Comfort Providing Gender-Affirming Care and Preferences for Consultative Support Among Rural Pediatric Primary Care Providers.

To examine how specialist-to-pediatric primary care provider (PPCP) consultative support may impact PPCP comfort in providing gender-affirming care. PPCPs in West Virginia completed an electronic survey. -tests compared comfort providing gender-affirming care and rank-sum tests compared the practicality of four consultative support modalities by time in practice and specialty.

Pediatric Gender Care in Primary Care Settings in West Virginia: Provider Knowledge, Attitudes, and Educational Experiences.

Purpose: Pediatric primary care providers (PPCPs) often care for gender diverse youth (GDY), particularly in rural areas, but little is known about their relevant knowledge, attitudes, or educational experiences regarding caring for this population.

Methods: This study surveyed PPCPs throughout the rural state of West Virginia using an online survey assessing 1) demographics, 2) knowledge, 3) attitudes, and 4) educational experiences. Knowledge and attitude scores were calculated and proportion-tests and t-tests were used to compare these scores by PPCP characteristics including age, time in practice, and training background.

No evidence for a dilution effect of the non-native snail, Potamopyrgus antipodarum, on native snails.

The dilution effect can occur by a range of mechanisms and results in reduced parasite prevalence in host taxa. In invaded ecosystems, the dilution effect can benefit native species if non-native species, acting as resistant or less competent hosts, reduce rates of parasitic infections in native species. In field experiments, we assessed whether manipulating biomass of the non-native snail, Potamopyrgus antipodarum, caused a dilution effect by reducing trematode infections in three taxa of native snails.

The vaginal microbiome and preterm birth.

The incidence of preterm birth exceeds 10% worldwide. There are significant disparities in the frequency of preterm birth among populations within countries, and women of African ancestry disproportionately bear the burden of risk in the United States. In the present study, we report a community resource that includes 'omics' data from approximately 12,000 samples as part of the integrative Human Microbiome Project.

Self-Concept in the Context of Diabetes Prevention: Development of the Lifestyle Health-Related Self-Concept Questionnaire.

Purpose: Understanding psychosocial factors in the context of lifestyle change is important to recognize distinctions in type 2 diabetes prevention behaviors. A relatively stable psychosocial feature, such as health-related self-concept (HRSC), may indicate factors that promote or repress positive health behaviors. The present study created a questionnaire specific to lifestyle change activities by modifying the Generalized Health-Related Self-Concept Questionnaire (G-HRSC).

PERFect: PERmutation Filtering test for microbiome data.

The human microbiota composition is associated with a number of diseases including obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, and bacterial vaginosis. Thus, microbiome research has the potential to reshape clinical and therapeutic approaches. However, raw microbiome count data require careful pre-processing steps that take into account both the sparsity of counts and the large number of taxa that are being measured.

Gender and the structure of self-rated health across the adult life span.

Despite the widespread use of self-rated health (SRH) in population health studies, the meaning of this holistic health judgment remains an open question. Gender differences in health, an issue of utmost importance in population research and policy, are often measured with SRH; the comparisons could be biased if men and women differ in how they form their health judgment. The aim of this study is to examine whether men and women differ in how health inputs predict their health rating across the adult life span.

Changes in vaginal community state types reflect major shifts in the microbiome.

: Recent studies of various human microbiome habitats have revealed thousands of bacterial species and the existence of large variation in communities of microorganisms in the same habitats across individual human subjects. Previous efforts to summarize this diversity, notably in the human gut and vagina, have categorized microbiome profiles by clustering them into community state types (CSTs). The functional relevance of specific CSTs has not been established.

Identifying Greater Sage-Grouse source and sink habitats for conservation planning in an energy development landscape.

Conserving a declining species that is facing many threats, including overlap of its habitats with energy extraction activities, depends upon identifying and prioritizing the value of the habitats that remain. In addition, habitat quality is often compromised when source habitats are lost or fragmented due to anthropogenic development. Our objective was to build an ecological model to classify and map habitat quality in terms of source or sink dynamics for Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) in the Atlantic Rim Project Area (ARPA), a developing coalbed natural gas field in south-central Wyoming, USA.

A Comparison of Base-calling Algorithms for Illumina Sequencing Technology.

Recent advances in next-generation sequencing technology have yielded increasing cost-effectiveness and higher throughput produced per run, in turn, greatly influencing the analysis of DNA sequences. Among the various sequencing technologies, Illumina is by far the most widely used platform. However, the Illumina sequencing platform suffers from several imperfections that can be attributed to the chemical processes inherent to the sequencing-by-synthesis technology.

Long-Term BMI Trajectories and Health in Older Adults: Hierarchical Clustering of Functional Curves.

Objective: This project contributes to the emerging research that aims to identify distinct body mass index (BMI) trajectory types in the population. We identify clusters of long-term BMI curves among older adults and determine how the clusters differ with respect to initial health.

Method: Health and Retirement Study cohort (N = 9,893) with BMI information collected in up to 10 waves (1992-2010) is analyzed using a powerful cutting-edge approach: hierarchical clustering of BMI functions estimated via the Principal Analysis by Conditional Expectations (PACE) algorithm.

Predictors for dioxin accumulation in residents living in Da Nang and Bien Hoa, Vietnam, many years after Agent Orange use.

Agent Orange (AO) was the main defoliant used by the US in Vietnam from 1961 to 1971; AO was contaminated with dioxin (2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, or TCDD). Three major dioxin “hot spots” remain from previous AO storage and use at former US bases at Bien Hoa, Da Nang, and Phu Cat, posing potential health risks for Vietnamese living on or near these hot spots. We evaluated potential risk factors contributing to serum TCDD levels in Vietnamese residents at and near contaminated sites in Da Nang and Bien Hoa, Vietnam.

Investigating the performance of AIC in selecting phylogenetic models.

The popular likelihood-based model selection criterion, Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC), is a breakthrough mathematical result derived from information theory. AIC is an approximation to Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence with the derivation relying on the assumption that the likelihood function has finite second derivatives. However, for phylogenetic estimation, given that tree space is discrete with respect to tree topology, the assumption of a continuous likelihood function with finite second derivatives is violated.

Statistical issues associated with modeling of synonymous mutation data.

The explosion of data in evolutionary bioinformatics has led to sometimes ad hoc, incomplete and even inaccurate data analyses. Taking dS data, namely, data on synonymous substitutions per synonymous sites, we go through a statistical analysis for modeling the time since duplications of genes. We explore the shortcomings of previous analyses, especially with a view towards their effect on inference for the gene duplication process.

Plasticity of animal genome architecture unmasked by rapid evolution of a pelagic tunicate.

Genomes of animals as different as sponges and humans show conservation of global architecture. Here we show that multiple genomic features including transposon diversity, developmental gene repertoire, physical gene order, and intron-exon organization are shattered in the tunicate Oikopleura, belonging to the sister group of vertebrates and retaining chordate morphology. Ancestral architecture of animal genomes can be deeply modified and may therefore be largely nonadaptive.

Lineage-specific differences in the amino acid substitution process.

In Darwinian evolution, mutations occur approximately at random in a gene, turned into amino acid mutations by the genetic code. Some mutations are fixed to become substitutions and some are eliminated from the population. Partitioning pairs of closely related species with complete genome sequences by average population size of each pair, we looked at the substitution matrices generated for these partitions and compared the substitution patterns between species.