Roles of Health Literacy in Relation to Social Determinants of Health and Recommendations for Informatics-Based Interventions: Systematic Review.

Background: Health literacy (HL) is the ability to make informed decisions using health information. As health data and information availability increase due to online clinic notes and patient portals, it is important to understand how HL relates to social determinants of health (SDoH) and the place of informatics in mitigating disparities.

Objective: This systematic literature review aims to examine the role of HL in interactions with SDoH and to identify feasible HL-based interventions that address low patient understanding of health information to improve clinic note-sharing efficacy.

Is reproductive development adaptively calibrated to early experience? Evidence from a national sample of females.

Many developmental theories have not been sufficiently evaluated using designs that control for unobserved familial confounds. Our long-term goal is to determine the causal structure underlying associations between early environmental conditions and later psychosocial and health outcomes. Our overall objective in this study was to further evaluate predictions derived from applications of life history theory to female reproductive development, key among them that reproductive milestones translate early environmental risk into fertility, health, and behavioral outcomes.

Assessing the Readability of Online Patient Education Materials in Obstetrics and Gynecology Using Traditional Measures: Comparative Analysis and Limitations.

Background: Patient education materials (PEMs) can be vital sources of information for the general population. However, despite American Medical Association (AMA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) recommendations to make PEMs easier to read for patients with low health literacy, they often do not adhere to these recommendations. The readability of online PEMs in the obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN) field, in particular, has not been thoroughly investigated.

Genetic associations with parental investment from conception to wealth inheritance in six cohorts.

Genetic inheritance is not the only way parents' genes may affect children. It is also possible that parents' genes are associated with investments into children's development. We examined evidence for links between parental genetics and parental investments, from the prenatal period through to adulthood, using data from six population-based cohorts in the UK, US and New Zealand, together totalling 36,566 parents.

Testing Environmental Effects on Age at Menarche and Sexual Debut within a Genetically Informative Twin Design.

Life-history-derived models of female sexual development propose menarche timing as a key regulatory mechanism driving subsequent sexual behavior. The current research utilized a twin subsample of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health; n = 514) to evaluate environmental effects on timings of menarche and sexual debut, as well as address potential confounding of these effects within a genetically informative design. Results show mixed support for each life history model and provide little evidence rearing environment is important in the etiology of individual differences in age at menarche.

Socioeconomic factors in the age-graded effect of incarceration on depressive symptoms in early adulthood.

Based on insights from the stress process and life-course paradigms, this study investigates the effect of incarceration on depressive symptoms during early adulthood (ages 18-40). We employed fixed-effects dynamic panel models that adjust for confounding effects due to unobserved time-invariant variables and reverse causality using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 11, 811). Our analysis shows that the effect of incarceration on depressive symptoms is greater when incarceration occurs after individuals have established a stable adult status (ages 32-40) as compared to incarceration that occurs at earlier stages of adulthood (ages 18-24 and ages 25-31).

Uncovering the genetic architecture of broad antisocial behavior through a genome-wide association study meta-analysis.

Despite the substantial heritability of antisocial behavior (ASB), specific genetic variants robustly associated with the trait have not been identified. The present study by the Broad Antisocial Behavior Consortium (BroadABC) meta-analyzed data from 28 discovery samples (N = 85,359) and five independent replication samples (N = 8058) with genotypic data and broad measures of ASB. We identified the first significant genetic associations with broad ASB, involving common intronic variants in the forkhead box protein P2 (FOXP2) gene (lead SNP rs12536335, p = 6.

Genetically Adjusted Propensity Score Matching: A Comparison to Discordant MZ Twin Models.

Discordant monozygotic (MZ) twin methodologies are considered one of the foremost statistical approaches for estimating the influence of environmental factors on phenotypic variance. Limitations associated with the discordant MZ twin approach generates an inability to estimate particular relationships and adjust estimates for the confounding influence of gene-nonshared environment interactions. Recent advancements in molecular genetics, however, can provide the opportunity to address these limitations.

Incarceration, polygenic risk, and depressive symptoms among males in late adulthood.

This study demonstrates how social and genetic factors jointly influence depression in late adulthood. We focus on the effect of incarceration, a major life event consistently found to be associated with mental health problems. Drawing on data from males in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study and the Health and Retirement Study, we conduct a polygenic score analysis based on a genome-wide association study on depressive symptoms.

Why are Women More Religious than Men? Do Risk Preferences and Genetic Risk Predispositions Explain the Gender Gap?

Risk preference theory argues that the gender gap in religiosity is caused by greater female risk aversion. Although widely debated, risk preference theory has been inadequately tested. Our study tests the theory directly with phenotypic and genetic risk preferences in three dimensions-general, impulsive, and sensation-seeking risk.

The longitudinal associations between motivation, self-regulatory capacities, and future-oriented cognition and behavior among serious young offenders.

Objectives: The present study examined how changes in a set of motivational/self-regulatory factors were associated with subsequent change in future-oriented cognition and behavior.

