Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Small Individual Loans And Mental Health: A Randomized Controlled Trial Among South African Adults, Lia C. H. Fernald, Rita Hamad, Dean Karlan, Emily J. Ozer, Jonathan Zinman

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background: In the developing world, access to small, individual loans has been variously hailed as a poverty-alleviation tool – in the context of "microcredit" – but has also been criticized as "usury" and harmful to vulnerable borrowers. Prior studies have assessed effects of access to credit on traditional economic outcomes for poor borrowers, but effects on mental health have been largely ignored.

Methods: Applicants who had previously been rejected (n = 257) for a loan (200% annual percentage rate – APR) from a lender in South Africa were randomly assigned to a "second-look" that encouraged loan officers to approve their …

Improving Outcomes In Infants Of Hiv-Infected Women In A Developing Country Setting, Francine Noel, Sapna Mehta, Yuwei Zhu, Patricia De Matteis Rouzier, Abdias Marcelin, Jian R. Shi, Claudine Nolte, Linda Severe, Marie Marcelle Deschamps, Daniel W. Fitzgerald, Warren D. Johnson, Peter F. Wright, Jean W. Pape

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background: Since 1999 GHESKIO, a large voluntary counseling and HIV testing center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, has had an ongoing collaboration with the Haitian Ministry of Health to reduce the rate of mother to child HIV transmission. There are limited data on the ability to administer complex regimens for reducing mother to child transmission and on risk factors for continued transmission and infant mortality within programmatic settings in developing countries.

Methods and Findings: We analyzed data from 551 infants born to HIV-infected mothers seen at GHESKIO, between 1999 and 2005. HIV-infected mothers and their infants were given “short-course” monotherapy with antiretrovirals …

Methodology Development For Three-Dimensional Mr-Guided Near Infrared Spectroscopy Of Breast Tumors, Colin M. Carpenter, Subhadra Srinivasan, Brian W. Pogue, Keith D. Paulsen

Dartmouth Scholarship

Combined Magnetic Resonance (MR) and Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) has been proposed as a unique method to quantify hemodynamics, water content, and cellular size and packing density of breast tumors, as these tissue constituents can be quantified with increased resolution and overlaid on the structural features identified by the MR. However, the choices in how to reconstruct and visualize this information can have a dramatic impact on the feasibility of implementing this modality in the clinic. This is especially true in 3 dimensions, as there is often limited optical sampling of the breast tissue, and methods need to accurately reflect …

Direct Estimation Of Evoked Hemoglobin Changes By Multimodality Fusion Imaging, Theodore J. Huppert, Solomon G. Diamond, David A. Boas

Dartmouth Scholarship

In the last two decades, both diffuse optical tomography (DOT) and blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD)-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods have been developed as noninvasive tools for imaging evoked cerebral hemodynamic changes in studies of brain activity. Although these two technologies measure functional contrast from similar physiological sources, i.e., changes in hemoglobin levels, these two modalities are based on distinct physical and biophysical principles leading to both limitations and strengths to each method. In this work, we describe a unified linear model to combine the complimentary spatial, temporal, and spectroscopic resolutions of concurrently measured optical tomography and fMRI …

Correction: Molecular Subsets In The Gene Expression Signatures Of Scleroderma Skin, Ausra Milano, Sarah A. Pendergrass, Jennifer L. Sargent, Lacy K. George, Timothy H. Mccalmont, M. Kari Connolly, Michael L. Whitfield

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background: Scleroderma is a clinically heterogeneous disease with a complex phenotype. The disease is characterized by vascular dysfunction, tissue fibrosis, internal organ dysfunction, and immune dysfunction resulting in autoantibody production. Methodology and Findings: We analyzed the genome-wide patterns of gene expression with DNA microarrays in skin biopsies from distinct scleroderma subsets including 17 patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc) with diffuse scleroderma (dSSc), 7 patients with SSc with limited scleroderma (lSSc), 3 patients with morphea, and 6 healthy controls. 61 skin biopsies were analyzed in a total of 75 microarray hybridizations. Analysis by hierarchical clustering demonstrates nearly identical patterns of gene …

Neuromyelitis Optica Pathogenesis And Aquaporin 4, David J. Graber, Michael Levy, Douglas Kerr, William F. Wade

Dartmouth Scholarship

Neuromyelitis optica (NMO) is a severe, debilitating human disease that predominantly features immunopathology in the optic nerves and the spinal cord. An IgG1 autoantibody (NMO-IgG) that binds aquaporin 4 (AQP4) has been identified in the sera of a significant number of NMO patients, as well as in patients with two related neurologic conditions, bilateral optic neuritis (ON), and longitudinal extensive transverse myelitis (LETM), that are generally considered to lie within the NMO spectrum of diseases. NMO-IgG is not the only autoantibody found in NMO patient sera, but the correlation of pathology in central nervous system (CNS) with tissues that normally …

Using Built Environment Characteristics To Predict Walking For Exercise, Gina S. Lovasi, Anne V. Moudon, Amber L. Pearson, Philip M. Hurvitz, Eric B. Larson, David S. Siscovick, Ethan M. Berke

Dartmouth Scholarship

Environments conducive to walking may help people avoid sedentary lifestyles and associated diseases. Recent studies developed walkability models combining several built environment characteristics to optimally predict walking. Developing and testing such models with the same data could lead to overestimating one's ability to predict walking in an independent sample of the population. More accurate estimates of model fit can be obtained by splitting a single study population into training and validation sets (holdout approach) or through developing and evaluating models in different populations. We used these two approaches to test whether built environment characteristics near the home predict walking for …