Malaria in pregnancy: what can the social sciences contribute?
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Ribera JM
PROVIDER: S-EPMC1851625 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Authorship represents a highly discussed topic in nowadays academia. The share of co-authored papers has increased substantially in recent years allowing scientists to specialize and focus on specific tasks. Arising from this, social scientific literature has especially discussed author orders and the distribution of publication and citation credits among co-authors in depth. Yet only a small fraction of the authorship literature has also addressed the actual underlying question of what actually constitutes authorship. To identify social scientists' motives for assigning authorship, we conduct an empirical study surveying researchers around the globe. We find that social scientists tend to distribute research tasks among (individual) research team members. Nevertheless, they generally adhere to the universally applicable Vancouver criteria when distributing authorship. More specifically, participation in every research task with the exceptions of data work as well as reviewing and remarking increases scholars' chances to receive authorship. Based on our results, we advise journal editors to introduce authorship guidelines that incorporate the Vancouver criteria as they seem applicable to the social sciences. We further call upon research institutions to emphasize data skills in hiring and promotion processes as publication counts might not always depict these characteristics.
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Project description:This paper describes a novel search index for social and economic research data, one that enables users to search up-to-date references for data holdings in these disciplines. The index can be used for comparative analysis of publication of datasets in different areas of social science. The core of the index is the da|ra registration agency's database for social and economic data, which contains high-quality searchable metadata from registered data publishers. Research data's metadata records are harvested from data providers around the world and included in the index. In this paper, we describe the currently available indices on social science datasets and their shortcomings. Next, we describe the motivation behind and the purpose for the data discovery index as a dedicated and curated platform for finding social science research data and gesisDataSearch, its user interface. Further, we explain the harvesting, filtering and indexing procedure and give usage instructions for the dataset index. Lastly, we show that the index is currently the most comprehensive and most accessible collection of social science data descriptions available.
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Project description:One hundred and twenty-five million women in malaria-endemic areas become pregnant each year (see Dellicour et al. PLoS Med7: e1000221 [2010]) and require protection from infection to avoid disease and death for themselves and their offspring. Chloroquine prophylaxis was once a safe approach to prevention but has been abandoned because of drug-resistant parasites, and intermittent presumptive treatment with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, which is currently used to protect pregnant women throughout Africa, is rapidly losing its benefits for the same reason. No other drugs have yet been shown to be safe, tolerable, and effective as prevention for pregnant women, although monthly dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine has shown promise for reducing poor pregnancy outcomes. Insecticide-treated nets provide some benefits, such as reducing placental malaria and low birth weight. However, this leaves a heavy burden of maternal, fetal, and infant morbidity and mortality that could be avoided. Women naturally acquire resistance to Plasmodium falciparum over successive pregnancies as they acquire antibodies against parasitized red cells that bind chondroitin sulfate A in the placenta, suggesting that a vaccine is feasible. Pregnant women are an important reservoir of parasites in the community, and women of reproductive age must be included in any elimination effort, but several features of malaria during pregnancy will require special consideration during the implementation of elimination programs.
