Association Of Chronic Pain With Participation In Motor Skill Activities In Children With Cerebral Palsy, 2021 Georgia Southern University, Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health
Association Of Chronic Pain With Participation In Motor Skill Activities In Children With Cerebral Palsy, Haresh Rochani, Christopher M. Modlesky, Barbara Weissman, Joshua Vova, Gavin T. Colquitt
Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Environmental Health Sciences Faculty Publications
Many children with cerebral palsy (CP) experience the secondary condition of pain, which is problematic because children with CP face barriers to participation in motor skill activities.1,2 Motor performance in activities of daily living among children with CP is markedly lower than that among their age-matched peers.3 Because of the potential effect of pain on children with CP, we sought to examine the association between pain and activities requiring motor skill performance (ie, difficulty dressing or bathing and participation in sport) among a nationally representative sample of US children with CP.
Covid-19 And The Impact On Rural And Black Church Congregants: Results Of The C-M-C Project, 2021 University of Kentucky
Covid-19 And The Impact On Rural And Black Church Congregants: Results Of The C-M-C Project, Lovoria B. Williams, Anita F. Fernander, Tofial Azam, Maria L. Gomez, Junghee Kang, Cassidy L. Moody, Hannah Bowman, Nancy E. Schoenberg
Nursing Faculty Publications
The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating effects on Black and rural populations with a mortality rate among Blacks three times that of Whites and both rural and Black populations experiencing limited access to COVID-19 resources. The primary purpose of this study was to explore the health, financial, and psychological impact of COVID-19 among rural White Appalachian and Black nonrural central Kentucky church congregants. Secondarily we sought to examine the association between sociodemographics and behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs regarding COVID-19 and intent to vaccinate. We used a cross sectional survey design developed with the constructs of the Health Belief and Theory …
Identification Of Novel And Rare Variants Associated With Handgrip Strength Using Whole Genome Sequence Data From The Nhlbi Trans-Omics In Precision Medicine (Topmed) Program, 2021 Boston University
Identification Of Novel And Rare Variants Associated With Handgrip Strength Using Whole Genome Sequence Data From The Nhlbi Trans-Omics In Precision Medicine (Topmed) Program, Chloé Sarnowski, Han Chen, Mary L. Biggs, Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, Jan Bressler, Marguerite R. Irvin, Kathleen A. Ryan, David Karasik, Donna K. Arnett, L. Adrienne Cupples, David W. Fardo, Stephanie M. Gogarten, Benjamin D. Heavner, Deepti Jain, Hyun Min Kang, Charles Kooperberg, Arch G. Mainous, Braxton D. Mitchell, Alanna C. Morrison, Jeffrey R. O'Connell
Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications
Handgrip strength is a widely used measure of muscle strength and a predictor of a range of morbidities including cardiovascular diseases and all-cause mortality. Previous genome-wide association studies of handgrip strength have focused on common variants primarily in persons of European descent. We aimed to identify rare and ancestry-specific genetic variants associated with handgrip strength by conducting whole-genome sequence association analyses using 13,552 participants from six studies representing diverse population groups from the Trans-Omics in Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Program. By leveraging multiple handgrip strength measures performed in study participants over time, we increased our effective sample size by 7-12%. Single-variant …
Evaluating Public Masking Mandates On Covid-19 Growth Rates In U.S. States, 2021 University of Massachusetts Amherst
Evaluating Public Masking Mandates On Covid-19 Growth Rates In U.S. States, Angus K. Wong
Masters Theses
U.S. state governments have implemented numerous policies to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19. While there is strong biological evidence supporting the wearing of face masks or coverings in public spaces, the impact of public masking policies remains unclear. We aimed to evaluate how early versus delayed implementation of state-level public masking orders impacted subsequent COVID-19 growth rates. We defined “early” implementation as having a state-level mandate in place before September 1, 2020, the approximate start of the school-year. We defined COVID-19 growth rates as the relative increase in confirmed cases 7, 14, 21, 30, 45, 60-days after September 1. …
Mental Health Services Provision In Primary Care And Emergency Department Settings: Analysis Of Blended Fee-For-Service And Blended Capitation Models In Ontario, Canada., 2021 Western University
Mental Health Services Provision In Primary Care And Emergency Department Settings: Analysis Of Blended Fee-For-Service And Blended Capitation Models In Ontario, Canada., Thyna Vu, Kelly K Anderson, Nibene H Somé, Amardeep Thind, Sisira Sarma
Epidemiology and Biostatistics Publications
Treating mental illnesses in primary care is increasingly emphasized to improve access to mental health services. Although family physicians (FPs) or general practitioners are in an ideal position to provide the bulk of mental health care, it is unclear how best to remunerate FPs for the adequate provision of mental health services. We examined the quantity of mental health services provided in Ontario's blended fee-for-service and blended capitation models. We evaluated the impact of FPs switching from blended fee-for-service to blended capitation on the provision of mental health services in primary care and emergency department using longitudinal health administrative data …
