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Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences
An Epidemiologic Study Of Vaccination Exemptions And Pertussis Risk, Corinne B. Tandy
An Epidemiologic Study Of Vaccination Exemptions And Pertussis Risk, Corinne B. Tandy
Doctoral Dissertations
The incidence of pertussis, a vaccine-preventable disease that can have severe complications in infants, has been increasing in the United States over the past three decades. Vaccine hesitancy and refusal have also increased and are associated with vaccination exemptions, which in turn are associated with outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, including pertussis. Understanding attitudes towards vaccinations and identifying geographic disparities of vaccination exemptions and pertussis risks is useful for guiding control programs. Therefore, the objectives of this study were to: (i) investigate attitudes towards vaccinations; (ii) identify county-level geographic disparities and sociodemographic predictors of vaccination exemptions in Florida; (iii) investigate county-level …
Applied Infectious Disease Forecasting For Public Health, Graham Gibson
Applied Infectious Disease Forecasting For Public Health, Graham Gibson
Doctoral Dissertations
Infectious disease modeling has emerged as a powerful data driven tool for monitoring outbreaks, assessing intervention strategies, and allocating public health resources. This thesis addresses a variety of challenges faced in real-world infectious disease forecasting. We first present methods for aggregating forecasts made at different spatial scales, where explicitly modeling the spatial dependency would be computationally prohibitive. We then extend the mechanistic model framework to create an operational forecasting model capable of handling real-world COVID-19 surveillance system issues. Finally, we propose a new framework for merging mechanistic and statistical approaches to infectious disease forecasting. This framework allows modelers to construct …
High-Dimensional Feature Selection And Multi-Level Causal Mediation Analysis With Applications To Human Aging And Cluster-Based Intervention Studies, Hachem Saddiki
Doctoral Dissertations
Many questions in public health and medicine are fundamentally causal in that our objective is to learn the effect of some exposure, randomized or not, on an outcome of interest. As a result, causal inference frameworks and methodologies have gained interest as a promising tool to reliably answer scientific questions. However, the tasks of identifying and efficiently estimating causal effects from observed data still pose significant challenges under complex data generating scenarios. We focus on (1) high-dimensional settings where the number of variables is orders of magnitude higher than the number of observations; and (2) multi-level settings, where study participants …
Sleep, Reproduction, And Pregnancy, Joshua R. Freeman
Sleep, Reproduction, And Pregnancy, Joshua R. Freeman
Doctoral Dissertations
Sleep, and particularly sleep timing, prior to conception may be important for reproductive and pregnancy health. Evidence of a biological mechanism relating sleep to reproductive health from laboratory studies suggests that sleep may influence the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian (HPO) axis. The role of sleep in the HPO axis may also impact many reproductive outcomes including reproductive hormones, ovulation, pregnancy, live birth, pregnancy loss, and adverse pregnancy outcomes. However, epidemiological evidence for associations between sleep, especially sleep timing, and these reproductive health endpoints is limited with most studies typically assessing shift work, and not sleep patterns directly. To address these gaps, we evaluated …
Mental Health And Adiposity: The Effects Of Racial Discrimination And Social Relationships, Nicole D. Fields
Mental Health And Adiposity: The Effects Of Racial Discrimination And Social Relationships, Nicole D. Fields
Doctoral Dissertations
Excess adiposity is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and premature mortality. It is well-documented that Black women are disproportionately affected by excess adiposity. Research has focused on lifestyle factors, such as diet and physical activity, to explain the higher prevalence of obesity among Black women compared to white women; however, there is much less research on the association between psychological distress and adiposity, which may be important for understanding racial disparities. To date, no studies have examined the social context by which mental health and physical health are related. Black women in U.S. society live …
Policing And Health: Police Encounters As A Fundamental Cause Of Racial Health Disparities, Richard S. Carbonaro
Policing And Health: Police Encounters As A Fundamental Cause Of Racial Health Disparities, Richard S. Carbonaro
Doctoral Dissertations
Structural racism has taken many forms throughout American history and to this day continues to drive social, economic, and health inequalities. Mass incarceration is a modern tool of social marginalization with well documented and deep-rooted racial inequalities. Research has continually shown that mass incarceration negatively impacts the health of disadvantaged communities. Even police stops, the most common and mundane form of criminal justice contact has been linked with deleterious health outcomes at the individual and community level. In this dissertation, I identify specific social and biological mechanisms connecting encounters with the police and health outcomes. In the first chapter, I …