Predictors and Interdependence of Quality of Life in a Random Sample of Long-Term Young Breast Cancer Survivors and Their Biological Relatives.

Purpose: Quality of life (QOL) among young breast cancer survivors (YBCS) is often worse than QOL of older breast cancer survivors or age-matched peers without a history of cancer. Families commonly support YBCS, particularly during treatment, but little is known about long-term YBCS and family member QOL. The purpose of this study was to identify demographic, clinical, and psychosocial predictors of physical and mental QOL in YBCS and biological relatives and investigate associations between their QOL (i.

Symptom burden and quality of life among patient and family caregiver dyads in advanced cancer.

Purpose: Symptom management among patients diagnosed with advanced cancer is a high priority in clinical care that often involves the support of a family caregiver. However, limited studies have examined parallel patient and caregiver symptom burden and associations with their own and each other's quality of life (QOL). This study seeks to identify patient and caregiver symptom clusters and investigate associations between identified clusters and demographic, clinical, and psychosocial factors (cognitive appraisals and QOL).

Family Health Equity in Chronic Disease Prevention and Management.

Introduction/purpose: Efforts to improve chronic disease outcomes among US adults highlight families, particularly support from families, as a key aspect of disease prevention and management. To date, however, an overwhelming focus on individual-level outcomes and unidirectional support (eg, from a family caregiver to an identified care recipient) belies the existence of co-occurring health concerns and interdependent care. There are increasing calls for more sophisticated and intensive family health interventions that better integrate family-level factors, processes, and outcomes to provide comprehensive family support services in health care and community-based settings.

Increasing policy support for reducing racial health disparities.

Perceiving racial health disparities as unjust could catalyze or halt change.

Aging Stigma and the Health of US Adults Over 65: What Do We Know?

This narrative review assessed the current state of research on aging stigma and health relevant to US adults ages 65 and older. We adopted a stigma framework to highlight aging stigma as a meaningful social construct and the complex ways in which it may be harmful for health. We identified 29 studies of various types (experimental, intervention, cross-sectional quantitative, longitudinal quantitative, and qualitative) published between 2010 and 2023 that investigated relationships between concepts related to aging stigma and health.

Barriers to and Facilitators of Family Caregiving of Patients With COVID-19 Early in the Pandemic.

Background: In 2020, many family members were thrust into the role of caregiving for a relative with COVID-19 with little preparation, training, or understanding of the disease and its symptoms.

Objectives: To explore the barriers to and facilitators of caregiving experienced by family caregivers of patients with COVID-19 who had been in intensive care in the pandemic's earliest months.

Methods: In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted by web conference with 16 adults recovering at home after intubation for COVID-19 in an intensive care unit at a major academic medical center and their primary caregivers from March to August 2020 (N = 32).

Differences and Disparities in Ageism Affecting Older US Adults: A Review.

Purpose Of Review: This review summarizes findings from quantitative research studies published between 2010 and 2022 providing insight on sociodemographic differences and disparities in ageism among US adults ages 50 and older.

Findings: Across 21 studies, disparities in ageism were more consistently found such that those who were older (57% of studies), with less education (64%), and of lower socioeconomic status (100%) reported more ageism than their counterparts. Amount of ageism did not differ by sex in the majority (71%) of studies.

Consequences of Exposure to War Violence: Discriminating Those with Heightened Risk for Aggression from Those with Heightened Risk for Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms.

Chronic exposure to ethnic-political and war violence has deleterious effects throughout childhood. Some youths exposed to war violence are more likely to act aggressively afterwards, and some are more likely to experience post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTS symptoms). However, the concordance of these two outcomes is not strong, and it is unclear what discriminates between those who are at more risk for one or the other.

Implications of Cumulative Life Event Stress for Daily Stress Exposure and Cardiovascular Reactivity Among Black and White Americans.

Objectives: Daily stress and cardiovascular reactivity may be important mechanisms linking cumulative life event stress with cardiovascular health and may help to explain racial health disparities. However, studies have yet to examine links between exposure to life event stress, daily stress exposure, and cardiovascular reactivity. This study assessed links between trajectories of life event stress exposure, daily stressors, and cardiovascular reactivity among Black and White individuals.

Leveraging a genetically-informative study design to explore depression as a risk factor for type 2 diabetes: Rationale and participant characteristics of the Mood and Immune Regulation in Twins Study.

Background: Comorbidity between depression and type 2 diabetes is thought to arise from the joint effects of psychological, behavioral, and biological processes. Studies of monozygotic twins may provide a unique opportunity for clarifying how these processes inter-relate. This paper describes the rationale, characteristics, and initial findings of a longitudinal co-twin study aimed at examining the biopsychosocial mechanisms linking depression and risk of diabetes in mid-life.

Within-Person Bidirectional Associations Over Time Between Parenting and Youths' Callousness.

