Saturday, November 02, 2024

 

AMERIKA

Investment in pediatric emergency care could save more than 2,100 young lives annually




Oregon Health & Science University





In emergencies, children have distinct needs because of their unique physiological, emotional and developmental characteristics. But 83% of emergency departments nationwide are not fully prepared to meet those needs — which can be life-threatening for a child in cases of severe illness or injury.

A new Oregon Health & Science University-led study, published today in JAMA Network Open, found that bridging that gap, known as becoming “pediatric ready,” could prevent the deaths of more than 2,100 children each year with modest financial investment.  

In Oregon specifically, an investment of just over $3 per child — a total cost of about $2.7 million annually — could save approximately 30 children’s lives each year when adjusted for population size.

“Few topics are more important than children and their health. We need to do everything we can to keep them alive, and improving pediatric ED readiness is one significant way to move the needle,” said Craig Newgard, M.D., M.P.H., professor of emergency medicine in the OHSU School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “This study builds on a growing body of research demonstrating that every hospital can and must be ready for children’s emergencies.

“For the first time, we have comprehensive national and state-by-state data that emphasizes both the urgency and feasibility of this work.”

Saving lives with readiness

The research team, co-led by Newgard and Nathan Kuppermann, M.D., chair of pediatrics and chief academic officer at Children’s National Hospital, analyzed data from 4,840 emergency departments, focusing on 669,019 children at risk for death upon seeking care. Using predictive models, they assessed how every emergency department achieving high pediatric readiness — defined as scoring at least 88 out of 100 on the National Pediatric Readiness Project, or NPRP, assessment — could impact mortality rates.

By applying the potential reduction in mortality associated with high readiness to the number of at-risk children and adjusting state-specific estimates for population size, the researchers identified the number of lives that could be saved each year: Of the 7,619 children who die annually while receiving emergency services, 2,143 lives could have been saved through universal high ED pediatric readiness.

The study authors emphasize that modest investment in health care dollars would be needed to eliminate these inequities in pediatric emergency care: The cost per child resident by state ranges from $0 to $12, a price tag lower than a single dose of most routine childhood vaccines.

They also outline several strategies to improve pediatric emergency care, such as integrating high pediatric readiness into hospital accreditation requirements and incentivizing readiness through performance-based reimbursement models.

“This research emphasizes the urgent need for widespread investment in pediatric readiness,” said Kate Remick, M.D., co-author of the study and emergency physician at the Dell School of Medicine at the University of Texas at Austin. “The National Pediatric Readiness Project has provided a roadmap for improvement. But we need the full engagement of clinicians, health care administrators, policymakers, and families to make universal pediatric readiness a reality.”

Ready, able to save a child’s life

On a high level, readiness of emergency departments represents the ability to care for acutely ill and injured children. In practice, achieving high pediatric ED readiness includes elements such as care coordination, personnel, quality improvement, safety, equipment, and policies and procedures.

To support hospitals’ efforts, the NPRP has developed free, open-access resources for ED providers and staff to help facilitate delivery of high-quality emergency care to all children. The Emergency Medical Services for Children Program also provides individualized resources, including program administrators in all 50 states who are able to guide hospitals through readiness work based on their state’s unique health care needs and landscape.

Understanding the significant geographic barriers many individuals face to receive care, upcoming research by Newgard and colleagues will focus on rural emergency care and how hospitals can better serve children living in rural and frontier areas. The research team will also continue to investigate the economic benefits of pediatric ED readiness, including long-term health system savings.

“The vast majority of kids — more than 80% — who present for care at emergency departments across the country are cared for outside of children’s hospitals, primarily in general community EDs,” Newgard said.

“What’s so impactful about the concept of readiness is that it’s designed to be inclusive of all hospitals regardless of size, resources, geography or other constraints,” he added. “It’s well within our reach to ensure every hospital is ready and able to save a child’s life.”

