Publications by authors named "Tully B"

Article Synopsis
  • The subseafloor igneous basement contains a vast microbial habitat, but little is known about the life that exists there, especially in older sections over 65 million years old.
  • Recent research tested this by analyzing samples from the Louisville Seamount Chain, finding varied cell biomass indicating the presence of microbial life in rocks older than 65 million years.
  • The dominant bacterial genes found suggest active microbial processes related to nitrogen, sulfur, metal transformations, and hydrocarbon breakdown, highlighting a much broader range of subseafloor life than previously recognized.
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Effective conservation requires a variety of perspectives that center on different ways of knowing. Disciplinary diversity and inclusion (DDI) offers an important means of integrating different ways of knowing into pressing conservation challenges. However, DDI means more than multiple disciplinary approaches to conservation; cognitive diversity and epistemic justice are key.

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Background: Implementation of recommended gestational weight gain (GWG) care by antenatal care providers is poor. It is unclear whether practice implementation and barriers differ between antenatal care provider profession or experience. This study aimed to assesses the provision of and barriers to guideline care for GWG and examine associations with professional discipline and years of experience.

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Introduction: Antenatal clinical guidelines recommend antenatal care providers routinely assess the smoking status of all pregnant women at the first antenatal visit and, for women who are current smokers, provide cessation support at the first and all subsequent visits. This study aimed to assess women's receipt of comprehensive guideline-recommended care for smoking during pregnancy and the maternal and service characteristics associated with such care.

Aims And Methods: A telephone survey was conducted with women who were recently pregnant and received antenatal care from public maternity services in one Australian local health district.

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Introduction: E-cigarette use has rapidly increased amongst young people in Australia, however the prevalence of use amongst pregnant people is not known. The aim of this study was to examine the prevalence of e-cigarette use and dual use of e-cigarettes and tobacco cigarettes, characteristics associated with use and reasons for use amongst a sample of pregnant Australian people attending public antenatal clinics.

Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 4024 pregnant people attending antenatal appointments, between July 2021 and December 2022, in one local health district in New South Wales, Australia.

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Introduction: Globally, guideline-recommended antenatal care for smoking cessation is not routinely delivered by antenatal care providers. Implementation strategies have been shown to improve the delivery of clinical practices across a variety of clinical services but there is an absence of evidence in applying such strategies to support improvements to antenatal care for smoking cessation in pregnancy. This study aims to determine the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of implementation strategies in increasing the routine provision of recommended antenatal care for smoking cessation in public maternity services.

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Transposases are mobile genetic elements that move within and between genomes, promoting genomic plasticity in microorganisms. In marine microbial communities, the abundance of transposases increases with depth, but the reasons behind this trend remain unclear. Our analysis of metagenomes from the Oceans and Malaspina Expeditions suggests that a particle-associated lifestyle is the main covariate for the high occurrence of transposases in the deep ocean, and this trend holds true for individual genomes as well as in a community-wide sense.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the implementation and acceptability of gestational weight gain (GWG) care as recommended by Australian clinical guidelines for pregnant women, focusing on weight assessment and dietary advice.
  • It found that only 13.1% of women reported receiving weight assessments at both their first and a subsequent antenatal visit, and less than one-third received comprehensive advice on GWG, diet, and physical activity.
  • Factors such as being younger, identifying as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, having a higher pre-pregnancy BMI, experiencing a first pregnancy, and living in lower socio-economic conditions were associated with higher likelihoods of receiving care and advice.
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Background: Smoking, alcohol consumption and weight gain outside recommendations during pregnancy are preventable health risk factors associated with poorer health outcomes for mother and infant. Clustering of these risk factors further increases the risk and severity of outcomes. Limited research has explored the characteristics of pregnant women that are associated with clustering of these risks and women's preferences for receiving support.

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Single-celled eukaryotes play ecologically significant roles in the marine environment, yet fundamental questions about their biodiversity, ecological function, and interactions remain. Environmental sequencing enables researchers to document naturally occurring protistan communities, without culturing bias, yet metagenomic and metatranscriptomic sequencing approaches cannot separate individual species from communities. To more completely capture the genomic content of mixed protistan populations, we can create bins of sequences that represent the same organism (metagenome-assembled genomes [MAGs]).

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Heterotrophic microbes play an important role in the Earth System as key drivers of major biogeochemical cycles. Specifically, the consumption rate of organic matter is set by the interaction between diverse microbial communities and the chemical and physical environment in which they reside. Modeling these dynamics requires reducing the complexity of microbial communities and linking directly with biogeochemical functions.

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Background: Antenatal clinical practice guidelines recommend routine assessment of weight and provision of advice on recommended weight gain during pregnancy and referral to additional services when appropriate. However, there are barriers to clinicians adopting such best-practice guidelines. Effective, cost-effective, and affordable implementation strategies are needed to ensure the intended benefits of guidelines are realised.

