Designing and delivering a poetry workshop for clinician well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: A case study.

Facilitated poetry writing workshops are used in healthcare settings as a therapeutic approach to address stressful factors that negatively influence clinician well-being. However, owing to the novelty of this intervention and a tendency to combine poetry with other types of narrative-based techniques, proponents of poetic medicine are calling for harmonization across programs in the US. This would facilitate the study of poetry in medicine and the multiple facets of well-being it is said to promote.

The Impact of Long COVID on Employment and Well-Being: A Qualitative Study of Patient Perspectives.

Background: Exploring the experiences of Long COVID patients who face challenges with employment may inform improvements in how healthcare systems can provide holistic care for this patient population.

Objective: Understand perspectives about the impact of Long COVID on employment and well-being among patients seeking healthcare for Long COVID.

Design: Qualitative study involving one-on-one interviews.

Lessons Learned From Developing Dashboards to Support Decision-Making for Community Opioid Response by Community Stakeholders: Mixed Methods and Multisite Study.

Background: Data dashboards are published tools that present visualizations; they are increasingly used to display data about behavioral health, social determinants of health, and chronic and infectious disease risks to inform or support public health endeavors. Dashboards can be an evidence-based approach used by communities to influence decision-making in health care for specific populations. Despite widespread use, evidence on how to best design and use dashboards in the public health realm is limited.

Leveraging local knowledge to contextualize the opioid epidemic within HEALing Communities Study communities: A Photovoice protocol.

Since its inception 30 years ago, Photovoice has gained increasing popularity as a research method and more recently has been incorporated within randomized controlled trial (RCT) designs. Photovoice is a participatory action research method that pairs photography with focus group discussions to record community strengths and concerns, build critical consciousness, and reach policymakers. Adherence of Photovoice implementation to these original tenets of Photovoice varies.

Community-Engaged Data Science (CEDS): A Case Study of Working with Communities to Use Data to Inform Change.

Data-informed decision making is a critical goal for many community-based public health research initiatives. However, community partners often encounter challenges when interacting with data. The Community-Engaged Data Science (CEDS) model offers a goal-oriented, iterative guide for communities to collaborate with research data scientists through data ambassadors.

Patient and Provider Perspectives About the Use of Patient-Generated Health Data During Pregnancy: Qualitative Exploratory Study.

Background: There is increasing interest in using patient-generated health data (PGHD) to improve patient-centered care during pregnancy. However, little research has examined the perspectives of patients and providers as they report, collect, and use PGHD to inform obstetric care.

Objective: This study aims to explore the perspectives of patients and providers about the use of PGHD during pregnancy, including the benefits and challenges of reporting, collecting, and using these data, as well as considerations for expanding the use of PGHD to improve obstetric care.

Understanding Concerns about COVID-19 and Vaccination: Perspectives from Kidney Transplant Recipients.

The COVID-19 pandemic poses a significant risk for immunosuppressed groups such as transplant patients. The purpose of this study was to improve our understanding of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on kidney transplant recipients, including their views on COVID-19 vaccination. Semi-structured interviews were conducted from December 2021 to August 2022 with 38 kidney transplant recipients who had an appointment with their transplant care team within the previous 6 months.

Cocktail-party listening and cognitive abilities show strong pleiotropy.

Introduction: The cocktail-party problem refers to the difficulty listeners face when trying to attend to relevant sounds that are mixed with irrelevant ones. Previous studies have shown that solving these problems relies on perceptual as well as cognitive processes. Previously, we showed that speech-reception thresholds (SRTs) on a cocktail-party listening task were influenced by genetic factors.

Embedding Big Qual and Team Science into Qualitative Research: Lessons from a Large-scale, Cross-site Research Study.

Background: A major part of the HEALing Communities Study (HCS), launched in 2019 to address the growing opioid epidemic, is evaluating the study's intervention implementation process through an implementation science (IS) approach. One component of the IS approach involves teams with more than 20 researchers collaborating across four research sites to conduct in-depth qualitative interviews with over 300 participants at four time points. After completion of the first two rounds of data collection, we reflect upon our qualitative data collection and analysis approach.

A White Matter Connection of Schizophrenia and Alzheimer's Disease.

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a severe psychiatric illness associated with an elevated risk for developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). Both SZ and AD have white matter abnormalities and cognitive deficits as core disease features. We hypothesized that aging in SZ patients may be associated with the development of cerebral white matter deficit patterns similar to those observed in AD.

Minimal Relationship between Local Gyrification and General Cognitive Ability in Humans.

Previous studies suggest that gyrification is associated with superior cognitive abilities in humans, but the strength of this relationship remains unclear. Here, in two samples of related individuals (total N = 2882), we calculated an index of local gyrification (LGI) at thousands of cortical surface points using structural brain images and an index of general cognitive ability (g) using performance on cognitive tests. Replicating previous studies, we found that phenotypic and genetic LGI-g correlations were positive and statistically significant in many cortical regions.

