State of the art in biobehavioral approaches to the management of chronic pain in childhood.

Chronic pain in childhood is prevalent, persistent and significantly impactful on most domains of life. The chronic pain experience occurs within a complex biopsychosocial framework, with particular emphasis on the social context. Currently, psychological treatments involve a cognitive-behavioral therapy treatment plan, providing some combination of psychoeducation, self-regulation training, maladaptive cognition identification, behavioral exposure and parent involvement.

Hypertension, antihypertensive treatment and cancer incidence and mortality: a pooled collaborative analysis of 12 Australian and New Zealand cohorts.

Background: Observational studies examining associations between hypertension and cancer are inconsistent. We explored the association of hypertension, graded hypertension and antihypertensive treatment with cancer incidence and mortality.

Method: Eighty-six thousand five hundred and ninety-three participants from the Australian and New Zealand Diabetes and Cancer Collaboration were linked to the National Death Index and Australian Cancer Database.

Nonmarital Relationships and Changing Perceptions of Marriage Among African American Young Adults.

Cohabitation has become increasingly widespread over the past decade. Such trends have given rise to debates about the relation between cohabitation and marriage, in terms of what cohabitation means for individual relationship trajectories and for the institution of marriage more generally. Using recent data from a sample of almost 800 African Americans and fixed effects modeling procedures, in the present study the authors shed some light on these debates by exploring the extent to which cohabitation, relative to both singlehood and dating, was associated with within-individual changes in African Americans' marital beliefs during the transition to adulthood.

Perspectives on the clinical significance of functional pain syndromes in children.

Functional pain syndromes (FPS) characterize a subset of individuals who experience pain and related symptoms and disability without clear structural or disease etiology. In the pediatric population, FPS hold high clinical importance due to significant prevalence rates and potential to persist into adulthood. Although extensive research has been executed to disambiguate FPS, the syndromes that fall within its spectrum remain conceptually complex and sometimes ill-defined.

Baseline Physiologic and Psychosocial Characteristics of Transgender Youth Seeking Care for Gender Dysphoria.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to describe baseline characteristics of participants in a prospective observational study of transgender youth (aged 12-24 years) seeking care for gender dysphoria at a large, urban transgender youth clinic.

Methods: Eligible participants presented consecutively for care at between February 2011 and June 2013 and completed a computer-assisted survey at their initial study visit. Physiologic data were abstracted from medical charts.

Association of Cardiometabolic Multimorbidity With Mortality.

Importance: The prevalence of cardiometabolic multimorbidity is increasing.

Objective: To estimate reductions in life expectancy associated with cardiometabolic multimorbidity.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Age- and sex-adjusted mortality rates and hazard ratios (HRs) were calculated using individual participant data from the Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration (689,300 participants; 91 cohorts; years of baseline surveys: 1960-2007; latest mortality follow-up: April 2013; 128,843 deaths).

Generation of Broad-Spectrum Antifungal Drug Candidates from the Natural Product Compound Aureobasidin A.

The natural product aureobasidin A (AbA) is a potent, well-tolerated antifungal agent with robust efficacy in animals. Although native AbA is active against a number of fungi, it has little activity against Aspergillus fumigatus, an important human pathogen, and attempts to improve the activity against this organism by structural modifications have to date involved chemistries too complex for continued development. This report describes novel chemistry for the modification of AbA.

Systematic Review on Intensive Interdisciplinary Pain Treatment of Children With Chronic Pain.

Background And Objective: Pediatric debilitating chronic pain is a severe health problem, often requiring complex interventions such as intensive interdisciplinary pain treatment (IIPT). Research is lacking regarding the effectiveness of IIPT for children. The objective was to systematically review studies evaluating the effects of IIPT.

Microlearning mApp raises health competence: hybrid service design.

Work place health support interventions can help support our aging work force, with mApps offering cost-effectiveness opportunities. Previous research shows that health support apps should offer users enough newness and relevance each time they are used. Otherwise the 'eHealth law of attrition' applies: 90 % of users are lost prematurely.

The metabolic syndrome and cancer: Is the metabolic syndrome useful for predicting cancer risk above and beyond its individual components?

Aims: The metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a risk factor for cancer. However, it is not known if the MetS confers a greater cancer risk than the sum of its individual components, which components drive the association, or if the MetS predicts future cancer risk.

Materials And Methods: We linked 20,648 participants from the Australian and New Zealand Diabetes and Cancer Collaboration with complete data on the MetS to national cancer registries and used Cox proportional hazards models to estimate associations of the MetS, the number of positive MetS components, and each of the five MetS components separately with the risk for overall, colorectal, prostate and breast cancer.

Topical Review: Resilience Resources and Mechanisms in Pediatric Chronic Pain.

Objective: To apply resilience theory and the extant literature to propose a resilience-risk model for pediatric chronic pain and provide an agenda for research and clinical practice in pediatric chronic pain resilience. 

Method: Literature review to develop a resilience-risk model for pediatric chronic pain.

Results: The chronic pain literature has identified unique individual and social/environmental resilience resources and pain-related resilience mechanisms that promote pain adaptation.