Objective: Callousness has been identified as a key driver of aggressive and violent behavior from childhood into early adulthood. Although previous research has underscored the importance of the parenting environment in contributing to the development of youth callousness, findings have generally been confined to the between-individual level and have not examined bidirectionality. In the current study, we test whether aspects of parenting are associated with callousness from childhood to adolescence both between and within individuals, examine the temporal ordering of associations, and test whether these relations are moderated by gender or developmental stage.

Multiple forms of discrimination and inflammation in Black Americans: Are there differences by sex?

Rationale: Discrimination is a risk factor and potential pathway through which social determinants such as race and sex contribute to chronic inflammation in Black Americans in middle and later adulthood. Questions remain regarding which forms of discrimination are most salient for inflammatory dysregulation, and whether there are sex-based differences in these pathways.

Objective: This exploratory study investigates sex differences in the relationships between four forms of discrimination and inflammatory dysregulation among middle aged and older Black Americans.

Conceptualizing and Operationalizing Collaboration Among Multiple Caregivers of Older Adults.

Objectives: In many families, multiple caregivers support older adults living with dementia. Studying collaboration among caregivers requires consideration of conceptual and methodological issues that have not been fully explored. This study presents a framework for conceptualizing caregiver collaboration and an index that captures variation in collaboration among multiple caregivers within care networks.

Caregiving in the COVID-19 pandemic: Family adaptations following an intensive care unit hospitalisation.

Aim And Objective: To identify how family caregivers adapt to the caregiving role following a relative's COVID-19-related intensive care unit (ICU) hospitalisation.

Background: Family caregiving is often associated with poor health amongst caregivers which may limit their capacity to effectively support patients. Though severe COVID-19 infection has necessitated increasing numbers of persons who require caregiver support, little is known about these caregivers, the persons they are caring for, or the strategies used to effectively adjust to the caregiving role.

Psychosocial Stress and Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis Stress Reactivity: Variations by Race and Socioeconomic Status Among Adults at Risk of Diabetes.

Objective: Although stress is posited to play a key role in health disparities, the extent to which commonly used self-report psychosocial stress measures are related to neurobiological stress processes, especially across diverse populations, is unresolved. This study examined how two measures of psychosocial stress, perceived stress and domain-specific stress, covary with the acute neurobiological stress response.

Methods: The Richmond Stress and Sugar Study includes a racially and socioeconomically diverse cohort of adults at risk for type 2 diabetes ( n = 125; mean age = 57 years, 48% Black, and 61% high neighborhood socioeconomic status [SES]).

A new method for the sampling and preservation of placental specimens in low-resource settings for the identification of and analysis of nucleic acids.

Collection, preservation, and shipment of histological specimens in low-resource settings is challenging. We present a novel method that achieved excellent preservation of placental specimens from rural Mali by using formalin fixation, ethanol dehydration, and long-term storage in a solar-powered freezer. Sample preservation success was 92%, permitting evaluation of current and past malaria infection, anemia, placental maturity, and inflammation.

Deviations from typical paths: a novel approach to working with GPS data in the behavioral sciences.

Background: Behavioral science researchers are increasingly collecting detailed location data such as second-by-second GPS tracking on participants due to increased ease and affordability. While intraindividual variability has been discussed in the travel literature for decades, traditional methods designed for studying individual differences in central tendencies limit the extent to which novel questions about variability in lived experiences can be answered. Thus, new methods of quantifying behavior that focus on intraindividual variability are needed to address the context in which the behavior occurs and the location tracking data from which behavior is derived.

Experiences of Everyday Ageism and the Health of Older US Adults.

Importance: Major incidents of ageism have been shown to be associated with poorer health and well-being among older adults. Less is known about routine types of age-based discrimination, prejudice, and stereotyping that older adults encounter in their day-to-day lives, known as everyday ageism.

Objective: To examine the prevalence of everyday ageism, group differences and disparities, and associations of everyday ageism with indicators of poor physical and mental health.

Self-Regulatory Coping Behaviors and Stress Reactivity: Exploring the Environmental Affordance Model of Health Disparities.

Objectives: To explore the relationship between self-regulatory coping behaviors (SRCB) and hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) stress reactivity.

Methods: Data came from the Richmond Stress and Sugar Study (n=125, median age: 57 years, 46% non-Hispanic White, 48% African American). The relationships between 11 SRCB ("health-harming" [e.

Mechanisms of Cardiometabolic Health Outcomes and Disparities: What Characteristics of Chronic Stressors are Linked to HPA-Axis Dysregulation?

Chronic stressors are associated with cardiometabolic health conditions and disparities. Mechanisms linking stressors and health remain poorly understood. Two cohort studies (Cardiac Rehabilitation And The Experience [CREATE] and Tracking Risk Identification for Adult Diabetes [TRIAD]) with harmonized variables were used to examine relationships between six types of chronic stressors in adulthood and Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis dysregulation, as indicated by blunted diurnal cortisol slopes, which are stress-sensitive biomarkers implicated in cardiometabolic health (merged = 213, mean age 61, 18% Black).