Statistical Modeling For High-Dimensional Compositional Data With Applications To The Human Microbiome, 2021 University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Statistical Modeling For High-Dimensional Compositional Data With Applications To The Human Microbiome, Thy Dao
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Compositional data refer to the data that lie on a simplex, which are common in many scientific domains such as genomics, geology, and economics. As the components in a composition must sum to one, traditional tests based on unconstrained data become inappropriate, and new statistical methods are needed to analyze this special type of data. This dissertation is motivated by some statistical problems arising in the analysis of compositional data. In particular, we focus on the high-dimensional and over-dispersed setting, where the dimensionality of compositions is greater than the sample size and the dispersion parameter is moderate or large. In …
A Comparison Of Spatial Clustering Assessment Methods, 2021 University of South Carolina
A Comparison Of Spatial Clustering Assessment Methods, Nadeesha Dilhani Vidanapathirana
Theses and Dissertations
Spatial clustering detection methods are widely used in many fields of research including sociology, epidemiology, ecology, and criminology. The objective of this study is to assess the performance of four spatial clustering detection methods: the average nearest neighbor ratio, Ripley’s K function, local Moran’s I and Getis-Ord Gi* statistics. We conduct a simulation study to evaluate the performance of each method for areal data under different types of spatial dependence and three different areal structures; a 20x20 regular grid, United States counties in six states and Canadian forward sortation areas (FSAs) in three provinces. The results shows that the empirical …
Accurate And Integrative Detection Of Copy Number Variants With High-Throughput Data, 2021 University of South Carolina
Accurate And Integrative Detection Of Copy Number Variants With High-Throughput Data, Xizhi Luo
Theses and Dissertations
Copy number variation, as a major source of genetic variation in the human genome, are gains or losses of the DNA segments. Copy number variation has gained considerable interest as it plays important roles in human complex diseases. Therefore, accurate detection of CNVs with data generated by modern genotyping technologies, such as SNP array and whole-exome sequencing (WES), comprises a critical step toward a better understanding of disease etiology. However, current statistical methodologies for CNV detection still face analytical challenges due to numerous genetic and technological factors that may lead to spurious findings. First, existing methods assume the independent observations …
Analysis Of Genetic Variants Associated With Levels Of Immune Modulating Proteins For Impact On Alzheimer’S Disease Risk Reveal A Potential Role For Siglec14, 2021 University of Kentucky
Analysis Of Genetic Variants Associated With Levels Of Immune Modulating Proteins For Impact On Alzheimer’S Disease Risk Reveal A Potential Role For Siglec14, Benjamin C. Shaw, Yuriko Katsumata, James F. Simpson, David W. Fardo, Steven Estus
Biostatistics Faculty Publications
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified immune-related genes as risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), including TREM2 and CD33, frequently passing a stringent false-discovery rate. These genes either encode or signal through immunomodulatory tyrosine-phosphorylated inhibitory motifs (ITIMs) or activation motifs (ITAMs) and govern processes critical to AD pathology, such as inflammation and amyloid phagocytosis. To investigate whether additional ITIM and ITAM-containing family members may contribute to AD risk and be overlooked due to the stringent multiple testing in GWAS, we combined protein quantitative trait loci (pQTL) data from a recent plasma proteomics study with AD associations in a recent …
Addressing Bias In Non-Experimental Studies Assessing Treatment Outcomes In Prostate Cancer, 2021 The University of Western Ontario
Addressing Bias In Non-Experimental Studies Assessing Treatment Outcomes In Prostate Cancer, David E. Guy
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
We evaluated the ability of matching techniques to balance baseline characteristics between treatment groups using non-experimental data. We identified a set of balance diagnostics that assessed key differences in baseline covariates with potential for confounding. These diagnostics were used in a novel systematic approach to developing and evaluating models for use in propensity score matching that optimized balance and data retention. We then compared the performance of propensity score and coarsened exact matching strategies in optimizing balance and data retention, using non-experimental data from a pan-Canadian prostate cancer database. Both matching techniques balanced baseline covariates adequately and retained approximately 70% …
Bayesian Multivariate Joint Modeling For Skewed-Longitudinal And Time-To-Event Data, 2021 University of South Florida
Bayesian Multivariate Joint Modeling For Skewed-Longitudinal And Time-To-Event Data, Lan Xu
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
In epidemiologic and clinical studies, a relatively large number of biomarkers are repeatedly measured in patients over time, often associated with data on epidemiologic and clinical interest events. So, much attention is focused on developing the specific patterns of the longitudinal measurements, and the associations between those patterns and the time to a certain event, such as heart attack, diagnose of disease, time to transplantation, or death. In the last two decades, the research into joint modeling of longitudinal and time-to-event data has received a tremendous amount of attention.