Pediatric Pain Screening Tool: rapid identification of risk in youth with pain complaints.

Moderate to severe chronic pain is a problem for 1.7 million children, costing $19.5 billion dollars annually in the United States alone.

Longitudinal stability of medication adherence among adolescent solid organ transplant recipients.

Solid organ transplantation requires ongoing adherence to immunosuppressants and other medications. Although adolescence is a risk factor for poor medication-taking, little is known about the patterns of adherence within individuals over time. This study aimed to examine the stability of adherence over time using three different assessment techniques.

Comparison of anthropometric measures as predictors of cancer incidence: A pooled collaborative analysis of 11 Australian cohorts.

Obesity is a risk factor for cancer. However, it is not known if general adiposity, as measured by body mass index (BMI) or central adiposity [e.g.

Living in fear of your child's pain: the Parent Fear of Pain Questionnaire.

Fear and avoidance have been consistently associated with poor pain-related outcomes in children. In the context of the pediatric pain experience, parent distress and behaviors can be highly influential. This study validated the Parent Fear of Pain Questionnaire (PFOPQ) to assess a parent's fears and avoidance behaviors associated with their child's pain.

Rapid treatment-induced brain changes in pediatric CRPS.

To date, brain structure and function changes in children with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) as a result of disease and treatment remain unknown. Here, we investigated (a) gray matter (GM) differences between patients with CRPS and healthy controls and (b) GM and functional connectivity (FC) changes in patients following intensive interdisciplinary psychophysical pain treatment. Twenty-three patients (13 females, 9 males; average age ± SD = 13.

Pubertal timing and sexual risk behaviors among rural African American male youth: testing a model based on life history theory.

Life History Theory (LHT), a branch of evolutionary biology, describes how organisms maximize their reproductive success in response to environmental conditions. This theory suggests that challenging environmental conditions will lead to early pubertal maturation, which in turn predicts heightened risky sexual behavior. Although largely confirmed among female adolescents, results with male youth are inconsistent.

Clinical cutoffs for adherence barriers in solid organ transplant recipients: how many is too many?

Objective: The current study used multiple statistical methods to determine empirically derived and clinically relevant cutoff scores on the Adolescent Medication Barriers Scale (AMBS) and Parent Medication Barriers Scale (PMBS) to detect adolescents and young adults with solid organ transplants who experienced medication nonadherence or negative medical outcomes.

Methods: Participants included 71 patients and 80 caregivers. Cutoff scores were determined via receiver operating characteristic curve analyses, t-test analyses, and the sensitivity and specificity of using certain cutoff scores.

Prediction of cardiovascular and all-cause mortality at 10 years in the hypertensive aged population.

Background: We have previously developed a score for predicting cardiovascular events in the intermediate term in an elderly hypertensive population. In this study, we aimed to extend this work to predict 10-year cardiovascular and all-cause mortality in the hypertensive aged population.

Methods: Ten-year follow-up data of 5,378 hypertensive participants in the Second Australian National Blood Pressure study who were aged 65-84 years at baseline (1995-2001) and without prior cardiovascular events were analyzed.

Intrinsic brain networks normalize with treatment in pediatric complex regional pain syndrome.

Pediatric complex regional pain syndrome (P-CRPS) offers a unique model of chronic neuropathic pain as it either resolves spontaneously or through therapeutic interventions in most patients. Here we evaluated brain changes in well-characterized children and adolescents with P-CRPS by measuring resting state networks before and following a brief (median = 3 weeks) but intensive physical and psychological treatment program, and compared them to matched healthy controls. Differences in intrinsic brain networks were observed in P-CRPS compared to controls before treatment (disease state) with the most prominent differences in the fronto-parietal, salience, default mode, central executive, and sensorimotor networks.

"Pain Can't Stop Me": Examining Pain Self-Efficacy and Acceptance as Resilience Processes Among Youth With Chronic Headache.

Objective: To examine pain self-efficacy and pain acceptance in relation to functioning in pediatric patients with chronic headache.

Methods: Participants were 209 youth aged 8-17 years who presented for a multidisciplinary pediatric headache clinic evaluation. They completed measures of pain self-efficacy and pain acceptance and a standard battery of clinical measures including indicators of emotional functioning.

Factors that Influence Trajectories of Delinquency Throughout Adolescence.

Given that one of the most powerful predictors of adult crime is the presence of behavior problems in childhood and adolescence, there is a need to further understand factors that determine behavior patterns during this developmental stage. This study focuses on stressful life experiences such as exposure to delinquent peers, racial discrimination, as well as family characteristics such as parenting style and family transitions. Data come from four waves of the Family and Community Health Survey, an African-American sample.

The Presence of Borrelia miyamotoi, A Relapsing Fever Spirochaete, in Questing Ixodes ricinus in Belgium and in The Netherlands.

Borrelia miyamotoi is a tick-borne bacterium that may cause relapsing fever in humans. As this pathogen has been discovered in Europe only recently, only little is known about its local impact on human health and its spatial distribution. In this study, we show the results of PCR screenings for B.