availability for youth with incarcerated parents and efforts to address the disparities faced by Black and Latinx youth.
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Community-based programs serve a critical need for vulnerable youth and families. In recent years, researchers and practitioners have urged programs to adopt a trauma-informed care (TIC) approach to address adversity in young people's lives. The purpose of this article is to describe the implementation and outcomes of the Trauma Ambassador (TA) Program, a pilot youth leadership program guided by a community-university partnership that utilized a TIC approach in an underserved East North Philadelphia neighborhood.

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In an era of mass extinction and biodiversity crisis, it is increasingly crucial to cultivate more just and inclusive multispecies futures. As mitigation and adaption efforts are formed in response to these crises, just transitions forward require intentional consideration of the hybrid entanglement of humans, human societies, and wider landscapes. We thus apply a critical hybridity framework to examine the entanglement of the pollinator crisis with the cultural and agricultural practice of hobbyist beekeeping.

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Clinicians' self-efficacy with regard to delivering evidence-based interventions (EBIs) to youth is an important target for both improving EBI use in the community and mitigating the risk of clinician burnout and turnover. Examining predictors of clinician self-efficacy to treat trauma-exposed youth is, therefore, an important step for informing the design of implementation strategies to enhance the mental health workforce's capacity to deliver EBIs in this population. We examined predictors of clinician self-efficacy in working with trauma-exposed youth in a sample of practicing mental health clinicians (N = 258, M age = 34.

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Objective: We examined whether in the presence of trauma exposure, non-traumatic stress-related symptoms are interpreted by mental health clinicians as less salient than the trauma exposure and are de-emphasized as a treatment target, consistent with a diagnostic overshadowing bias.

Methods: Using an adapted version of a diagnostic overshadowing bias experimental paradigm, mental health clinicians ( = 266, age = 34.4 years, 82% female) were randomly assigned to receive two of six clinical vignette variations.

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Human beings are social in nature and maintaining social interactions, relationships and intimacy are fundamental needs of older adults (OAs) living in assisted living (AL) communities. Yet, these very basic human needs have been impeded by quarantine mandates imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The socialization aspect offered in AL, allows for an integration of the whole person: body, mind, and spirit and is beneficial in mitigating the development of co-morbidities and negative patient outcomes.

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The cranberry, a commodity of social, cultural, and economic importance to New England, is under threat due to climatic change in this region of the United States. Yet, previous research reveals that cranberry growers have mixed attitudes about the anthropogenic roots of climate change, with many being skeptical. Building on the researchers' analysis of the personal and ecological conditions that affect climate change attitudes among cranberry growers, this paper examines the effect that key actors in the growers' social networks have on those attitudes.

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This pilot study examined changes in cancer-related post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) across time for siblings of children with cancer. Siblings (N = 32; aged 8-18) completed a measure of anxiety, the Child PTSD Symptom Scale (CPSS), and the PTSD section of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV-TR (SCID) at twelve (SD = .9) and eighteen months (SD = 1.

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This paper presents the evidence for a standard of care for psychosocial assessment in pediatric cancer. An interdisciplinary group of investigators utilized EBSCO, PubMed, PsycINFO, Ovid, and Google Scholar search databases, focusing on five areas: youth/family psychosocial adjustment, family resources, family/social support, previous history/premorbid functioning, and family structure/function. Descriptive quantitative studies, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses (n = 149) were reviewed and evaluated using grading of recommendations, assessment development, and evaluation (GRADE) criteria.

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Background: Although families of children with cancer and other serious medical conditions have documented psychosocial needs, the systematic identification of needs and delivery of evidence-based care remain challenges. Screening for multifaceted family psychosocial risk is a means by which psychosocial treatment needs for pediatric patients and their families can be identified in an effective and inclusive manner.

Material And Methods: The Pediatric Psychosocial Preventative Health Model (PPPHM) is a model that can guide systematic assessment of family psychosocial risk.

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Brain cholesterol, which is synthesized locally, is a major component of myelin and cell membranes and participates in neuronal functions, such as membrane trafficking, signal transduction, neurotransmitter release, and synaptogenesis. Here we show that brain cholesterol biosynthesis is reduced in multiple transgenic and knock-in Huntington's disease (HD) rodent models, arguably dependent on deficits in mutant astrocytes. Mice carrying a progressively increased number of CAG repeats show a more evident reduction in cholesterol biosynthesis.

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Huntington's disease (HD) is one of the most common autosomal dominant inherited, neurodegenerative disorders. It is characterized by progressive motor, emotional and cognitive dysfunction. In addition metabolic abnormalities such as wasting and altered energy expenditure are increasingly recognized as clinical hallmarks of the disease.

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Onset of genetically determined neurodegenerative diseases is difficult to specify because of their insidious and slowly progressive nature. This is especially true for spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA) because of varying affection of many parts of the nervous system and huge variability of symptoms. We investigated early symptoms in 287 patients with SCA1, SCA2, SCA3, or SCA6 and calculated the influence of CAG repeat length on age of onset depending on (1) the definition of disease onset, (2) people defining onset, and (3) duration of symptoms.

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Friedreich ataxia (FRDA) is associated with a GAA-trinucleotide-repeat expansion in the first intron of the FXN gene (9q13-21), which encodes a 210-amino-acid protein named frataxin. More than 95% of patients are homozygous for 90-1,300 repeat expansion on both alleles. The remaining patients have been shown to be compound heterozygous for a GAA expansion on one allele and a micromutation on the other.

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Huntington's disease is one of a group of hereditary neurodegenerative diseases characterized by a glutamine expansion (polyQ) in proteins which are expressed in various cell populations. In agreement with this widespread distribution, we have previously shown that A(2A) receptor signaling is affected in mouse brain as well as in peripheral blood cells from a small cohort of HD patients. Here we analyzed a total of 252 subjects, including 126 HD gene-positive individuals, from different clinical sites.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study focuses on how the CAG repeat expansion in the HD gene is the main cause of Huntington's disease (HD) and largely influences when the disease starts.
  • - Researchers looked for genetic markers in several genes (GRIK2, TBP, BDNF, HIP1, and ZDHHC17) to see if they could affect the age of onset for HD by analyzing a group of 980 European patients.
  • - Despite identifying some variations in the ZDHHC17 gene and others, the study concluded that none of these genes acted as significant genetic modifiers influencing the age at which Huntington's disease manifests.
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An expanded polyglutamine stretch in the huntingtin protein has been identified as the pathogenetic cause of Huntington's disease (HD). Although the length of the expanded polyglutamine repeat is inversely correlated with the age-at-onset, additional genetic factors are thought to modify the variance in the disease onset. As linkage analysis suggested a modifier locus on chromosome 4p, we investigated the functional relevance of S18Y polymorphism of the ubiquitin carboxy-terminal hydrolase L1 in 946 Caucasian HD patients.

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The growth of U-87 or C6 gliomas co-implanted in nude mice with retroviral producer cells (VPC) expressing the herpes simplex virus-thymidine kinase (HSV-tk) gene is only partially impaired by treatment with ganciclovir (GCV). The effect of GCV is even less evident when C6 and VPC are co-implanted into the rat brain. Furthermore, tumors from C6 cells carrying the HSV-tk gene are not eradicated by GCV, although they remain sensitive to GCV when replated in vitro.

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