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Background: Exclusive breastfeeding to six months of age is a major global public health priority. Several characteristics are known to be associated with early cessation of breastfeeding, however, limited evidence exists regarding whether women's reported reasons for cessation are associated with maternal, pregnancy and infant characteristics. The aims of this study were to: i) describe women's reported intention to breastfeed and their subsequent breastfeeding practices; ii) describe women's reported reasons for breastfeeding cessation prior to the infant being five months of age; and iii) examine associations between these factors and maternal, pregnancy and infant characteristics.

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The Pediatric Environmental Health Center (PEHC) at Boston Children's Hospital is a specialty referral clinic that provides consultation for approximately 250 patients annually. Identifying environmental hazards is key for clinical management. Exposure concerns include lead, mold, pesticides, perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), impaired air quality, and more.

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Background: Clinical guideline recommendations for addressing modifiable risk factors are not routinely implemented into preconception and antenatal care. This review assessed the effectiveness of implementation strategies in improving health professional provision of preconception and antenatal care addressing tobacco smoking, weight management and alcohol consumption.

Methods: A systematic review of randomised and non-randomised studies with a parallel comparison group was conducted.

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Objective: A practice change intervention demonstrated improvements in the provision of antenatal care addressing alcohol consumption. The aim of this study was to explore whether the effectiveness of the intervention differed between subgroups of pregnant women and types and location of maternity services.

Design And Setting: Post-hoc exploratory subgroup analyses of the outcomes from a randomised stepped-wedge controlled trial conducted with all public maternity services within three sectors of a local health district in Australia.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study evaluated a practice change intervention aimed at reducing alcohol use during pregnancy by implementing new care guidelines in three sectors of Hunter New England, Australia.
  • Surveys were conducted before and after the intervention to gather data from 1309 women pre-intervention and 2540 post-intervention about their alcohol consumption during pregnancy.
  • The results showed that while overall alcohol use remained similar, there was a significant reduction in special occasion drinking among pregnant women after the intervention.
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The subseafloor is a vast habitat that supports microorganisms that have a global scale impact on geochemical cycles. Many of the endemic microbial communities inhabiting the subseafloor consist of small populations under growth-limited conditions. For small populations, stochastic evolutionary events can have large impacts on intraspecific population dynamics and allele frequencies.

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Introduction: Antenatal care addressing alcohol consumption during pregnancy is not routinely delivered in maternity services. Although a number of implementation trials have reported significant increases in such care, the majority of women still did not receive all recommended care elements, and improvements dissipated over time. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of an iteratively developed and delivered implementation support package in: (1) increasing the proportion of pregnant women who receive antenatal care addressing alcohol consumption and (2) sustaining the rate of care over time.

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Article Synopsis
  • * By integrating various datasets, including drug response and gene essentiality screens, researchers identified thousands of protein biomarkers linked to cancer vulnerabilities, many of which were undetectable at the transcript level.
  • * The study demonstrates that the predictive power of the proteome for drug response is similarly effective as that of the transcriptome, and even reducing the number of analyzed proteins to 1,500 does not significantly affect this predictive capability.
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Introduction: Alcohol use in pregnancy remains common in Australia, despite national guidelines recommending that pregnant women abstain. The aims of this study were to investigate where pregnant women obtain information about alcohol use in pregnancy and the relationship between the information source used and women's demographic characteristics and alcohol use.

Methods: In this cross-sectional survey of pregnant women attending public maternity services in the Hunter New England region (New South Wales), women were asked, 'Where did you get information to help you make decisions about alcohol use during pregnancy?'.

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Objectives: Healthy Conversation Skills (HCS) training is an established method of upskilling health professionals in person-centred behaviour change communication. A Train-the-Trainer (TtT) model was adopted to scale-up delivery of HCS training. This study examined the impact of the TtT course on new Trainers' perceived barriers and enablers to delivering HCS training using the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF).

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Background: Clinical guideline recommendations for addressing alcohol consumption during pregnancy are sub-optimally implemented and limited evidence exists to inform practice improvements. The aim of this study was to estimate the effectiveness of a practice change intervention in improving the provision of antenatal care addressing alcohol consumption during pregnancy in public maternity services.

Methods: A randomised stepped-wedge controlled trial was undertaken with all public maternity services in three sectors (one urban, two regional/rural) of a single local health district in New South Wales, Australia.

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Background: There are significant challenges in ensuring sufficient clinician participation in quality improvement training. Clinician capability has been identified as a barrier to the delivery of evidence-based care. Clinician training is an effective strategy to address this barrier, however, there are significant challenges in ensuring adequate clinician participation in training.

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This case study focuses on the development and implementation of a governance structure and processes by a mainstream health unit that valued the principles of Aboriginal self-determination, empowerment and leadership by Aboriginal staff in organisational and service delivery decisions and elevated Aboriginal voices by embedding cultural inclusion in such decision making. Various models of embedding Aboriginal voices in the governance of the unit were developed and implemented over time. Ongoing review and reflection identified limitations and opportunities for improving the embedding of Aboriginal voices in organisational decision making.

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