Introduction to the Special Issue on Interferon Responses: From Cells to Systems.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Morrison DJ
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8767929 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:The severity of the overdose epidemic underscores the urgent need for innovative and high impact interventions that promote the rapid penetration and scale up of evidence-based practices (EBPs) in communities profoundly affected by fatal opioid overdose. This special issue shares scientific advancements in implementation research design and evaluation of a novel data-driven community-based intervention. The HEALing (Helping End Addiction Long-Term) Communities Study (HCS) is a four-year study that is designed to examine the effectiveness of the Communities That HEAL (CTH) intervention. The CTH intervention supports the dissemination of EBPs in 67 communities across four high-burdened states-Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio. The diversity in these communities in terms of rural-urban status, race-ethnicity and other social determinants of health facilitates generalizability of results to other communities across the US. The nine papers in this special issue describe critical elements that constitute the HCS framework and design. This includes the implementation of EBPs that have a substantial impact on fatal and non-fatal opioid overdose, the Opioid-overdose Reduction Continuum of Care Approach, communication campaigns to increase awareness and demand for EBPs and reduce stigma against people with OUD and MOUD interventions, and the process of community engagement. This includes how to form community coalitions and gain their commitment, and steps taken to mobilize coalitions to pursue EBP implementation and ensure EBPs are adapted for community needs. The collective papers in this issue demonstrate that the design of any complex study must adapt to unanticipated temporal events, including the rapidly emerging COVID-19 crisis. Readers will learn about the scientific process of the design and implementation of a community-engaged intervention, its methodologies, guiding conceptual models, and research implementation strategies that can be applied to address other health issues.
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Project description:In 1957, Conrad H. Waddington published a paper in which he demonstrated the inheritance of an acquired characteristic in a population in response to an environmental stimulus [1].[...].
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Project description:An extraordinary claim was made by one of the leading researchers within positive psychology, namely, there is a universal-invariant ratio between positive to negative emotions that serves as a unique tipping point between flourishing and languishing in individuals, marriages, organizations, and other human systems across all cultures and times. Known as the "critical positivity ratio," this finding was supposedly derived from the famous Lorenz equation in physics by using the mathematics of nonlinear dynamic systems, and was defined precisely as "2.9013." This exact number was widely touted as a great discovery by many leaders of positive psychology, had tremendous impact in various applied areas of psychology, and, more broadly, and was extensively cited in both the scientific literature and in the global popular media. However, this finding has been demonstrated to be bogus. Since its advent as a relatively new subdiscipline, positive psychology has claimed superiority to its precursor, the subdiscipline of humanistic psychology, in terms of supposedly both using more rigorous science and avoiding popularizing nonsense. The debunking of the critical positivity ratio demonstrates that positive psychology did not live up to these claims, and this has important implications, which are discussed in terms of "romantic scientism" and "voodoo science." In addition, articles in the special issue on the "Implications of Debunking the 'Critical Positivity Ratio' for Humanistic Psychology" are introduced, as they also delve into these concerns.
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Project description:As a result of the increasing speed and magnitude in which habitats worldwide are experiencing environmental change, making accurate predictions of the effects of global change on ecosystems and the organisms that inhabit them have become an important goal for ecologists. Experimental and modelling approaches aimed at understanding the linkages between factors of global change and biotic responses have become numerous and increasingly complex in order to adequately capture the multifarious dynamics associated with these relationships. However, constrained by resources, experiments are often conducted at small spatiotemporal scales (e.g. looking at a plot of a few square metres over a few years) and at low organizational levels (looking at organisms rather than ecosystems) in spite of both theoretical and experimental work that suggests ecological dynamics across scales can be dissimilar. This phenomenon has been hypothesized to occur because the mechanisms that drive dynamics across scales differ. A good example is the effect of elevated CO2 on transpiration. While at the leaf level, transpiration can be reduced, at the stand level, transpiration can increase because leaf area per unit ground area increases. The reported net effect is then highly dependent on the spatiotemporal scale. This special issue considers the biological relevancy inherent in the patterns associated with the magnitude and type of response to changing environmental conditions, across scales. This collection of papers attempts to provide a comprehensive treatment of this phenomenon in order to help develop an understanding of the extent of, and mechanisms involved with, ecological response to global change.
