Strategies for treating acute pain in patients with opioid dependence: a scoping review protocol.

Introduction: People who are dependent on opioids experience acute pain similar to other individuals. However, treating acute pain in these patients renders unique challenges such as opioid-induced hyperalgesia, opioid tolerance, withdrawal and stigma from healthcare providers. Thus, it is crucial to identify effective strategies for treating acute pain in this population and to highlight gaps in knowledge to create a high standard of care.

Effectiveness of an Intervention to Improve Decision Making for Older Patients With Advanced Chronic Kidney Disease : A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Older patients with advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD) face difficult decisions about managing kidney failure, frequently experiencing decisional conflict, regret, and treatment misaligned with preferences.

Objective: To assess whether a decision aid about kidney replacement therapy improved decisional quality compared with usual care.

Design: Multicenter, randomized, controlled trial.

Treatment Decision Making for Older Kidney Patients during COVID-19.

Background And Objectives: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) disrupted medical care across health care settings for older patients with advanced CKD. Understanding how shared decision making for kidney treatment decisions was influenced by the uncertainty of an evolving pandemic can provide insights for supporting shared decision making through the current and future public health crises.

Design, Setting, Participants, & Measurements: We performed thematic and narrative analyses of semistructured interviews with patients (CKD stages 4 and 5, age 70+), care partners, and clinicians from Boston, Portland (Maine), San Diego, and Chicago from August to December 2020.

Shared Decision Making Among Older Adults With Advanced CKD.

Rationale & Objective: Older adults with advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD) face difficult decisions about dialysis initiation. Although shared decision making (SDM) can help align patient preferences and values with treatment options, the extent to which older patients with CKD experience SDM remains unknown.

Study Design: A cross-sectional analysis of patient surveys examining decisional readiness, treatment options education, care partner support, and SDM.

Perceptions of Telehealth vs In-Person Visits Among Older Adults With Advanced Kidney Disease, Care Partners, and Clinicians.

Importance: Telehealth has been posited as a cost-effective means for improving access to care for persons with chronic conditions, including kidney disease. Perceptions of telehealth among older patients with chronic illness, their care partners, and clinicians are largely unknown but are critical to successful telehealth use and expansion efforts.

Objective: To identify patient, care partner, and nephrologists' perceptions of the patient-centeredness, benefits, drawbacks of telehealth compared to in-person visits.

"We went as a team closer to the truth": impacts of interprofessional education on trauma- and violence- informed care for staff in primary care settings.

Building on trauma-informed care (TIC), Trauma and Violence-Informed Care (TVIC) aims to minimize re-traumatization for people who have previously experienced violence, support people currently experiencing violence and draw attention to structural violence. Previous research has not explored how health care providers understand TVIC nor studied either TIC or TVIC in primary health care (PHC). This analysis of the perspectives of fourteen PHC staff regarding the impacts of interprofessional TVIC education sessions was conducted as part of a larger study of an intervention to promote equity in PHC.

What Predicts a Mayoral Official's Opinion about the Role of Stress in Health Disparities?

High stress is a public health issue in the United States (US), that disproportionately affects socially-marginalized group members, including racial and ethnic minorities and those of low socioeconomic status. While city governments have the potential to reduce stress exposure and health disparities through municipal policies, very little is known about factors that are associated with mayor officials' beliefs about stress as a determinant of disparities. This information is important because it can inform the design of interventions to educate city policymakers about evidence related to stress and health disparities.

Nab2 maintains thymus cellularity with aging and stress.

Thymic cellularity is influenced by a variety of biological and environmental factors, such as age and stress; however, little is known about the molecular genetic mechanisms that regulate this process. Immediate early genes of the Early growth response (Egr) family have critical roles in immune function and response to environmental stress. The transcription factors, Egr1, Egr2 and Egr3, play roles in the thymus and in peripheral T-cell activation.

Beyond pleasure and pain: Facial expression ambiguity in adults and children during intense situations.

According to psychological models as well as common intuition, intense positive and negative situations evoke highly distinct emotional expressions. Nevertheless, recent work has shown that when judging isolated faces, the affective valence of winning and losing professional tennis players is hard to differentiate. However, expressions produced by professional athletes during publicly broadcasted sports events may be strategically controlled.

Health care providers' perspectives on a weekly text-messaging intervention to engage HIV-positive persons in care (WelTel BC1).

Though evidence shows that Mobile health (mHealth) interventions can improve adherence and viral load in HIV-positive persons, few have studied the health care providers' (HCP) perspective. We conducted a prospective mixed methods pilot study using the WelTel intervention wherein HIV-positive participants (n = 25) received weekly interactive text messages for 6 months. Text message response rate and topic data were collected to illustrate the HCP experience.

A qualitative study investigating the use of a mobile phone short message service designed to improve HIV adherence and retention in care in Canada (WelTel BC1).

Patient engagement in care and adherence to medication are critical to achieving the full benefits of antiretroviral therapy (ART) among people with HIV infection. A randomized controlled trial in Kenya, WelTelKenya1, showed that an interactive mobile phone text-messaging intervention can improve adherence and viral load suppression. We conducted a pilot study to adapt the WelTel intervention for HIV-infected clients (n = 25) at an HIV clinic in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Reduced levels of serotonin 2A receptors underlie resistance of Egr3-deficient mice to locomotor suppression by clozapine.

The immediate-early gene early growth response 3 (Egr3) is associated with schizophrenia and expressed at reduced levels in postmortem patients' brains. We have previously reported that Egr3-deficient (Egr3(-/-)) mice display reduced sensitivity to the sedating effects of clozapine compared with wild-type (WT) littermates, paralleling the heightened tolerance of schizophrenia patients to antipsychotic side effects. In this study, we have used a pharmacological dissection approach to identify a neurotransmitter receptor defect in Egr3(-/-) mice that may mediate their resistance to the locomotor suppressive effects of clozapine.

Maternal literacy and health behavior: a Nepalese case study.

This article addresses the question of whether literacy could be mediating the relationships of schooling to maternal health behavior in populations undergoing demographic transition. Recent studies in which literacy was directly assessed suggest a literacy pathway to demographic change. The literacy skills of 167 urban and rural mothers of school-aged children in Lalitpur District of the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal were assessed by tests of reading comprehension, academic language proficiency, health media skills and health narrative skill, as part of studies in the urban and rural communities that included a maternal interview and ethnographic fieldwork on the contexts of family life, health care and female schooling.