Assessing Injury and Violence Prevention in North Carolina's Local Health Departments.

Background: Injury and violence-related morbidity and mortality present a major public health problem in North Carolina. However, the extent to which local health departments (LHDs) engage in injury and violence prevention (IVP) has not been well described.

Objectives: One objective of the current study is to provide a baseline assessment of IVP in the state's LHDs, describing capacity, priorities, challenges, and the degree to which programs are data-driven and evidence-based.

Reactance to Health Warnings Scale: Development and Validation.

Background: Health warnings may be less effective if they elicit reactance, a motivation to resist a threat to freedom, yet we lack a standard measure of reactance.

Purpose: We sought to validate a new health warning reactance scale in the context of pictorial cigarette pack warnings.

Methods: A national sample of adults (n = 1413) responded to reactance survey questions while viewing randomly assigned pictorial or text warnings on images of cigarette packs.

Effect of Pictorial Cigarette Pack Warnings on Changes in Smoking Behavior: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Pictorial warnings on cigarette packs draw attention and increase quit intentions, but their effect on smoking behavior remains uncertain.

Objective: To assess the effect of adding pictorial warnings to the front and back of cigarette packs.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This 4-week between-participant randomized clinical trial was carried out in California and North Carolina.

Social Interactions Sparked by Pictorial Warnings on Cigarette Packs.

The Message Impact Framework suggests that social interactions may offer smokers the opportunity to process pictorial warnings on cigarette packs more deeply. We aimed to describe adult smokers' social interactions about pictorial cigarette pack warnings in two longitudinal pilot studies. In Pilot Study 1, 30 smokers used cigarette packs with one of nine pictorial warnings for two weeks.

Network influences on dissemination of evidence-based guidelines in state tobacco control programs.

Little is known regarding the social network relationships that influence dissemination of evidence-based public health practices and policies. In public health, it is critical that evidence-based guidelines, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Best Practices for Comprehensive Tobacco Control Programs, are effectively and efficiently disseminated to intended stakeholders. To determine the organizational and network predictors of dissemination among state tobacco control programs, interviews with members of tobacco control networks across eight states were conducted between August 2009 and September 2010.

An evaluation of public school district tobacco policies in St. Louis County, Missouri.

Background: One way to address tobacco use by youth is for primary and secondary schools to adopt and implement comprehensive tobacco policies. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the comprehensiveness of tobacco policies in St. Louis County, Missouri public school districts.

Smoke-free workplace ballot campaigns: case studies from Missouri and lessons for policy and media advocacy.

Purpose: To assess the key components of smoke-free campaigns that may have influenced voting outcomes in three communities.

Design: Community case studies with content analysis of tobacco-related newspaper articles.

Setting: Three semiurban Missouri communities.

RNA from brush oral cytology to measure squamous cell carcinoma gene expression.

Background: RNA expression analysis of oral keratinocytes can be used to detect early stages of disease such as oral cancer or to monitor on-going treatment responses of the same or other oral diseases. A limitation is the inability to obtain high quality RNA from oral tissue without using biopsies. While oral cytology cell samples can be obtained from patients in a minimally invasive manner they have not been validated for quantitative analysis of RNA expression.