Numerous researchers have proposed joint modeling approaches for a single longitudinal …
Impact Of Neoantigen Expression And T-Cell Activation On Breast Cancer Survival, 2021 University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Impact Of Neoantigen Expression And T-Cell Activation On Breast Cancer Survival, Wenjing Li, Amei Amei, Francis Bui, Saba Norouzifar, Lingeng Lu, Zuoheng Wang
Mathematical Sciences Faculty Research
Neoantigens are derived from tumor-specific somatic mutations. Neoantigen-based syn-thesized peptides have been under clinical investigation to boost cancer immunotherapy efficacy. The promising results prompt us to further elucidate the effect of neoantigen expression on patient survival in breast cancer. We applied Kaplan–Meier survival and multivariable Cox regression models to evaluate the effect of neoantigen expression and its interaction with T-cell activation on overall survival in a cohort of 729 breast cancer patients. Pearson’s chi-squared tests were used to assess the relationships between neoantigen expression and clinical pathological variables. Spearman correlation analysis was conducted to identify correlations between neoantigen expression, mutation …
Sample Size Formulas For Estimating Areas Under The Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves With Precision And Assurance, 2021 The University of Western Ontario
Sample Size Formulas For Estimating Areas Under The Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves With Precision And Assurance, Grace Lu
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) is commonly used to quantify the discriminative ability of tests with ordinal or continuous test data. When planning a study to evaluate a new test, it is important to determine a minimum sample size required to achieve a prespecified precision of estimating AUC. However, conventional sample size formulas do not consider the probability of achieving a prespecified precision, resulting in underestimation of sample sizes. To incorporate the assurance probability, asymptotic sample size formulas were derived using different variance estimators for AUC in this thesis. The precision of AUC estimations was quantified …
Asymmetric Multivariate Archimedean Copula Models And Semi-Competing Risks Data Analysis, 2021 New Jersey Institute of Technology
Asymmetric Multivariate Archimedean Copula Models And Semi-Competing Risks Data Analysis, Ziyan Guo
Dissertations
Many multivariate models have been proposed and developed to model high dimensional data when the dimension of a data set is greater than 2 (d ≥ 3). The existing multivariate models often force the “exchangeable” structure for part or the whole model, are not very flexible which tends to be of limited use in practice. There is a demand for developing and studying multivariate models with any pre-specified bivariate margins.
