We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
People at high risk for psychosis access primary care mental health services for depression and anxiety and are unlikely to recover from these affective symptoms. We report the first controlled trial of cognitive–behavioural therapy (CBT) for depression and anxiety, minimally adapted for psychosis risk, in primary care.
Aims
To evaluate feasibility, acceptability and signals of efficacy for CBT for depression and anxiety adapted for psychosis risk, designed in collaboration with people with psychosis.
Method
A longitudinal controlled trial comparing best practice CBT for depression and anxiety (CBT-BP) with CBT adapted for psychosis risk (CBT-PR), in patients meeting criteria for UK primary care services and who are also clinically high risk for psychosis (trial registration no. ISRCTN40678).
Results
Rates of recruitment (55 to CBT-BP, 44 to CBT-PR), completion of measures (90% CBT-BP, 94% CBT-PR) and retention in therapy (75% CBT-BP, 95% CBT-PR) demonstrate the feasibility and acceptability of the adapted therapy. Routine measures of depression and anxiety signal improved clinical and recovery outcomes for CBT-PR. Psychosis and relational measures signal sustained improvement (at 3 months) in the CBT-PR group. No serious adverse events were reported.
Conclusions
Primary care mental health services present a unique opportunity to identify and treat people at risk of psychosis at a time when they are help-seeking. CBT for depression and anxiety, minimally adapted for psychosis risk, can be delivered in routine services, and is likely to improve clinical and recovery outcomes and reduce psychosis risk. A definitive trial is needed to estimate clinical and cost-effectiveness.
Objectives/Goals: Mayo Clinic’s Clinical Trials Beyond Walls™ (CTBW) program collaborates with study teams to implement decentralized elements in clinical trials, enabling participation from home or local settings. In cancer treatment trials, traditional paper pill diaries are replaced with real-time digital tracking solutions to monitor chemotherapy adherence. Methods/Study Population: The CTBW team developed a solution to deliver electronic pill diaries to research participants using the electronic health record (EHR) system Epic and patient portal MyChart1. The solution includes a portal message to remind participants to take chemotherapy. Medication dose, date taken, and reasons for missed doses (e.g., “I forgot” or “side effects were bothersome”) are captured. An automated in-basket notification system alerts the study team when predefined conditions are met. Configurable medication schedules ensure diaries are sent according to the prescribed frequency. Reports were generated to allow study teams to monitor all participant diaries. Results/Anticipated Results: The CTBW team implemented this digital pill diary in neuro-oncology trial NCT066250472. We anticipate the pill diary in the patient portal will enhance chemotherapy adherence by capturing real-time data in a platform widely used by Mayo Clinic patients. This patient-reported data is stored in the EHR, where it is accessible to providers and study teams. This allows for continuous monitoring, which facilitates a streamlined review of potential adverse events, improved compliance visibility, and timely treatment adjustments compared to paper-based or external solutions. The system also streamlines data entry, reducing human error and eliminating manual transcription. The created language and workflow templates allow the CTBW to scale this approach to future cancer trials Discussion/Significance of Impact: Decentralized clinical trial participants may never visit Mayo Clinic, making digital recording essential. The EHR-based digital pill diary enables continuous monitoring within a familiar system for providers and patients, increasing study team visibility, and allowing for earlier intervention in cases of non-compliance or adverse events.
Hallucinations are common and distressing symptoms in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Treatment response in clinical trials is measured using validated questionnaires, including the Scale for Assessment of Positive Symptoms-Hallucinations (SAPS-H) and University of Miami PD Hallucinations Questionnaire (UM-PDHQ). The minimum clinically important difference (MCID) has not been determined for either scale. This study aimed to estimate a range of MCIDs for SAPS-H and UM-PDHQ using both consensus-based and statistical approaches.
Methods
A Delphi survey was used to seek opinions of researchers, clinicians, and people with lived experience. We defined consensus as agreement ≥75%. Statistical approaches used blinded data from the first 100 PD participants in the Trial for Ondansetron as Parkinson’s Hallucinations Treatment (TOP HAT, NCT04167813). The distribution-based approach defined the MCID as 0.5 of the standard deviation of change in scores from baseline at 12 weeks. The anchor-based approach defined the MCID as the average change in scores corresponding to a 1-point improvement in clinical global impression-severity scale (CGI-S).
