Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Research Brief: "Substance Use Among Military-Connected Youth: The California Healthy Kids Survey", Institute For Veterans And Military Families At Syracuse University

Institute for Veterans and Military Families

This research studies the correlation between youth with deployed family members in their lifetime and recent substance use in youth, and found substance use positively correlated with the number of family member deployments. Implications of these findings suggest that monitoring behavior could potentially lead to providing the emotional support necessary to prevent adolescents from turning to substance use, and policy should reflect this by implementing emotional support programs for adolescents with deployed family members. Future research in this area should investigate alternative coping mechanisms for youth dealing with the deployment of a family member, as well as the efficacy of …

Noise-Induced Tinnitus Using Individualized Gap Detection Analysis And Its Relationship With Hyperacusis, Anxiety, And Spatial Cognition, Edward Pace, Jinsheng Zhang

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Research Publications

Tinnitus has a complex etiology that involves auditory and non-auditory factors and may be accompanied by hyperacusis, anxiety and cognitive changes. Thus far, investigations of the interrelationship between tinnitus and auditory and non-auditory impairment have yielded conflicting results. To further address this issue, we noise exposed rats and assessed them for tinnitus using a gap detection behavioral paradigm combined with statistically-driven analysis to diagnose tinnitus in individual rats. We also tested rats for hearing detection, responsivity, and loss using prepulse inhibition and auditory brainstem response, and for spatial cognition and anxiety using Morris water maze and elevated plus maze. We …

Net Reclassification Index: A Misleading Measure Of Prediction Improvement, Margaret Sullivan Pepe, Holly Janes, Kathleen F. Kerr, Bruce M. Psaty

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

The evaluation of biomarkers to improve risk prediction is a common theme in modern research. Since its introduction in 2008, the net reclassification index (NRI) (Pencina et al. 2008, Pencina et al. 2011) has gained widespread use as a measure of prediction performance with over 1,200 citations as of June 30, 2013. The NRI is considered by some to be more sensitive to clinically important changes in risk than the traditional change in the AUC (Delta AUC) statistic (Hlatky et al. 2009). Recent statistical research has raised questions, however, about the validity of conclusions based on the NRI. (Hilden and …

Impact Of Social Franchising On Contraceptive Use When Complemented By Vouchers: A Quasi-Experimental Study In Rural Pakistan, Syed Khurram Azmat, Babar Tasneem Shaikh, Waqas Hameed, Ghulam Mustafa, Wajahat Hussain, Jamshaid Asghar, Muhammad Ishaque, Aftab Ahmed, Mohsina Bilgrami

Community Health Sciences

Background: Pakistan has had a low contraceptive prevalence rate for the last two decades; with preference for natural birth spacing methods and condoms. Family planning services offered by the public sector have never fulfilled the demand for contraception, particularly in rural areas. In the private sector, cost is a major constraint. In 2008, Marie Stopes Society - a local NGO started a social franchise programme along with a free voucher scheme to promote uptake of IUCDs amongst the poor. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of this approach, which is designed to increase modern long term contraceptive awareness and use in …

The Lived Experiences Of Children Who Have A Sibling With A Chronic Disability, Holly Willardson, Dr. Barbara Mandleco

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Between 5-31% of children in the United States will experience a chronic condition in their lifetime, a number which can only be expected to climb with the advances of medical technology that allow these children to live longer. Because of this rise in US children with chronic conditions or disabilities, research has examined the effects the condition has on the family unit. In the past, many studies on families raising children with disabilities/chronic conditions have drawn data from parents (mostly mothers), teachers, and clinicians, but little research has been gathered from the perspective of the sibling.

Barriers To Overcoming Malnutrition In Tucumán, Argentina, Trista Jones, Dr. Erin Maughan

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In the 1990s Argentina was considered one of the ten richest countries in the world; in 2002, Argentina underwent a severe governmental crisis that resulted in monetary inflation and high levels of unemployment (Arie, 2002). The economy has made it difficult for many to afford basic essentials like food. This political and economic instability has been considered a key component to the now prevalent problem of malnutrition in Argentine children, especially of the rural provinces. Estimates of up to two million children in the country suffer from malnutrition (Arie, 2002). Government and Humanitarian aid organizations provide some meals to children …

Nutrition Among Pre- And Post-Natal Argentine Mothers, Camber Cooper, Dr. Erin Maughan

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Tucumán is the poorest province in the country of Argentina, made worse by recent economic turmoil. Maternal nutrition is not only important for her own health, but it is also crucial to her developing fetus, both before and during pregnancy, as all nutrients the infant receives during this time come solely from the mother (Lowdermilk & Perry, 2004). Considering the importance of maternal nutrition, reports of malnutrition in Argentina cause particular concern for pregnant and nursing women. According to Argentina’s National Institute of Censuses and Statistics (n.d.), infant mortality across the country in 2002 was 16.8 per 1,000 live births, …

A Comparison Of Growth Rates In Premature Infants In Tucamàn, Argentina And The United States: A Secondary Data Analysis, Emily Sear, Joann Abegglen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Extrauterine growth, or growth outside the womb following birth, is a serious challenge and concern in premature neonates. Preterm infants have low birth weights simply because they have not reached full growth and development at the time of birth.

