Background: Although evening screen time is thought to impair subsequent sleep, current measures are limited to questionnaires which seem unlikely to accurately assess screen time in youth. Given the ubiquitous nature of digital devices, improving measurement of screen time is required before related health effects can be appropriately determined. The aim of this study was to objectively quantify screen time before sleep using video camera footage.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn cells, proteins rapidly self-assemble into sophisticated nanomachines. Bioinspired self-assembly approaches, such as DNA origami, have been used to achieve complex three-dimensional (3D) nanostructures and devices. However, current synthetic systems are limited by low yields in hierarchical assembly and challenges in rapid and efficient reconfiguration between diverse structures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Although questionnaire-based cross-sectional research suggests that screen time before bed correlates with poor sleep, self-reported data seem unlikely to capture the complexity of modern screen use, requiring objective night-by-night measures to advance this field.
Objective: To examine whether evening screen time is associated with sleep duration and quality that night in youths.
Design, Setting, And Participants: This repeated-measures cohort study was performed from March to December 2021 in participant homes in Dunedin, New Zealand.
J Epidemiol Community Health
November 2024
Background: Child mental health has become an increasingly important issue in the UK, especially in the context of significant welfare reforms. Universal Credit (UC) has introduced substantial changes to the UK's social security system, significantly impacting low-income families. Our aim was to assess the effects of UC's introduction on children's mental health for families eligible for UC versus a comparable non-eligible sample.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Bioblitzes are a tool for the rapid appraisal of biodiversity and are particularly useful in remote and understudied regions and for understudied taxa. Lichens are an example of an often overlooked group, despite being widespread in virtually all terrestrial ecosystems and having many important ecological functions.
New Information: We report the lichens and allied fungi collected during the 2018 terrestrial bioblitz conducted on Calvert Island on the Central Coast of British Columbia, Canada.
Background: Ivermectin mass drug administration (MDA) is effective for controlling onchocerciasis and scabies, with evidence supporting its role in some species of soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections. In the context of RISE, a cluster-randomised trial for scabies, this study evaluated the effectiveness of ivermectin MDA in reducing STH burden in the Western Province of Solomon Islands.
Methods: Twenty villages were randomised 1:1 to receive ivermectin MDA as one dose (IVM-1) or two doses (IVM-2) for scabies.
Purpose: Exposure to parental mental ill-health and poverty in childhood impact health across the lifecourse. Both maternal and paternal mental health may be important influences, but few studies have unpicked the complex interrelationships between these exposures and family poverty for later health.
Methods: We used longitudinal data on 10,500 children from the nationally representative UK millennium cohort study.
Learning Disability Liaison Nurses have been shown to improve hospital experiences and this is an emerging role in Ireland. This research qualitatively explored the impact of a Clinical Nurse Specialist Acute Hospital Liaison from the perspective of staff in an intellectual disability community organisation. Participants identified significant challenges with supporting people attending hospitals including accessing and understanding information, anxieties and not being prepared for transitions through the hospital.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Adolescent mental health is a public health priority. Maternal mental ill health and adverse socioeconomic exposure (ASE) are known risk factors of adolescent mental ill health. However, little is known about the extent to which cumulative ASE over the life course mediates the maternal-adolescent mental health association, which this study aims to explore.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Screen time is predominantly measured using questionnaires assessing a limited range of activities. This project aimed to develop a coding protocol that reliably identified screen time, including device type and specific screen behaviors, from video-camera footage.
Methods: Screen use was captured from wearable and stationary PatrolEyes video cameras in 43 participants (aged 10-14 years) within the home environment (May-December 2021, coding in 2022, statistical analysis in 2023).
Background: The UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) administers Universal Credit (UC) - the main UK benefit for people in- and out-of-work. UC is being rolled out nationally from 2013 to 2024. Citizens Advice (CA) is an independent charity that provides advice and support to people making a claim for UC.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFActivated microplates are widely used in biological assays and cell culture to immobilize biomolecules, either through passive physical adsorption or covalent cross-linking. Covalent attachment gives greater stability in complex biological mixtures. However, current multistep chemical activation methods add complexity and cost, require specific functional groups, and can introduce cytotoxic chemicals that affect downstream cellular applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough species richness can be determined by different mechanisms at different spatial scales, the role of scale in the effects of marine inputs on island biogeography has not been studied explicitly. Here, we evaluated the potential influence of island characteristics and marine inputs (seaweed wrack biomass and marine-derived nitrogen in the soil) on plant species richness at both a local (plot) and regional (island) scale on 92 islands in British Columbia, Canada. We found that the effects of subsidies on species richness depend strongly on spatial scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe qualitative study reported in this article set out to develop an understanding of how staff supporting individuals with intellectual disabilities deliver health promotion in their practice. The aim was to determine how social care managers working within an intellectual disability care setting in Ireland perceived health promotion and their role within it. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect the data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Children in care face adverse health outcomes throughout their life course compared with their peers. In England, over the past decade, the stark rise in the number of cared-for children has coincided with rising child poverty, a key risk factor for children entering care. We aimed to assess the contribution of recent trends in child poverty to trends in care entry.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The UK social security system is being transformed by the implementation of Universal Credit (UC), which combines six existing benefits and tax credits into a single payment for low-income households. Despite extensive reports of hardship associated with the introduction of UC, no previous studies have comprehensively evaluated its impact on mental health. Because payments are targeted at low-income households, impacts on mental health will have important consequences for health inequalities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Canadians are increasingly gaining web-based access to digital health services, and they expect to access their data from these services through a central patient access channel. Implementing data sharing between these services will require patient trust that is fostered through meaningful consent and consent management. Understanding user consent requirements and information needs is necessary for developing a trustworthy and transparent consent management system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe digital health landscape is rapidly evolving with regard to how society accesses and interacts with digital information and technologies. With a largely commercial marketplace, there are growing concerns that users are not fully informed about how their data are used. Canadian privacy legislation is currently undergoing modernization to improve the transparency of commercial information handling practices through the introduction of meaningful consent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMarine-derived resource subsidies can generate intrapopulation variation in the behaviors and diets of terrestrial consumers. How omnivores respond, given their multiple trophic interactions, is not well understood. We sampled mice () and their food sources at five sites on three islands of the Central Coast of British Columbia, Canada, to test predictions regarding variation in the spatial behavior and consumption of marine-subsidized foods among individuals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDNA nanotechnology provides methods for building custom membrane-interacting nanostructures with diverse functions, such as shaping membranes, tethering defined numbers of membrane proteins, and transmembrane nanopores. The modification of DNA nanostructures with hydrophobic groups, such as cholesterol, is required to facilitate membrane interactions. However, cholesterol-induced aggregation of DNA origami nanostructures remains a challenge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOver the last 12 years the United Kingdom (UK) has seen the introduction of an austerity programme-a fiscal policy-with the primary goal to reduce the government's budget deficit and the role of the welfare system. Between 2010 and 2015 there was an estimated reduction of £14.5 billion in spending, attributable to decreasing the value of benefits and restricting entitlement to benefit claimants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlpine lakes support unique communities which may respond with great sensitivity to climate change. Thus, an understanding of the drivers of the structure of communities inhabiting alpine lakes is important to predict potential changes in the future. To this end, we sampled benthic macroinvertebrate communities and measured environmental variables (water temperature, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, pH, nitrate, turbidity, blue-green algal phycocyanin, chlorophyll-a) as well as structural parameters (habitat type, lake size, maximum depth) in 28 lakes within Hohe Tauern National Park, Austria, between altitudes of 2,000 and 2,700 m a.
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