Results
Fifty-one researchers and clinicians contributed to three rounds of the Delphi survey and reached consensus that the MCID was 2 points on both scales. Sixteen experts with lived experience reached the same consensus. Distribution-defined MCIDs were 2.6 points for SAPS-H and 1.3 points for UM-PDHQ, whereas anchor-based MCIDs were 2.1 and 1.3 points, respectively.
Conclusions
We used triangulation from multiple methodologies to derive the range of MCID estimates for the two rating scales, which was between 2 and 2.7 points for SAPS-H and 1.3 and 2 points for UM-PDHQ.
Repatriation of human remains and associated funerary objects under NAGPRA and the increased use of culturally informed curation practices for sacred, religious, and ceremonial objects are important steps toward restoring control over cultural patrimony to Native Nations in the United States. Many museums holding Indigenous belongings have begun a collaborative care approach involving Indigenous community voices and improving access to collections. However, this framework has not been applied to many animal remains curated in American archaeology museums, which remain broadly beyond the care or administrative purview of Native people. Because many Indigenous worldviews do not hold a clear separation between the human and animal spheres, common practices applied to animal remains are not congruent with the idea of respectful or culturally informed care. Here we outline steps to shift the treatment of animals through the application of Indigenous knowledge to museum collections.
Although poetic modernism marked the height of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s seminal influence, British, American, and postcolonialist poets around the globe (including in Ireland, Nigeria, Australia, Canada, and the Caribbean) continue to engage intensely with his work. Many have learned to write in their own idiosyncratic voices while honouring or debating with Hopkins, and even while intentionally echoing his innovative techniques or his ecological and spiritual themes. The topic of Hopkins’s poetic legacies is ripe for further scholarly attention. Even a brief assessment of writers he has influenced reveals that his voice has deeply shaped the contours of contemporary anglophone verse.
A clinical and translational scientist (CTS) often seeks to increase their knowledge of statistical topics to effectively conduct biomedical research studies. A common method for obtaining this knowledge is through existing online educational materials that are suggested by a biostatistical collaborator or identified by the CTS. However, the volume of available educational materials on diverse statistical topics makes the task of identifying high-quality educational resources at an appropriate level challenging and time consuming for CTSs and collaborative biostatisticians. In response to these challenges, the Biostats4You website was created, where existing online educational materials for a variety of statistical topics are vetted to identify those most appropriate for CTSs. In this manuscript, we describe the resource review process, provide information about statistical topics and resources currently available, and make recommendations for how CTSs and collaborative biostatisticians can utilize the Biostats4You website to improve training, mentoring, and collaborative research practices.
Individuals routinely engage in instrumental transactional legal behavior, from generating tax returns to signing leases to negotiating employment terms. While some individuals undertake these activities equipped with the skills, knowledge, and capacity to behave strategically, others do not. In this article, we introduce the concept of legal actuation to describe this legal behavior and theorize its role as a source of inequality under the law. Using estate planning as an empirical example, we consider how variation in legal actuation may serve to reproduce economic inequalities and investigate the role of legal socialization, knowledge, and capability as mechanisms of advantage. In doing so, we draw attention to an understudied dimension of everyday legal behavior that has important implications for equal justice and the relationship between law and inequality.
Incarceration is a significant social determinant of health, contributing to high morbidity, mortality, and racialized health inequities. However, incarceration status is largely invisible to health services research due to inadequate clinical electronic health record (EHR) capture. This study aims to develop, train, and validate natural language processing (NLP) techniques to more effectively identify incarceration status in the EHR.
Methods:
The study population consisted of adult patients (≥ 18 y.o.) who presented to the emergency department between June 2013 and August 2021. The EHR database was filtered for notes for specific incarceration-related terms, and then a random selection of 1,000 notes was annotated for incarceration and further stratified into specific statuses of prior history, recent, and current incarceration. For NLP model development, 80% of the notes were used to train the Longformer-based and RoBERTa algorithms. The remaining 20% of the notes underwent analysis with GPT-4.