The research was supported by a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Emergency Medical Services for Children Targeted Issue grant (H34MC33243-01-01) and an HHS National Institutes of Health (NIH) Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) grant (R24 HD085927). The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by HHS, HRSA, NIH, or the U.S. Government.

 

Political pros no better than public in predicting which messages persuade




Yale University





Political campaigns spend big bucks hiring consultants to craft persuasive messaging, but a new study coauthored by Yale political scientist Joshua L. Kalla demonstrates that political professionals perform no better than laypeople in predicting which messages will sway voters.

In the study, Kalla and his coauthors evaluated how well sample groups of political practitioners — professionals who work for political campaigns, polling firms, and advocacy organizations — and members of the public could predict the effectiveness of 172 campaign messages concerning 21 political issues, including legalizing marijuana, cancelling student debt, and increasing border security.

They found that both groups performed barely better than chance and that the practitioners were no more perceptive than laypeople in identifying messaging that resonates with people.

“We found that neither political practitioners nor the mass public are particularly accurate in predicting which persuasive messages are more effective than others,” said Kalla, associate professor of political science in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “This suggests that political practitioners who craft language intended to persuade have fairly poor intuitions about which messages people will find persuasive.”

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was coauthored by David E. Brookman, Christian Caballero, and Matthew Easton, all of the University of California, Berkeley.

For the study, the researchers gathered 172 text-based political messages that political practitioners have used to support or oppose 21 distinct issues. They pulled the messages from sources such as voter guides published by various advocacy organizations or the social media accounts of prominent politicians.

An example is a message used by the Marijuana Policy Project to support the legalization of cannabis: “Polls show that a strong and growing majority of Americans agree it is time to end cannabis prohibition. Nationwide, a recent Gallup poll found that 66% support making marijuana use legal for adults.”

To measure the effectiveness of these messages, the researchers conducted a large-scale survey experiment, in which they randomly assigned 23,167 participants into either a treatment group or a control group. The treatment groups were presented with messages for three specific issues; the control group saw no messages. Then they questioned participants in both the treatment and control groups on their opinions of the issues, for a total of 67,215 observations from the participants. The researchers used this data to estimate the efficacy of each message.

Next, they asked 1,524 political practitioners with varied experience and expertise and 21,247 laypeople to predict the messages’ effectiveness. (Ninety-one percent of the practitioners reported being directly involved with developing messaging.) Both groups did little better predicting the messages’ persuasiveness than if they had guessed randomly.

The study showed that the members of the public believed that other people are more persuadable than the initial survey showed or the practitioners expected. But after accounting for those inflated expectations, practitioners did not predict meaningfully better than laypeople, the study found.

Among the political practitioners, the study found that experience or issue expertise did not translate into a greater ability to identify effective messages.

The findings suggest that, rather than relying on their intuition, political practitioners should consider incorporating data-science techniques into their evaluations of potential messages, said Kalla, a faculty fellow at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

“The main takeaway here is that political practitioners have tools available to help them identify effective messages without having to rely on their gut feeling,” he said. “They could use survey experiments similar to what we did in this study. We see political campaigns already doing that, and I suspect more will adopt such techniques moving forward.”

 

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More resources needed to protect birds in Germany

Citizen scientists enable Göttingen University researchers to analyse effectiveness of protected areas

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Göttingen

Bucking the trend: the corn bunting is one of the few field birds to experience improvement – particularly in protected areas. 

image: 

Bucking the trend: the corn bunting is one of the few field birds to experience improvement – particularly in protected areas.

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Credit: Johannes Kamp

Member states of the European Union are obliged to designate Special Protection Areas (SPAs) as part of the Natura 2000 network. These areas are designed to guarantee the preservation and restoration of bird populations. However, due to the paucity of data about rare species, it was not known how well these areas worked. Researchers at the University of Göttingen and Dachverband Deutscher Avifaunisten (DDA) developed citizen science platforms as a new data source to evaluate the effectiveness of the 742 protected areas for birds across Germany. This research shows that although these areas are well placed, their effectiveness varies greatly. When  protected areas were compared with unprotected sites that showed similar geographical characteristics, only a few species thrived better inside the SPAs. The results were published in the journal Biological Conservation.