Decreasing Student Nurse Anxity Through Mentored Learning, Denise Mann

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Anxiety is persistent feeling throughout the nursing school experience for the majority of students. Kleehammer, Hart and Keck conducted an anxiety study in which they found that nursing students face high levels of anxiety especially concerning “the initial clinical experience on a unit and fear of making mistakes” (1990).

Hispanic Labor Childbearing Women: Improving Perinatal Outcomes, Cambria Jones, Dr. Lynn Callister

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In recent years there has been a surge in the influx of Hispanic immigrants to the United States. With this influx of immigrants pushing beyond the border states into more central United States, healthcare providers have been presented with the challenge of how to adequately meet the needs of Hispanic immigrants.

Women And Their Nurses’ Perceptions Of The Birthing Experience And Factors That Influence Change In Birth Preference, Jennifer L. Hamilton, Troy Carlton

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Nurses provide essential care and support during labor and the lack of such support has been equated with decreased patient satisfaction. Satisfaction of laboring women has been found to be important because women most commonly will make future health care decisions for their families. The intent of this study was two parts. 1. To identify factors which influence women to change their birth preference and 2.To identify how nurses’ personal bias and perceptions of the birth experience influence a women change in their birth preference.

The Role Of Nitric Oxide Dysregulation In Tumor Maintenance, Christopher Rabender

Theses and Dissertations

The inflammatory nature of the tumor microenvironment provides a cytokine and chemokine rich proliferative environment. Much of the responsibility of this environment is due to the production of Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS). These studies examined the proliferative rich tumor environment from a new perspective of Nitric Oxide Synthase (NOS) dysregulation. NOS’s have the ability to become uncoupled and generate superoxide in lieu of nitric oxide (NO). A requirement of NOS for the production of NO is the cofactor tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4) and when it is missing NOS becomes uncoupled and turns into a peroxynitrite synthase. Here I demonstrate that NOS is …

Heading To Rio For The 2013 World Congress On Huntington's Disease, Kenneth P. Serbin

At Risk for Huntington's Disease

No abstract provided.

Implementing Pediatric Stimulator Experience: Student Satisfaction, Elizabeth Laney, Dr. Patricia Ravert

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this project was to implement the pediatric simulator into the Nursing Pediatrics course and then assess student satisfaction. This included learning about how to run the patient simulator, finding study cases related to clinical situations, and working with teachers to plan lab time. The goal was to understand how the simulator improves student education and prepares them for the work force.

Cold Atmospheric Plasma For Selectively Ablating Metastatic Breast Cancer Cells, Mian Wang, Benjamin Holmes, Xiaoqian Cheng, Wei Zhu, Michael Keidar, Lijie Grace Zhang

Medicine Faculty Publications

Traditional breast cancer treatments such as surgery and radiotherapy contain many inherent limitations with regards to incomplete and nonselective tumor ablation. Cold atomospheric plasma (CAP) is an ionized gas where the ion temperature is close to room temperature. It contains electrons, charged particles, radicals, various excited molecules, UV photons and transient electric fields. These various compositional elements have the potential to either enhance and promote cellular activity, or disrupt and destroy them. In particular, based on this unique composition, CAP could offer a minimally-invasive surgical approach allowing for specific cancer cell or tumor tissue removal without influencing healthy cells. Thus, …

Forebrain Deletion Of The Vesicular Acetylcholine Transporter Results In Deficits In Executive Function, Metabolic, And Rna Splicing Abnormalities In The Prefrontal Cortex, Benjamin Kolisnyk, Mohammed A. Al-Onaizi, Pedro H. F. Hirata, Monica S. Guzman, Simona Nikolova, Shahar Barbash, Hermona Soreq, Robert Bartha, Marco A. M. Prado, Vania F. Prado