Results:
There were 849 unique patients across 989 visits in the 1000 annotated notes. Manual annotation revealed that 559 of 1000 notes (55.9%) contained evidence of incarceration history. ICD-10 code (sensitivity: 4.8%, specificity: 99.1%, F1-score: 0.09) demonstrated inferior performance to RoBERTa NLP (sensitivity: 78.6%, specificity: 73.3%, F1-score: 0.79), Longformer NLP (sensitivity: 94.6%, specificity: 87.5%, F1-score: 0.93), and GPT-4 (sensitivity: 100%, specificity: 61.1%, F1-score: 0.86).
Conclusions:
Our advanced NLP models demonstrate a high degree of accuracy in identifying incarceration status from clinical notes. Further research is needed to explore their scaled implementation in population health initiatives and assess their potential to mitigate health disparities through tailored system interventions.
To date, support for independence in older people has been largely focused on achieving practice- and policy-orientated goals such as maintenance of function, remaining in one's own home and reducing the impact of receiving care. Uncertainty about what independence means to older people means that these goals may not align with what matters and should be considered for a more person-centred approach to independence. This study aimed to improve understanding of the meaning and facilitators of independence from older people's perspectives. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 community-dwelling people aged 75+, purposively sampled for maximum variance in demographic characteristics. Interviews, conducted by phone or online, were recorded and transcribed. Analysis was conducted using a framework approach to organise, and facilitate comparison of, inductively and deductively generated codes. Patterns were identified and interpreted into themes. Transcripts and themes were reviewed with the research team. Disagreements in interpretations were resolved through discussion. Two themes were identified. The first theme, ‘Older people draw on personal values and experiences to develop unique interpretations of independence’, was underpinned by three concepts: participation, autonomy and control. The concepts reflected patterns identified within participants’ meanings of independence. The second theme, ‘It's not what you have, but how you think about it that creates independence’, represented participants’ shared prioritisation of psychological attributes over physical or environmental resources for maintaining independence. Participation, autonomy and control are shared concepts within older people's diverse interpretations of independence. This paper addresses uncertainty around what independence means to older people and contributes three key concepts that should be considered when operationalising person-centred support for independence.
Ongoing professional development is important for collaborative biostatisticians, as it enables them to remain current with the latest advances in statistical methodology and software, refine their analytical skills, and expand their domain knowledge, thereby facilitating their ability to contribute effectively to biomedical research. Although external opportunities for professional development, such as attending conferences and workshops, are widely recognized and valued in the field of biostatistics, there has been comparatively little attention given to internal opportunities for enhancing the skills and knowledge of biostatisticians which can be implemented with lower financial and time investment than external offerings. The purpose of this paper is to offer guidance for ongoing internal professional development activities that can be employed by collaborative biostatistics units in universities and academic medical centers to complement structured curricula and initial training. Specific examples of activities are provided so that collaborative biostatisticians and/or managers of biostatistical units can flexibly combine components to create an appropriately scaled, customized program that meets the needs of themselves or of the unit.
Key theoretical frameworks have proposed that examining the impact of exposure to specific dimensions of stress at specific developmental periods is likely to yield important insight into processes of risk and resilience. Utilizing a sample of N = 549 young adults who provided a detailed retrospective history of their lifetime exposure to numerous dimensions of traumatic stress and ratings of their current trauma-related symptomatology via completion of an online survey, here we test whether an individual’s perception of their lifetime stress as either controllable or predictable buffered the impact of exposure on trauma-related symptomatology assessed in adulthood. Further, we tested whether this moderation effect differed when evaluated in the context of early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood stress. Consistent with hypotheses, results highlight both stressor controllability and stressor predictability as buffering the impact of traumatic stress exposure on trauma-related symptomatology and suggest that the potency of this buffering effect varies across unique developmental periods. Leveraging dimensional ratings of lifetime stress exposure to probe heterogeneity in outcomes following stress – and, critically, considering interactions between dimensions of exposure and the developmental period when stress occurred – is likely to yield increased understanding of risk and resilience following traumatic stress.