 

Citizen science platforms enable thousands of people to contribute to research with their observations – whether a single blackbird at a bird feeder or a long list of species seen during a day trip to the seashore. The study used the platform www.ornitho.de, which contains more than 90 million records. The advantage of such platforms is that they provide almost complete coverage of the country. However, the poorly standardised and unsystematic data collection process means that there are multiple sources of error. For this reason, the researchers limited their analysis just to particularly valuable, complete lists that provide information on all birds registered during an observation. To find out how the protected areas fared, the researchers compared them with areas that were not protected but had similar natural features.

 

The analyses showed that 62 per cent of the species studied were more likely to be found in a Special Protection Area than outside it. Dr Femke Pflüger, first author of the study, based at the DDA and Göttingen University’s Department of Conservation Biology, highlights these positive findings: “Conservationists obviously did a good job in selecting the right areas in the 2000s.” However, a comparison over time showed more mixed results and she adds: “For the period 2012 to 2022, we were only able to identify positive developments in protected areas for 17 per cent of the species. These concerned mainly meadow birds such as black-tailed godwits and curlews, which have benefited from targeted habitat management.” For 83 per cent of the species, there was either no measurable effect or the development was less favourable inside the protected areas than outside. The study also defined situations as ‘effective protection’ if the probability of finding a species decreased over time, both inside and outside the protected areas, but to a lesser extent within them.

 

Professor Johannes Kamp, Head of the Department of Conservation Biology at the University of Göttingen who led the analyses, says: “This shows that designating a Special Protection Area is not enough to stop a downward trend. The areas need better staffing and funding to restore habitats and to target measures specifically to support endangered species.” Dr Jakob Katzenberger, who coordinates the DDA's research, is delighted that thousands of citizens contributed: “We were able to show that collecting biodiversity data from online platforms has huge potential. It was possible to track large-scale changes in birdlife really effectively.”

 

This research was made possible thanks to funding by the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) as part of the project ‘Implementation of measures for nationwide harmonised bird monitoring in EU special protection areas’.

 

Original publication: Pflüger, F.J. et al: “Semi-structured citizen science data reveal mixed effectiveness of EU Special Protection Areas (SPA) in Germany.” Biological Conservation 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2024.110801

 

 

Contact:

Professor Johannes Kamp

University of Göttingen

Department of Conservation Biology

Bürgerstraße 50, 37073 Göttingen

Tel: +49 (0)551 39-25207

Email: johannes.kamp@uni-goettingen.de

www.uni-goettingen.de/conservation

 

Dr Femke Pflüger

Dachverband Deutscher Avifaunisten (DDA) and

University of Göttingen

Department of Conservation Biology

Bürgerstraße 50, 37073 Göttingen

Tel: +49 (0)551 39-25207

Email: fpflueg@gwdg.de

www.dda-web.de/dda/team/mitarbeiter/Pfl%C3%BCger,Femke

 

Member states of the European Union are obliged to designate Special Protection Areas (SPAs) as part of the Natura 2000 network. These areas are designed to guarantee the preservation and restoration of bird populations. However, due to the paucity of data about rare species, it was not known how well these areas worked. Researchers at the University of Göttingen and Dachverband Deutscher Avifaunisten (DDA) developed citizen science platforms as a new data source to evaluate the effectiveness of the 742 protected areas for birds across Germany. This research shows that although these areas are well placed, their effectiveness varies greatly. When  protected areas were compared with unprotected sites that showed similar geographical characteristics, only a few species thrived better inside the SPAs. The results were published in the journal Biological Conservation.