Hypotheses: We hypothesized that within-individual changes in aspirations, expectations, emotion regulation, resistance to peer influence, and impulse control would be positively associated with later change in future-oriented cognition and behavior. We also predicted that between-individual effects would be larger in magnitude than within-individual effects.

Genetic architecture of socioeconomic outcomes: Educational attainment, occupational status, and wealth.

This study takes a socio-genomic approach to examine the complex relationships among three important socioeconomic outcomes: educational attainment, occupational status, and wealth. Using more than 8,000 genetic samples from the Health and Retirement study, it first estimates the collective influence of genetic variants across the whole human genome to each of the three socioeconomic outcomes. It then tests genetic correlations among three socioeconomic outcomes, and examines the extent to which genetic influences on occupational status and wealth are mediated by educational attainment.

The Genome-Wide Study of Human Social Behavior and Its Application in Sociology.

Recent years have seen a push for the integration of modern genomic methodologies with sociological inquiry. The inclusion of genomic approaches promises to help address long-standing issues in sociology (e.g.

Every contact leaves a trace: contact with the criminal justice system, life outcomes, and the intersection with genetics.

Contact with the criminal justice (CJ) system is a relatively common occurrence in the United States. Criminologists and sociologists have long considered the impact of contact with the CJ system on later-in-life outcomes. This body of work has revealed a great deal of heterogeneity in life outcomes, suggesting individual differences are important to consider.

Functional connectomics from neural dynamics: probabilistic graphical models for neuronal network of .

We propose an approach to represent neuronal network dynamics as a probabilistic graphical model (PGM). To construct the PGM, we collect time series of neuronal responses produced by the neuronal network and use singular value decomposition to obtain a low-dimensional projection of the time-series data. We then extract dominant patterns from the projections to get pairwise dependency information and create a graphical model for the full network.

Genetic Heterogeneity in Depressive Symptoms Following the Death of a Spouse: Polygenic Score Analysis of the U.S. Health and Retirement Study.

Objective: Experience of stressful life events is associated with risk of depression. Yet many exposed individuals do not become depressed. A controversial hypothesis is that genetic factors influence vulnerability to depression following stress.

Opportunities and challenges of big data for the social sciences: The case of genomic data.

In this paper, we draw attention to one unique and valuable source of big data, genomic data, by demonstrating the opportunities they provide to social scientists. We discuss different types of large-scale genomic data and recent advances in statistical methods and computational infrastructure used to address challenges in managing and analyzing such data. We highlight how these data and methods can be used to benefit social science research.

Lifetime Socioeconomic Status, Historical Context, and Genetic Inheritance in Shaping Body Mass in Middle and Late Adulthood.

This study demonstrates body mass in middle and late adulthood as a consequence of the complex interplay among individuals' genes, lifetime socioeconomic experiences, and the historical context in which they live. Drawing on approximately 9,000 genetic samples from the Health and Retirement Study, we first investigate how socioeconomic status (SES) over the life course moderates the impact of 32 established obesity-related genetic variants on body mass index (BMI) in middle and late adulthood. Further, we consider differences across birth cohorts in the genetic influence on BMI and cohort variations in the moderating effects of life-course SES on the genetic influence.

Does Marriage Moderate Genetic Effects on Delinquency and Violence?

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 1,254), the authors investigated whether marriage can foster desistance from delinquency and violence by moderating genetic effects. In contrast to existing gene-environment research that typically focuses on one or a few genetic polymorphisms, they extended a recently developed mixed linear model to consider the collective influence of 580 single nucleotide polymorphisms in 64 genes related to aggression and risky behavior. The mixed linear model estimates the proportion of variance in the phenotype that is explained by the single nucleotide polymorphisms.

The Genome-Wide Influence on Human BMI Depends on Physical Activity, Life Course, and Historical Period.

In this analysis, guided by an evolutionary framework, we investigate how the human genome as a whole interacts with historical period, age, and physical activity to influence body mass index (BMI). The genomic influence is estimated by (1) heritability or the proportion of variance in BMI explained by genome-wide genotype data, and (2) the random effects or the best linear unbiased predictors (BLUPs) of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) data on BMI. Data were used from the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) in the United States.

Gene by Social-Environment Interaction for Youth Delinquency and Violence: Thirty-Nine Aggression-related Genes.

Complex human traits are likely to be affected by many environmental and genetic factors, and the interactions among them. However, previous gene-environment interaction (G×E) studies have typically focused on one or only a few genetic variants at a time. To provide a broader view of G×E, this study examines the relationship between 403 genetic variants from 39 genes and youth delinquency and violence.

Mixture SNPs effect on phenotype in genome-wide association studies.

Background: Recently mixed linear models are used to address the issue of "missing" heritability in traditional Genome-wide association studies (GWAS). The models assume that all single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are associated with the phenotypes of interest. However, it is more common that only a small proportion of SNPs have significant effects on the phenotypes, while most SNPs have no or very small effects.