Neurocognitive impairment in type 2 diabetes: evidence for shared genetic aetiology.

Aims/hypothesis: Type 2 diabetes is associated with cognitive impairments, but it is unclear whether common genetic factors influence both type 2 diabetes risk and cognition.

Methods: Using data from 1892 Mexican-American individuals from extended pedigrees, including 402 with type 2 diabetes, we examined possible pleiotropy between type 2 diabetes and cognitive functioning, as measured by a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery.

Results: Negative phenotypic correlations (ρ) were observed between type 2 diabetes and measures of attention (Continuous Performance Test [CPT d']: ρ = -0.

Childhood Trauma and Stressful Life Events Are Independently Associated with Sleep Disturbances in Adolescents.

Adolescence is a critical developmental period associated with an increase in stress, the appearance of anxiety and depressive symptoms, and changes in sleep patterns. Even though the disruption of sleep patterns in stress and anxiety and depressive disorders is well known, the independent effects of childhood trauma and stressful life events on sleep patterns are less understood. We tested the independent effects of stress (childhood trauma and stressful life events) while controlling for anxiety and depression on adolescent sleep patterns.

Evidence for genetic correlation between human cerebral white matter microstructure and inflammation.

White matter microstructure is affected by immune system activity via the actions of circulating pro-inflammatory cytokines. Although white matter microstructure and inflammatory measures are significantly heritable, it is unclear if overlapping genetic factors influence these traits in humans. We conducted genetic correlation analyses of these traits using randomly ascertained extended pedigrees from the Genetics of Brain Structure and Function Study (N = 1862, 59% females, ages 18-97 years; 42 ± 15.

The role of familial risk, parental psychopathology, and stress for first-onset depression during adolescence.

Background: Adolescence represents a critical developmental period during which the initial onset of depression emerges. Family risk for depression is a salient risk factor for the initial onset of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). We examined the effects of familial risk, stress, and behavior on the risk of developing first-onset depression.

A QTL on chromosome 3q23 influences processing speed in humans.

Processing speed is a psychological construct that refers to the speed with which an individual can perform any cognitive operation. Processing speed correlates strongly with general cognitive ability, declines sharply with age and is impaired across a number of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Thus, identifying genes that influence processing speed will likely improve understanding of the genetics of intelligence, biological aging and the etiologies of numerous disorders.

Trajectories of Alcohol Initiation and Use During Adolescence: The Role of Stress and Amygdala Reactivity.

Objective: Early alcohol use initiation predicts onset of alcohol use disorders in adulthood. However, little is known about developmental trajectories of alcohol use initiation and their putative biological and environmental correlates.

Method: Adolescents (N = 330) with high or low familial loading for depression were assessed annually for up to 6 years.

Inflammatory markers as predictors of depression and anxiety in adolescents: Statistical model building with component-wise gradient boosting.

Background: Immune system abnormalities have been repeatedly observed in several psychiatric disorders, including severe depression and anxiety. However, whether specific immune mediators play an early role in the etiopathogenesis of these disorders remains unknown.

Methods: In a longitudinal design, component-wise gradient boosting was used to build models of depression, assessed by the Mood-Feelings Questionnaire-Child (MFQC), and anxiety, assessed by the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) in 254 adolescents from a large set of candidate predictors, including sex, race, 39 inflammatory proteins, and the interactions between those proteins and time.

A test of the psychometric characteristics of the BIS-Brief among three groups of youth.

The Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11) is the most widely administered trait impulsiveness questionnaire. Recently a shorter, unidimensional version of the instrument was developed for adults (BIS-Brief). While psychometric characteristics of the BIS-Brief support its use among adults, it also may be more appropriate for youth samples than the complete BIS-11 because it less burdensome and omits items about activities not usually encountered by children and adolescents.

Human Cortical Thickness Organized into Genetically-determined Communities across Spatial Resolutions.

The cerebral cortex may be organized into anatomical genetic modules, communities of brain regions with shared genetic influences via pleiotropy. Such modules could represent novel phenotypes amenable to large-scale gene discovery. This modular structure was investigated with network analysis of in vivo MRI of extended pedigrees, revealing a "multiscale" structure where smaller and larger modules exist simultaneously and in partially overlapping fashion across spatial scales, in contrast to prior work suggesting a specific number of cortical thickness modules.

Bacterial Siderophores Hijack Neutrophil Functions.

Neutrophils are the primary immune cells that respond to inflammation and combat microbial transgression. To thrive, the bacteria residing in their mammalian host have to withstand the antibactericidal responses of neutrophils. We report that enterobactin (Ent), a catecholate siderophore expressed by , inhibited PMA-induced generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) in mouse and human neutrophils.