Suppose there exists such a class of flexible models with any pre-specified bivariate margins. Given a multivariate data, what is the distribution function and how to easily estimate the parameters …
Spatially Refined Time-Varying Reproduction Numbers Of Covid-19 By Health District In Georgia, Usa, March–December 2020, 2021 Georgia Southern University, Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health
Spatially Refined Time-Varying Reproduction Numbers Of Covid-19 By Health District In Georgia, Usa, March–December 2020, Chigozie A. Ogwara, Arshpreet Kaur Mallhi, Xinyi Hua, Kamalich Muniz-Rodriguez, Jessica S. Schwind, Xiaolu Zhou, Jeffery A. Jones, Joanne Chopak-Foss, Gerardo Chowell, Isaac Chun-Hai Fung
Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Environmental Health Sciences Faculty Publications
This study quantifies the transmission potential of SARS-CoV-2 across public health districts in Georgia, USA, and tests if per capita cumulative case count varies across counties. To estimate the time-varying reproduction number, Rt of SARS-CoV-2 in Georgia and its 18 public health districts, we apply the R package ‘EpiEstim’ to the time series of historical daily incidence of confirmed cases, 2 March–15 December 2020. The epidemic curve is shifted backward by nine days to account for the incubation period and delay to testing. Linear regression is performed between log10-transformed per capita cumulative case count and log10-transformed population size. We observe …
Theranostic Applications Of Sirna Bioconjugates In Cancer Detection And Treatment, 2021 Seton Hall University
Theranostic Applications Of Sirna Bioconjugates In Cancer Detection And Treatment, Sunil S. Shah
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
Abstract
The emerging field of RNA nanotechnology has led to rapid advances in the applications of RNA in chemical biology, medicinal chemistry, and biotechnology. At the forefront of its utility is the ability to self-assemble multiple siRNAs into nanostructure formulations capable of targeting selected oncogenes and potentiating the gene therapy of malignant tumors. Self-assembled siRNA integrates multiple siRNAs within a single molecular platform for silencing multiple oncogenic mRNA targets with high precision and efficacy to potentially induce cancer cell apoptosis through the RNA interference (RNAi) pathway. Furthermore, the conjugation of siRNA self-assemblies with bio-active probes results in multi-functional theranostic (therapy+diagnostic) …
A Highly Predictive Microrna Panel For Determining Delayed Cerebral Vasospasm Risk Following Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage, 2021 University of Kentucky
A Highly Predictive Microrna Panel For Determining Delayed Cerebral Vasospasm Risk Following Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage, Wang-Xia Wang, Joe E. Springer, Kevin Xie, David W. Fardo, Kevin W. Hatton
Sanders-Brown Center on Aging Faculty Publications
Approximately one-third of aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH) patients develop delayed cerebral vasospasm (DCV) 3–10 days after aneurysm rupture resulting in additional, permanent neurologic disability. Currently, no validated biomarker is available to determine the risk of DCV in aSAH patients. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been implicated in virtually all human diseases, including aSAH, and are found in extracellular biofluids including plasma and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). We used a custom designed TaqMan Low Density Array miRNA panel to examine the levels of 47 selected brain and vasculature injury related miRNAs in CSF and plasma specimens collected from 31 patients with or without DCV …
Species In Vernal Pools: Anova, 2021 CUNY College of Staten Island
Species In Vernal Pools: Anova, Lisa Manne
Open Educational Resources
A one-way analysis of variance exercise using data on species diversities from vernal pools.Data are from vernal pools in Willowbrook Park (adjacent to College of Staten Island's campus) in spring.
The typical ANOVA gives a straightforward result (significant anova, easily-interpreted Tukey-Kramer analysis). This data set requires more nuanced interpretation, as the ANOVA is marginally significant, and Tukey-Kramer yields one significant pairwise comparison between groups. Relative lack of variation within groups explains this apparent enigma.
The Hybridizing Ions Treatment (Hit) Method Development And Computational Study On Sars-Cov-2 E Protein., 2021 University of Texas at El Paso
The Hybridizing Ions Treatment (Hit) Method Development And Computational Study On Sars-Cov-2 E Protein., Shengjie Sun
Open Access Theses & Dissertations
Fast and accurate calculations of the electrostatic features for highly charged biomolecules such as DNA, RNA, highly charged proteins, are crucial but challenging tasks. Traditional implicit solvent methods calculate the electrostatic features fast, but they are not able to balance the high net charges in the biomolecules effectively. Explicit solvent methods add unbalanced ions to neutralize the highly charged biomolecules in molecular dynamic simulations, which require more expensive computing resources. Here we developed a novel method, the Hybridizing Ions Treatment (HIT) method, which hybridizes the implicit solvent method with the explicit method to realistically calculate the electrostatic potential for highly …
Does Social Support Moderate The Association Between Income And Food Security Status Among Seniors Living In Southern Nevada?, 2021 University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Does Social Support Moderate The Association Between Income And Food Security Status Among Seniors Living In Southern Nevada?, Adugna Teka Siweya
UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones
Background: Income is the strongest predictor of food insecurity among seniors, and social support also an essential factor to help mitigate the effects of food insecurity. However, little is known about the potential role that social support may play as a moderator of the association between income and food insecurity. Thus, we aim to examine social support as a moderator for the relationship between income and food insecurity among seniors. Methods: Logistic regression models were used to analyze data collected in 2019 from seniors residing in Southern Nevada. Predictors of food insecurity, sociodemographic factors, social support variables, and income and …