Rule-mediated connectivity in social-ecological-technological systems: A comparative network analysis of reservoir operation rules in Coyote Valley Dam (United States) and Ameghino Dam (Argentina).

In the management of reservoirs, different forms of infrastructure (such as dams, hydropower units, information) are functionally interdependent and often managed by different types of actors to form a social-ecological-technological system. Such interdependence also occurs because institutions (understood as rules that guide and constrain actor behavior) exist to indicate how infrastructures should be managed. We apply institutional analysis and social network analysis to identify how functionally interdependent infrastructures and actors are connected by formal rules created to manage reservoir operations in Argentina (Ameghino Dam, Chubut) and the United States (Coyote Valley Dam, California).

Associations between rural hospital closures and acute and post-acute care access and outcomes.

Objective: To determine whether rural hospital closures affected hospital and post-acute care (PAC) use and outcomes.

Study Setting And Design: Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we evaluated associations between 32 rural hospital closures and changes in county-level: (1) travel distances to and lengths of stay at hospitals; (2) functional limitations at and time from hospital discharge to start of PAC episode; (3) 30-day readmissions and mortality and hospitalizations for a fall-related injury; and (4) population-level hospitalization and death rates.

Data Sources And Analytic Sample: 100% Medicare claims and home health and skilled nursing facility clinical data to identify approximately 3 million discharges for older fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries.

Addressing concerns of access and distribution of health workforce: a discrete choice experiment to develop rural attraction and retention strategies in southwestern Ethiopia.

Background: There is a shortage of health workers in Ethiopia, with an uneven distribution between urban and rural areas. To formulate effective policy interventions aimed at attracting and retaining health workers in rural regions, this study examined the stated preferences of health workers when selecting health jobs.

Methods: A discrete choice experiment was conducted among health workers in the Aari and South Omo zones of the South Ethiopia region, from September to November 2022 to gather insights into their job preferences.

Performance of the Washington Group questions in measuring blindness and deafness.

The Washington Group Short Set (WGSS) questions are intended to measure the severity of disability and disability status in US federal surveys. We used data from the 2010-2018 National Health Interview Survey to examine the performance of the WGSS visual disability and hearing disability questions in capturing blindness and deafness. We found that the WGSS questions failed to capture 35.

A year of disability health equity milestones: Why disability data is still needed.

Three milestone disability health equity related decisions occurred between September 2023 and May 2024. Though each is to be celebrated in its own right, the continued failure to collect and/or limitations with disability data block the path to achieving disability health equity in the US.

Midlife health in Britain and the United States: a comparison of two nationally representative cohorts.

Background: Older adults in the USA have worse health and wider socioeconomic inequalities in health compared with those in Britain. Less is known about how health in the two countries compares in mid-life, a time of emerging health decline, including inequalities in health.

Methods: We compare measures of current regular smoking status, obesity, self-rated health, cholesterol, blood pressure and glycated haemoglobin using population-weighted modified Poisson regression in the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) in Britain (N = 9665) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) in the USA (N = 12 300), when cohort members were aged 34-46 and 33-43, respectively.

Disability inclusion in national surveys.

National surveys are important for understanding the disparities that disabled people experience across social determinants of health; however, limited research has examined the methods used to include disabled people in these surveys. This study reviewed nationally representative surveys administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Census Bureau that collected data in the past 5 years and sampled adults ≥18 years. Data from both publicly available online survey documents and a questionnaire emailed to survey administrators were used to determine whether surveys (1) oversampled disabled people, (2) had a data-accessibility protocol to support data collection, and (3) provided multiple data-collection modalities (eg, phone, paper).

Parity and post-reproductive mortality among U.S. Black and White women: Evidence from the health and retirement study.

Population health research finds women's mortality risk associated with childlessness, low parity (one child), and high parity (6+ children) in a U-shaped pattern, although U.S. studies are inconsistent overall and by race/ethnicity.

The role of perceived social support in subjective wellbeing among working-age U.S. adults with and without limitations in activities of daily living.

Background: Perceived social support may enhance subjective wellbeing (SWB) for adults with activities of daily living (ADL) limitations. However, little is known about how social support may mediate (explain) and/or moderate SWB differences among U.S.

Causal inference on human behaviour.

Making causal inferences regarding human behaviour is difficult given the complex interplay between countless contributors to behaviour, including factors in the external world and our internal states. We provide a non-technical conceptual overview of challenges and opportunities for causal inference on human behaviour. The challenges include our ambiguous causal language and thinking, statistical under- or over-control, effect heterogeneity, interference, timescales of effects and complex treatments.

"Dead or Alive?" Assessment of the Binary End-of-Event Outcome Indicator for the NEMSIS Public Research Dataset.

Objectives: The National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS) provides a robust set of data to evaluate prehospital care. However, a major limitation is that the vast majority of the records lack a definitive outcome. This study aimed to evaluate the performance of a recently proposed method ("MLB" method) to impute missing end-of-EMS-event outcomes ("dead" or "alive") for patient care reports in the NEMSIS public research dataset.

Logical interdependencies in infrastructure: What are they, how to identify them, and what do they mean for infrastructure risk analysis?