 

Citizen science platforms enable thousands of people to contribute to research with their observations – whether a single blackbird at a bird feeder or a long list of species seen during a day trip to the seashore. The study used the platform www.ornitho.de, which contains more than 90 million records. The advantage of such platforms is that they provide almost complete coverage of the country. However, the poorly standardised and unsystematic data collection process means that there are multiple sources of error. For this reason, the researchers limited their analysis just to particularly valuable, complete lists that provide information on all birds registered during an observation. To find out how the protected areas fared, the researchers compared them with areas that were not protected but had similar natural features.

 

The analyses showed that 62 per cent of the species studied were more likely to be found in a Special Protection Area than outside it. Dr Femke Pflüger, first author of the study, based at the DDA and Göttingen University’s Department of Conservation Biology, highlights these positive findings: “Conservationists obviously did a good job in selecting the right areas in the 2000s.” However, a comparison over time showed more mixed results and she adds: “For the period 2012 to 2022, we were only able to identify positive developments in protected areas for 17 per cent of the species. These concerned mainly meadow birds such as black-tailed godwits and curlews, which have benefited from targeted habitat management.” For 83 per cent of the species, there was either no measurable effect or the development was less favourable inside the protected areas than outside. The study also defined situations as ‘effective protection’ if the probability of finding a species decreased over time, both inside and outside the protected areas, but to a lesser extent within them.

 

Professor Johannes Kamp, Head of the Department of Conservation Biology at the University of Göttingen who led the analyses, says: “This shows that designating a Special Protection Area is not enough to stop a downward trend. The areas need better staffing and funding to restore habitats and to target measures specifically to support endangered species.” Dr Jakob Katzenberger, who coordinates the DDA's research, is delighted that thousands of citizens contributed: “We were able to show that collecting biodiversity data from online platforms has huge potential. It was possible to track large-scale changes in birdlife really effectively.”

 

This research was made possible thanks to funding by the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) as part of the project ‘Implementation of measures for nationwide harmonised bird monitoring in EU special protection areas’.

 

Original publication: Pflüger, F.J. et al: “Semi-structured citizen science data reveal mixed effectiveness of EU Special Protection Areas (SPA) in Germany.” Biological Conservation 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2024.110801

 

Black-tailed godwits benefit from targeted measures to shape their habitat in protected areas


 

Contact:

Professor Johannes Kamp

University of Göttingen

Department of Conservation Biology

Bürgerstraße 50, 37073 Göttingen

Tel: +49 (0)551 39-25207

Email: johannes.kamp@uni-goettingen.de

www.uni-goettingen.de/conservation

 

Dr Femke Pflüger

Dachverband Deutscher Avifaunisten (DDA) and

University of Göttingen

Department of Conservation Biology

Bürgerstraße 50, 37073 Göttingen

Tel: +49 (0)551 39-25207

Email: fpflueg@gwdg.de

www.dda-web.de/dda/team/mitarbeiter/Pfl%C3%BCger,Femke

 

 

Bee gene specifies collective behavior



Bee research: publication in Science Advances



Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf

Honeybeens with QR code 

image: 

Each honeybee is labelled with a QR code so that their individual behaviour can be tracked. (Photo: HHU / Christoph Kawan)

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Credit: HHU / Christoph Kawan




Embargoed: Not for Release Until 2:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time Friday, 01 November 2024.

Researchers at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) are collaborating with colleagues from Frankfurt/Main, Oxford and Würzburg to investigate how the complex, cooperative behaviour of honey bees (Apis mellifera) is genetically programmed so that it can be passed on to subsequent generations. As they explain in the scientific journal Science Advances, they found an answer in what is known as the doublesex gene (dsx).

Behavioural interactions between organisms are fundamental and often inherited. Every human being and every animal interacts with other individuals in its social group in one way or another through its behaviour. In the animal kingdom, this has considerable advantages in collective foraging for food, defence against predators and the rearing of offspring.