Anatomy and Cell Biology Publications

One of the key brain regions in cognitive processing and executive function is the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which receives cholinergic input from basal forebrain cholinergic neurons. We evaluated the contribution of synaptically released acetylcholine (ACh) to executive function by genetically targeting the vesicular acetylcholine transporter (VAChT) in the mouse forebrain. Executive function was assessed using a pairwise visual discrimination paradigm and the 5-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRT). In the pairwise test, VAChT-deficient mice were able to learn, but were impaired in reversal learning, suggesting that these mice present cognitive inflexibility. Interestingly, VAChT-targeted mice took longer to reach criteria in …

Strengthening The Evidence Base For Accreditation: Progress In Phssr And Pbrns, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

With the launch of a voluntary national accreditation program for public health agencies, the field requires an expanding evidence base concerning which public health strategies work best, for which populations, and under what circumstances. The field of public health services and systems research (PHSSR) and practice-based research networks (PBRNs) are producing applied studies that can inform the future development and implementation of accreditation standards, and evaluate the impact of accreditation on the field of practice.

Evaluation Of Palestinian Refugee Women’S Attitudes Towards And Persistence In Exclusive Breastfeeding For Six Months, Heather Thomas, Dr. Madanat Hala

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In the wake of the Iraq war, the Israel/ Lebanon conflict and the ongoing violence in Palestine, Jordan has become a country overburdened with refugees. The UNHCR estimates that over 3 million refugees are living in Jordan, with the majority being from Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon (UNRWA, 2005). Many of these refugees don’t have access to health services. Consequently, infant mortality rates are much higher among refugees than the surrounding population, and UNICEF indicates that these numbers could be reduced if more children were exclusively breastfed (UNICEF, 2003).The purpose of my research was to discover what the prevalence of exclusive …

Distribution Of Health Care Services And Access As A Function Of Population In Southeast Alaska, Valerie Strasburger, Stephanie Fugal

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The majority of health disparities in Alaska are related to reliable and affordable access to health care. This is particularly relevant to the communities in southeast Alaska (SEAK) because many of them are isolated island communities. The purpose of my research was to determine the areas in SEAK with the most severe limitations to enable health professionals in this region to meet the goals set in Healthy Alaskans 2010.

Hiv/Aids Prevention, Care And Support For Children In Vietnam, Thi Pruitt, Dr. Hala Madanat

Journal of Undergraduate Research

East Asia is the fastest growing region of the world. Its average annual growth income has ranked top-of-the-world for the past three years. In addition to economic development, East Asia is now also the world’s home for some of its fastest growing AIDS epidemics. Approximately 31,000 children under age 15 are living with HIV and AIDS and there were 11,000 new infections in 2005—an average of 30 children infected per day. Not different from its region, between 1990 and 2005, Vietnam has reported 104,111 HIV infected cases. About 12,000 to 15,000 newly infected HIV patients were reported annually. However, due …

Cambodian Medical Students And Smoking: Habits, Knowledge And Attitudes, Jessica A. Allen, Dr. Gordon Lindsay

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Health care professionals play an important role in the reduction of tobacco demand through patient counseling, advocating public education programs, supporting legislation, and personal example. Dr. Bettina Piko (2005), in the Journal of Community Health, states that health care professionals are generally more aware of the adverse health consequences of smoking than the general population. Moreover the World Health Organizations Code of Practice on Tobacco Control for Health Professional Organizations calls for health professionals to lead by example and become involved in tobacco control as part of the public health agenda in his/her country.

The Freshman Experience, Stephanie Mannon

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this exploratory research was to investigate if change in sexual risk-taking behavior between high school and college can be predicted as a function of the interaction of person and situation traits. College, conceptualized as a backspace (situation) construct, and personality traits (sensation-seeking, neuroticism, extraversion) conducive to deviant behavior were examined. While significant risky behavior was reported for all students (n = 252), hierarchical regression analyses revealed that higher levels of the specified personality traits in combination with on-campus backspace residential status was not predictive of greater change in engagement in sexual risk-taking behavior. Implications for future research …

Ari Study Report, Cameron Nelson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

With the breathtaking view of the Andes through my bus window last Friday morning, I thought of the many Bolivian mothers who would bring their sick children into the Senkata Clinic that day. The June temperatures dropped significantly at night, and I wondered how many children would awake that morning with a severe cough and difficulty breathing, signs of pneumonia. Over the past seven weeks, dozens of children affected with acute respiratory infections (ARI) stared at me with huge brown eyes, reflecting extreme poverty, malnutrition, and fear. Their mothers often called me “Doctor” and looked at me as I interviewed …

How Studies Of Human Sex Ratios At Birth May Lead To The Understanding Of Several Forms Of Pathology, William H. James

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

This paper deals with the problem of the causes of the variation of sex ratio (proportion male) at birth. This problem is common to a number of areas in biology and medicine e.g. obstetrics, neurology/psychiatry, parasitology, virology, oncology and teratology. It is established that there are significantly biased, but unexplained, sex ratios in each of these fields. Yet workers in them (with the possible exception of virology) have regarded the problem as a minor loose end, irrelevant to the field’s major problems. However, as far as I know, no-one has previously noted that unexplained biased sex ratios occur, and thus …

Anti-Chaperone Activity And Cytotoxicity Of Chemical Components In Copaiba Oil, Daniel Kulman, Janine Naim, Bin Su Ph.D.