The nursing associate role was first deployed in England in 2019 to fill a perceived skills gap in the nursing workforce between healthcare assistants and registered nurses and to offer an alternative route into registered nursing. Initially, trainee nursing associates were predominantly based in hospital settings; however, more recently, there has been an increase in trainees based in primary care settings. Early research has focussed on experiences of the role across a range of settings, particularly secondary care; therefore, little is known about the experiences and unique support needs of trainees based in primary care.
Aim:
To explore the experiences and career development opportunities for trainee nursing associates based in primary care.
Methods:
This study used a qualitative exploratory design. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 11 trainee nursing associates based in primary care from across England. Data were collected between October and November 2021, transcribed and analysed thematically.
Findings:
Four key themes relating to primary care trainee experiences of training and development were identified. Firstly, nursing associate training provided a ‘valuable opportunity for career progression’. Trainees were frustrated by the ‘emphasis on secondary care’ in both academic content and placement portfolio requirements. They also experienced ‘inconsistency in support’ from their managers and assessors and noted a number of ‘constraints to their learning opportunities’, including the opportunity to progress to become registered nurses.
Conclusion:
This study raises important issues for trainee nursing associates, which may influence the recruitment and retention of the nursing associate workforce in primary care. Educators should consider adjustments to how the curriculum is delivered, including primary care skills and relevant assessments. Employers need to recognise the resource requirements for the programme, in relation to time and support, to avoid undue stress for trainees. Protected learning time should enable trainees to meet the required proficiencies.
To explore higher education institution (HEI) perspectives on the development and implementation of trainee nursing associates (NAs) in the primary care workforce in England.
Background:
Current shortages of primary health care staff have led to innovative skill mix approaches in attempts to maintain safe and effective care. In England, a new level of nursing practice, NAs, was introduced and joined the workforce in 2019. This role was envisaged as a way of bridging the skills gap between health care assistants and registered nurses and as an alternative route into registered nursing. However, there is limited evidence on programme development and implementation of trainee NAs within primary care settings and HEI perspectives on this.
Methods:
This paper draws from a larger qualitative study of HEI perspectives on the trainee NA programme. Twenty-seven staff involved in training NAs, from five HEIs across England, were interviewed from June to September 2021. The interview schedule specifically included questions relating to primary care. Data relating to primary care were extracted and analysed using a combined framework and thematic analysis approach.
Findings:
Three themes were developed: ‘Understanding the trainee role and requirements’, ‘Trainee support in primary care’ and ‘Skills and scope of practice’. It is apparent that a more limited understanding of the NA programme requirements can lead to difficulties in accessing the right support for trainees in primary care. This can create challenges for trainees in gaining the required competencies and uncertainty in understanding what constitutes a safe scope of practice within the role for both employers and trainees. It might be anticipated that as this new programme becomes more embedded in primary care, a greater understanding will develop, support will improve and the nature and scope of this new level of practice will become clearer.
Previous work showed that people find explanations more satisfying when they contain irrelevant neuroscience information. The current studies investigate why this effect happens. In Study 1 ( N=322), subjects judged psychology explanations that did or did not contain irrelevant neuroscience information. Longer explanations were judged more satisfying, as were explanations containing neuroscience information, but these two factors made independent contributions. In Study 2 ( N=255), subjects directly compared good and bad explanations. Subjects were generally successful at selecting the good explanation except when the bad explanation contained neuroscience and the good one did not. Study 3 ( N=159) tested whether neuroscience jargon was necessary for the effect, or whether it would obtain with any reference to the brain. Responses to these two conditions did not differ. These results confirm that neuroscience information exerts a seductive effect on people’s judgments, which may explain the appeal of neuroscience information within the public sphere.
To examine the impact of early traumatic brain injury (TBI) on effortful control (EC) over time and the relationship of EC and executive functioning (EF) to long-term functional and social outcomes.
Method:
Parents of children (N = 206, ages 3–7) with moderate-to-severe TBI or orthopedic injuries (OIs) rated EC using the Child Behavior Questionnaire at 1 (pre-injury), 6, 12, and 18 months post-injury. Child functioning and social competence were assessed at 7 years post-injury. Mixed models examined the effects of injury, time since injury, and their interaction on EC. General linear models examined the associations of pre-injury EC and EC at 18 months with long-term functional and social outcomes. Models controlled for EF to assess the unique contribution of EC to outcomes.