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Project description:Pregnant women have a higher risk of malaria compared to non-pregnant women. This review provides an update on knowledge acquired since 2000 on P. falciparum and P.vivax infections in pregnancy. Maternal risk factors for malaria in pregnancy (MiP) include low maternal age, low parity, and low gestational age. The main effects of MIP include maternal anaemia, low birth weight (LBW), preterm delivery and increased infant and maternal mortality.P. falciparum infected erythrocytes sequester in the placenta by expressing surface antigens, mainly variant surface antigen (VAR2CSA), that bind to specific receptors, mainly chondroitin sulphate A. In stable transmission settings, the higher malaria risk in primigravidae can be explained by the non-recognition of these surface antigens by the immune system. Recently, placental sequestration has been described also for P.vivax infections. The mechanism of preterm delivery and intrauterine growth retardation is not completely understood, but fever (preterm delivery), anaemia, and high cytokines levels have been implicated.Clinical suspicion of MiP should be confirmed by parasitological diagnosis. The sensitivity of microscopy, with placenta histology as the gold standard, is 60% and 45% for peripheral and placental falciparum infections in African women, respectively. Compared to microscopy, RDTs have a lower sensitivity though when the quality of microscopy is low RDTs may be more reliable. Insecticide treated nets (ITN) and intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy (IPTp) are recommended for the prevention of MiP in stable transmission settings. ITNs have been shown to reduce malaria infection and adverse pregnancy outcomes by 28-47%. Although resistance is a concern, SP has been shown to be equivalent to MQ and AQ for IPTp. For the treatment of uncomplicated malaria during the first trimester, quinine plus clindamycin for 7 days is the first line treatment and artesunate plus clindamycin for 7 days is indicated if this treatment fails; in the 2(nd) and 3(rd) trimester first line treatment is an artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) known to be effective in the region or artesunate and clindamycin for 7 days or quinine and clindamycin. For severe malaria, in the second and third trimester parenteral artesunate is preferred over quinine. In the first trimester, both artesunate and quinine (parenteral) may be considered as options. Nevertheless, treatment should not be delayed and should be started immediately with the most readily available drug.
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Project description:BACKGROUND:Previous research has not provided enough direction regarding effective content design of courses integrating the humanities and social sciences in medical and dental education. This study aims at exploring how an Integrated Medical/Dental Humanities-Social Medicine/Dentistry course may be designed; how effective it may be in terms of student growth in knowledge, attitudes, skills, and aspirations; and associated factors. METHODS:The course was designed by distilling commonalities in the international standards for medical/dental education proposed by seven major health organizations. This analysis resulted in a curriculum covering nine major topics: history, professionalism, communication, ethics, management, policy, insurance, law, and research methodology. During the 2017 calendar year, data was collected and statistically analyzed from 68 third-year pre-doctoral students enrolled in the resulting MDHS 13-week course. RESULTS:Participants showed growth in skills, aspirations, knowledge, and attitudes, with the greatest change occurring in skills, then aspirations, knowledge, and attitudes. Knowledge growth was the only variable significantly related to student achievement of course objectives (??=?0.635, t (63)?=?3.394, p?=?0.001). The topics that students perceived as most critical were insurance, policy, management, and law. The perceived importance of research was most common among participants and was significantly related to all learning outcomes (For knowledge, ??=?0.213, t (63)?=?2.203, p?=?0.031; for attitudes, ??=?0.784, t (63)?=?10.257, p?=?0.000; for skills, ??=?0.769, t (63)?=?9.772, p?=?0.000; and aspirations ??=?0.639, t (63)?=?7.595, p?=?0.000). CONCLUSIONS:This study proposed a framework for humanities-social sciences education in health sciences education and analyzed its implementation. The empirical evaluation of its effectiveness and factors related to successful outcomes found that students perceived gains in their knowledge, attitudes, skills, and aspirations for humanistic and social aspects of dentistry/medicine. In addition, their recognition of the importance of research was associated with the greatest growth in all four learning outcomes. This study may contribute to the improved design of integrated humanities-social sciences courses.
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Project description:OBJECTIVES: Addiction to social networking sites (SNSs) is an international issue with numerous methods of measurement. The impact of such addictions among health science students is of particular concern. This study aimed to measure SNS addiction rates among health sciences students at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Muscat, Oman. METHODS: In April 2014, an anonymous English-language six-item electronic self-reporting survey based on the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale was administered to a non-random cohort of 141 medical and laboratory science students at SQU. The survey was used to measure usage of three SNSs: Facebook (Facebook Inc., Menlo Park, California, USA), YouTube (YouTube, San Bruno, California, USA) and Twitter (Twitter Inc., San Francisco, California, USA). Two sets of criteria were used to calculate addiction rates (a score of 3 on at least four survey items or a score of 3 on all six items). Work-related SNS usage was also measured. RESULTS: A total of 81 students completed the survey (response rate: 57.4%). Of the three SNSs, YouTube was most commonly used (100%), followed by Facebook (91.4%) and Twitter (70.4%). Usage and addiction rates varied significantly across the three SNSs. Addiction rates to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, respectively, varied according to the criteria used (14.2%, 47.2% and 33.3% versus 6.3%, 13.8% and 12.8%). However, addiction rates decreased when work-related activity was taken into account. CONCLUSION: Rates of SNS addiction among this cohort indicate a need for intervention. Additionally, the results suggest that addiction to individual SNSs should be measured and that work-related activities should be taken into account during measurement.