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Project description:The goal of this Special Issue is to introduce prevention scientists to an emerging form of healthcare, called precision medicine. This approach integrates investigation of the mechanisms of disease and health-compromising behaviors with prevention, treatment, and cure resolved at the level of the individual. Precision Medicine and its derivative personalized prevention represents a promising paradigm for prevention science as it accounts for response heterogeneity and guides development of targeted interventions that may enhance program effect sizes. If successfully integrated into prevention science research, personalized prevention is an approach that can inform the development of decision support tools (screening measures, prescriptive algorithms) and enhance the utility of mobile health technologies that will enable practitioners to use personalized consumer data to inform decisions about the best type and/or intensity of a prevention strategy for particular individuals or subgroups of individuals. In this special issue, we present conceptual articles that provide a heuristic framework for precision-based, personalization prevention research and empirical studies that address research questions exemplary of a new generation of precision-based personalized preventive interventions focused on children's mental health, behavioral health, and education.
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Project description:Background In order to track progress towards the target of universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a measure (demand for family planning satisfied with modern contraceptive methods) and a benchmark (at least 75% by 2030 in all countries) have been recommended. Objectives The goal of this study was to assess the prospects of reaching the benchmark at the country level. Such information can facilitate strategic planning, including resource allocation at global and country levels. Design We selected 63 countries based on their status as least developed according to the United Nations or as a priority country in global family planning initiatives. Using United Nations estimates and projections of family planning indicators between 1970 and 2030, we calculated percent demand for family planning satisfied with modern contraceptive methods for each year and country. We then calculated the annual percentage point changes between 2014 and 2030 required to meet the benchmark. The required rates of change were compared to current projections as well as estimates between 1970 and 2010. Results To reach the benchmark on average across the 63 countries, demand satisfied with modern methods must increase by 2.2 percentage points per year between 2014 and 2030 – more than double current projections. Between 1970 and 2010, such rapid progress was observed in 24 study countries but typically spanning 5–10 years. At currently projected rates, only 9 of the 63 study countries will reach the benchmark. Meanwhile, the gap between projected and required changes is largest in the Central and West African regions, 0.9 and 3.0 percentage points per year, respectively. If the benchmark is achieved, 334 million women across the study countries will use a modern contraceptive method in 2030, compared to 226 million women in 2014. Conclusions In order to achieve the component of the SDGs calling for universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, substantial effort is needed to accelerate rates of progress by a factor of 2 in most study countries and by a factor of 3 in Central and West African countries.
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Project description:This special issue of AGE showcases powerful alternative or unconventional approaches to basic aging research, including the use of exceptionally long-lived animal model species and comparative methods from evolutionary biology. In this opening paper, we introduce several of these alternative aging research themes, including the comparative phylogenetic approach. This approach applies modern inferential methods for dissecting basic physiological and biochemical mechanisms correlated with phenotypic traits including longevity, slow aging, sustained somatic maintenance, and repair of molecular damage. Comparative methods can be used to assess the general relevance of specific aging mechanisms--including oxidative processes--to diverse animal species, as well as to assess their potential clinical relevance to humans and other mammals. We also introduce several other novel, underexploited approaches with particular relevance to biogerontology, including the use of model animal species or strains that retain natural genetic heterogeneity, studies of effects of infectious disease and parasites on aging and responses to caloric restriction, studies of reproductive aging, and naturally occurring sex differences in aging. We emphasize the importance of drawing inferences from aging phenomena in laboratory studies that can be applied to clinically relevant aging syndromes in long-lived, outbred animals, including humans.
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Project description:Pediatric oncology psychosocial professionals collaborated with an interdisciplinary group of experts and stakeholders and developed evidence-based standards for pediatric psychosocial care. Given the breadth of research evidence and traditions of clinical care, 15 standards were derived. Each standard is based on a systematic review of relevant literature and used the AGREE II process to evaluate the quality of the evidence. This article describes the methods used to develop the standards and introduces the 15 articles included in this special issue. Established standards help ensure that all children with cancer and their families receive essential psychosocial care.
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Project description:Despite the importance of seed dispersal as a driving process behind plant community assembly, our understanding of the role of seed dispersal in plant population persistence and spread remains incomplete. As a result, our ability to predict the effects of global change on plant populations is hampered. We need to better understand the fundamental link between seed dispersal and population dynamics in order to make predictive generalizations across species and systems, to better understand plant community structure and function, and to make appropriate conservation and management responses related to seed dispersal. To tackle these important knowledge gaps, we established the CoDisperse Network and convened an interdisciplinary, NSF-sponsored Seed Dispersal Workshop in 2016, during which we explored the role of seed dispersal in plant population dynamics (NSF DEB Award # 1548194). In this Special Issue, we consider the current state of seed dispersal ecology and identify the following collaborative research needs: (i) the development of a mechanistic understanding of the movement process influencing dispersal of seeds; (ii) improved quantification of the relative influence of seed dispersal on plant fitness compared to processes occurring at other life history stages; (iii) an ability to scale from individual plants to ecosystems to quantify the influence of dispersal on ecosystem function; and (iv) the incorporation of seed dispersal ecology into conservation and management strategies.
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