A useful theoretical lens that has emerged for understanding urban resilience is the four basic types of interdependencies in critical infrastructures: the physical, geographic, cyber, and logical types. This paper is motivated by a conceptual and methodological limitation-although logical interdependencies (where two infrastructures affect the state of each other via human decisions) are regarded as one of the basic types of interdependencies, the question of how to apply the notion and how to quantify logical relations remains under-explored. To overcome this limitation, this study focuses on institutions (rules), for example, rules and planned tasks guiding human interactions with one another and infrastructure.

Estimated Pulse Wave Velocity Is Associated With a Higher Risk of Dementia in the Health and Retirement Study.

Background: In this paper, we use the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine the relationship between an estimated measure of pulse wave velocity (ePWV) and cognitive impairment with no dementia and dementia, respectively.

Methods: We modeled the relationship between ePWV and cognitive status in 2006/2008 using data from 8,492 men and women (mean age 68.6 years) controlling for age, blood pressure, sociodemographic, and socioeconomic characteristics (sex, race and ethnicity, education, income, wealth), health behaviors (smoking and physical activity), body mass index (BMI), health status and related medication use (history of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and stroke), and cerebrovascular disease (CVD)-related biomarkers (C-reactive protein, cystatin-C, hemoglobin A1c, total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein [HDL] cholesterol).

Elite class self-interest, socioeconomic inequality and U.S. population health.

Class-based perspectives on the persistent social gradients in health within modern welfare states largely focus on the adverse consequences of unfettered neoliberalism and entrenched meritocratic socioeconomic selection. Namely, neoliberal-driven economic inequality has fuelled resentment and stress among lower-status groups, while these groups have become more homogeneous with regard to health behaviours and outcomes. We synthesise several sociological and historical literatures to argue that, in addition to these class-based explanations, socioeconomic inequality may contribute to persistent social gradients in health due to elite class self-interest-in particular elites' preferences for overdiagnosis, overprescription and costly high-technology medical treatments over disease prevention, and for increased tolerance for regulatory capture.

Parent-Child Relationship Typologies and Associated Health Status Among Older Adults in the United States and China: A Cross-Cultural Comparison.

Background And Objectives: Cultural differences in intergenerational relationships have been well established in prior research. However, cross-national comparison evidence on the parent-child relationship and its health implications remains limited.

Research Design And Methods: Data from the 2014 U.

Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation.

The controversy over online misinformation and social media has opened a gap between public discourse and scientific research. Public intellectuals and journalists frequently make sweeping claims about the effects of exposure to false content online that are inconsistent with much of the current empirical evidence. Here we identify three common misperceptions: that average exposure to problematic content is high, that algorithms are largely responsible for this exposure and that social media is a primary cause of broader social problems such as polarization.

Sibling Availability, Sibling Sorting, and Subjective Health Among Chinese Adults.

Despite rising numbers of only children in China, little is known about their family dynamics and well-being in adulthood-for example, how often they marry other only children and whether those in siblingless families have worse or better health than others. Theoretical expectations produce opposing predictions: siblings might provide social and emotional support and reduce parental caregiving pressures, but only children might receive more support from parents and grandparents. Using the 2010 China Family Panel Study, we examine marital sorting on Chinese adults' number of siblings and test whether sibling availability and sibling sorting are associated with subjective physical and mental health.

Evaluating Seasonal Variations in Human Contact Patterns and Their Impact on the Transmission of Respiratory Infectious Diseases.

Background: Human contact patterns are a key determinant driving the spread of respiratory infectious diseases. However, the relationship between contact patterns and seasonality as well as their possible association with the seasonality of respiratory diseases is yet to be clarified.

Methods: We investigated the association between temperature and human contact patterns using data collected through a cross-sectional diary-based contact survey in Shanghai, China, between December 24, 2017, and May 30, 2018.

Association of Medicare Home Health Ratings With Older Adult Fall Injuries: An Instrumental Variables Analysis.

Objectives: To understand the role of high-quality home health care for fall prevention.

Design: A 100% sample of national Medicare claims and home health survey data (2015-2017) were used to assess fall injuries and receipt of a fall risk assessment among recently hospitalized Medicare fee-for-service home health users aged ≥66 years. Subanalyses examined patients by prior fall history status and hospital admission diagnosis type (eg, neurologic, respiratory, cardiovascular, infection, and orthopedic diagnoses).

Residential mobility and persistently depressed voting among disadvantaged adults in a large housing experiment.

This study examines the impact of residential mobility on electoral participation among the poor by matching data from Moving to Opportunity, a US-based multicity housing-mobility experiment, with nationwide individual voter data. Nearly all participants in the experiment were Black and Hispanic families who originally lived in high-poverty public housing developments. Notably, the study finds that receiving a housing voucher to move to a low-poverty neighborhood decreased adult participants' voter participation for nearly two decades-a negative impact equal to or outpacing that of the most effective get-out-the-vote campaigns in absolute magnitude.

Covid-19 patterns among adults with intellectual and developmental disability and the general population in New York state during the first year of the pandemic.

Background: People with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in the US, especially those living in group homes, experienced comparatively higher Covid-19 case/case fatality rates than the general population during the first year of the pandemic. There is no information about the patterns of case/case fatality rates during this time.

Objective: This study compared Covid-19 case/case fatality rates among people with IDD living in residential group homes to the general population across the first year of the pandemic in New York State (NYS).