Undergraduate Research Posters 2013

Copaiba oil derived from the oleoresin of the Copaiba tree has been widely used as an antiseptic and expectorant for the respiratory tract, and as anti-inflammatory agent in various skin diseases. Studies have indicated that Copaiba oil exhibited anti-carcinogenic properties in various preclinical studies. However, the anti-cancer mechanisms of copaiba oil still remain unclear. There are various diterpenoid compounds within Copaiba oil, which also make the mechanism investigation very difficult. Hardwickiic acid (HAA), a clerodane diterpenoid isolated from Copaiba oil shows anti-chaperone activity from a recent study. In the current study, cytotoxicity and anti-chaperone assay guided isolation led to 9 …

Can Simulation Along With Lecture And Demonstration Enhance The Knowledge Level Of Managing A Chest Tube For Senior Undergraduate Nursing Students?, Pamela Lawson

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Providing safe high quality care for patients with chest tubes by nursing students requires not only lecture and demonstration but also the use of simulation. Simulation allows for the students to practice in a non-threatening environment without harming any patients. The data was compiled to evaluate the effectiveness of the theory and simulation in terms of enhancing the knowledge level of chest tube management. Thirteen students participated in the study. A two-tailed t-test for two independent groups was used to test the differences in knowledge levels. Data analysis revealed the mean pre-simulation knowledge of students in the comparison group was …

Emergency Department Demographic Study, Jennifer K. Taylor, Russ Wilshaw, Rn, Ms, Cen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Emergency Departments provide health care to individuals twenty-four hours a day. To better meet the needs of consumers it is necessary to understand the main population groups utilizing emergency departments. This can be accomplished through demographic studies of various emergency departments. The research project I was involved with studied the clients of American Fork Emergency Room in Utah.

The -9/+9 Polymorphism Of The Bradykinin Receptor Beta 2 Gene And Athlete Status: A Study Involving Two European Cohorts., Marek Sawczuk, Yevgeniya I. Timshina, Irina V. Astratenkova, Agnieszka Maciejewska-Karłowska, Agata Leońska-Duniec, Krzysztof Ficek, Leysan J. Mustafina, Paweł Cięszczyk, Tomasz Klocek, Ildus I. Ahmetov

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

Background: Previous studies concerning the relevance of the BDKRB2 gene polymorphisms revealed that the absence (–9 allele) of a 9 base pair sequence in exon 1 of the BDKRB2 gene is correlated with higher skeletal muscle metabolic efficiency, glucose uptake during exercise, as well as endurance athletic performance. Aim: The aim of the study was to investigate the association between the BDKRB2 -9/+9 polymorphism and elite athletic status in two cohorts of east-European athletes. Therefore, we examined the genotype distribution of the BDKRB2 9/+9 polymorphic site in a group of Polish athletes and confirmed the results obtained in a replication …

Using Nursing Knowledge To Improve Health Literacy, Michele K. Savin, Msn, Nnp-Bc

College of Nursing Faculty Papers & Presentations

Health Literacy: an ability to obtain and understand written, oral, and numerical health information, which allows people to make appropriate healthcare decisions for themselves and their family members.

The Problem:

*Low Health Literacy affects up to twenty percent of the adult population in the US and is not correlated with highest education achieved.

*Hospitals and healthcare professionals are increasingly being held accountable to create systems of care that address this issue with every patient encounter.

*AHRQ talks about implementing Universal Literacy Precautions.

From The Uk To Byu: Local Norms For The Measurement Of Pragmatic Language, Lisa Christensen, Maggie Hansen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In the field of speech-language pathology, we encounter many children with what is known as language impairment. This impairment cannot be attributed to intellectual or sensory factors, and has been shown to involve a delay in both semantic (word meanings) and syntactic (grammar and structure) abilities. Some researchers also question whether pragmatic abilities (language usage in real-life contexts) are affected in those with language impairment. However, an instrument to evaluate pragmatics is very difficult to design. Typical formal tests don’t allow for varied contexts—an integral part of pragmatic skills. Eliminating these varied contexts inherently reduces the validity of results.1