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Project description:Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) increasingly absorb knowledge from Hard Sciences, i.e., Science, Technology, Agriculture and Medicine (STAM), as testified by a growing number of citations. However, whether citing more Hard Sciences brings more citations to HSS remains to be investigated. Based on China's HSS articles indexed by the Web of Science during 1998-2014, this paper estimated two-way fixed effects negative binomial models, with journal effects and year effects. Findings include: (1) An inverse U-shaped curve was observed between the percentage of STAM references to the HSS articles and the number of citations they received; (2) STAM contributed increasing knowledge to China's HSS, while Science and Technology knowledge contributed more citations to HSS articles. It is recommended that research policy should be adjusted to encourage HSS researchers to adequately integrate STAM knowledge when conducting interdisciplinary research, as over-cited STAM knowledge may jeopardize the readability of HSS articles.
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Project description:The paper proposes a new method for conducting a literature review by structured data of more than 2200 scientific articles and 1300 researchers on SSHPA (Social Sciences and Humanities Peer Awards), an open database of Vietnamese social scientists' scientific productivity. Based on the logical structure of SSHPA, the authors create a specialized database for the literature review: SDA (SSHPA Data Analysis). Combining expert's caliber and computational algorithms, SDA is expected to offer an immensely efficient and analytical based method of scanning data, hence ameliorating the traditional approach to conducting a literature review.•A specialized database for literature review is created using the scientific articles and author profiles from SSHPA, an open database of Vietnamese social scientists' productivity.•The review database assigns values of topics or methodological attributes to articles sourced from SSHPA.•Then, the authors can query comprehensive data tables, graphs, or diagrams to use for literature review.
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Project description:For the past 50 years, acknowledgments have been studied as important paratextual traces of research practices, collaboration, and infrastructure in science. Since 2008, funding acknowledgments have been indexed by Web of Science, supporting large-scale analyses of research funding. Applying advanced linguistic methods as well as Correspondence Analysis to more than one million acknowledgments from research articles and reviews published in 2015, this paper aims to go beyond funding disclosure and study the main types of contributions found in acknowledgments on a large scale and through disciplinary comparisons. Our analysis shows that technical support is more frequently acknowledged by scholars in Chemistry, Physics and Engineering. Earth and Space, Professional Fields, and Social Sciences are more likely to acknowledge contributions from colleagues, editors, and reviewers, while Biology acknowledgments put more emphasis on logistics and fieldwork-related tasks. Conflicts of interest disclosures (or lack of thereof) are more frequently found in acknowledgments from Clinical Medicine, Health and, to a lesser extent, Psychology. These results demonstrate that acknowledgment practices truly do vary across disciplines and that this can lead to important further research beyond the sole interest in funding.
| S-EPMC5627922 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Pregnant women are especially susceptible to malaria infection. Without existing immunity, severe malaria can develop requiring emergency treatment, and pregnancy loss is common. In semi-immune women, consequences of malaria for the mother include anaemia while stillbirth, premature delivery and foetal growth restriction affect the developing foetus. Preventive measures include insecticide-treated nets and (in some African settings) intermittent preventive treatment. Prompt management of maternal infection is key, using parenteral artemisinins for severe malaria, and artemisinin combination treatments (ACTs) in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. ACTs may soon also be recommended as an alternative to quinine as a treatment in the first trimester of pregnancy. Monitoring the safety of antimalarials and understanding their pharmacokinetics is particularly important in pregnancy with the altered maternal physiology and the risks to the developing foetus. As increasing numbers of countries embrace malaria elimination as a goal, the special needs of the vulnerable group of pregnant women and their infants should not be overlooked.
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