Results:
Children with severe TBI had significantly lower EC than both the OI and moderate TBI groups at each post-injury time point. Both pre-injury and 18-month EC were associated with long-term outcomes. Among those with low EC at baseline, children with moderate and severe TBI had more functional impairment than those with OI; however, no group differences were noted at high levels of EC. EC had main effects on parent-reported social competence that did not vary by injury type.
Conclusions:
Findings suggest that EC is sensitive to TBI effects and is a unique predictor of functional outcomes, independent of EF. High EC could serve as a protective factor, and as such measures of EC could be used to identify children for more intensive intervention.
Among outpatients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) due to the severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) δ (delta) variant who did and did not receive 2 vaccine doses at 7 days after symptom onset, there was no difference in viral shedding (cycle threshold difference 0.59, 95% CI, −4.68 to 3.50; P = .77) with SARS-CoV-2 cultured from 2 (7%) of 28 and 1 (4%) of 26 outpatients, respectively.
Dignity therapy (DT) is a guided process conducted by a health professional for reviewing one's life to promote dignity through the illness process. Empathic communication has been shown to be important in clinical interactions but has yet to be examined in the DT interview session. The Empathic Communication Coding System (ECCS) is a validated, reliable coding system used in clinical interactions. The aims of this study were (1) to assess the feasibility of the ECCS in DT sessions and (2) to describe the process of empathic communication during DT sessions.
Methods
We conducted a secondary analysis of 25 transcripts of DT sessions with older cancer patients. These DT sessions were collected as part of larger randomized controlled trial. We revised the ECCS and then coded the transcripts using the new ECCS-DT. Two coders achieved inter-rater reliability (κ = 0.84) on 20% of the transcripts and then independently coded the remaining transcripts.
Results
Participants were individuals with cancer between the ages of 55 and 75. We developed the ECCS-DT with four empathic response categories: acknowledgment, reflection, validation, and shared experience. We found that of the 235 idea units, 198 had at least one of the four empathic responses present. Of the total 25 DT sessions, 17 had at least one empathic response present in all idea units.
Significance of results
This feasibility study is an essential first step in our larger program of research to understand how empathic communication may play a role in DT outcomes. We aim to replicate findings in a larger sample and also investigate the linkage empathic communication may have in the DT session to positive patient outcomes. These findings, in turn, may lead to further refinement of training for dignity therapists, development of research into empathy as a mediator of outcomes, and generation of new interventions.
Across Eurasia, horse transport transformed ancient societies. Although evidence for chariotry is well dated, the origins of horse riding are less clear. Techniques to distinguish chariotry from riding in archaeological samples rely on elements not typically recovered from many steppe contexts. Here, the authors examine horse remains of Mongolia's Deer Stone-Khirigsuur (DSK) Complex, comparing them with ancient and modern East Asian horses used for both types of transport. DSK horses demonstrate unique dentition damage that could result from steppe chariotry, but may also indicate riding with a shallow rein angle at a fast gait. A key role for chariots in Late Bronze Age Mongolia helps explain the trajectory of horse use in early East Asia.
The mechanics underlying ice–skate friction remain uncertain despite over a century of study. In the 1930s, the theory of self-lubrication from frictional heat supplanted an earlier hypothesis that pressure melting governed skate friction. More recently, researchers have suggested that a layer of abraded wear particles or the presence of quasi-liquid molecular layers on the surface of ice could account for its slipperiness. Here, we assess the dominant hypotheses proposed to govern ice–skate friction and describe experiments conducted in an indoor skating rink aimed to provide observations to test these hypotheses. Our results indicate that the brittle failure of ice under rapid compression plays a strong role. Our observations did not confirm the presence of full-contact water films and are more consistent with the presence of lubricating ice-rich slurries at discontinuous high-pressure zones (HPZs). The presence of ice-rich slurries supporting skates through HPZs merges pressure-melting, abrasion and lubricating films as a unified hypothesis for why skates are so slippery across broad ranges of speeds, temperatures and normal loads. We suggest tribometer experiments to overcome the difficulties of investigating these processes during actual skating trials.