In some animals, such as honeybees, the social behaviour bonds are so strong that the individual members form a tight-knit society that function collectively as a single “superorganism”. Through their individual behaviour, thousands of worker bees protect the entire colony, feed it and care for the brood.

Professor Dr Martin Beye, who heads the Institute of Evolutionary Genetics at HHU and is the corresponding author of the study that has now been published in Science Advances, emphasises: “The behavioural repertoire of the individual bees and their function in the colony are not learned, but rather inherited. Until now, it was not known how such complex behaviours were genetically encoded.”

Together with colleagues from the universities in Frankfurt/Main, Oxford and Würzburg, the team of researchers at HHU led by Beye and first author Dr Vivien Sommer has now discovered that a special gene known as dsx specifies worker bee-specific behaviour.

Sommer: “The gene programmes whether a worker bee takes up a task in the colony and for how long. This includes collective tasks such as caring for the larvae or foraging for food and social exchanges on food sources, for example.”

The biologists used the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors in their investigations to modify or switch off the dsx gene in selected bees. They attached a QR code to the manipulated bees, then monitored their behaviour in the hive with cameras. The resulting video sequences were analysed with the support of artificial intelligence to determine the bees’ individual behavioural patterns.

Sommer: “Our central question was whether and how the inherited behavioural patterns changed as a result of the gene modification. Such changes must be reflected in the nervous system of the worker bees where the specific behaviour is controlled.”

The researchers introduced green fluorescent protein (GFP) into the dsx sequence so that GFP was produced together with the dsx protein. The neuronal circuits could then be viewed using fluorescence microscopy, in both the unmodified bees and in those with genetic modifications. “We were able to use these tools to see exactly which neural pathways the dsx gene creates in the brain and how this gene in turn specifies the inherited behavioural patterns of honeybees,” explains doctoral researcher Jana Seiler, who is also a co-author of the study.

“Our findings indicate a fundamental genetic programme that determines the neuronal circuitry and behaviour of worker bees,” says Professor Dr Wolfgang Rössler from the Department of Behavioural Physiology and Sociobiology, who led the study at the University of Würzburg.

In the next step, the researchers now want to move from the level of the individual honeybee to the bee colony superorganism. Alina Sturm, who is also a doctoral researcher at HHU and study co-author, adds: “We hope to find the link between individual programming and the coordinated behaviour of many individuals.”

The neuronal network in the bee’s brain appears in green. (Image: HHU / Institute for Evolutionary Genetics)

Credit

HHU / Institute for Evolutionary Genetics


Original publication:

Vivien Sommer, Jana Seiler, Alina Sturm, Sven Köhnen, Anna Wagner, Christina Blut, Wolfgang Rössler, Stephen F. Goodwin, Bernd Grünewald, Martin Beye. Dedicated developmental programing for group-supporting behaviors in eusocial honeybees. Science Advances (2024).

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adp3953

 

Change of ownership in home health agencies may lead to increased Medicare spending and reduced staffing levels, according to UTHealth Houston research





University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
Yucheng Hou, PhD 

image: 

Yucheng Hou, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Management, Policy, and Community Health at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health

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Credit: UTHealth Houston




Medicare-certified home health agencies, which are key to allowing older adults to age in place, are increasingly going through ownership changes, raising concerns about health care spending, workforce, and quality of care, according to a study by UTHealth Houston.

The research was published in JAMA Health Forum, part of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“The ownership change in health care sectors — including various forms of acquisitions by health systems, insurers, private equity firms, and other corporate investors — is increasingly reshaping U.S. health care system and causing concerns about quality of care,” said Yucheng Hou, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Management, Policy, and Community Health at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health. “Some types of the ownership changes, such as private equity firms’ acquisition of health care organizations, could shift organizations’ focus to short-term profit generating instead of providing high-quality care.”

While other studies have looked at implications after ownership changes in hospitals, physician practices, and nursing homes, this is one of the first studies to examine home health agencies, Hou said.

The researchers looked at 294 Medicare-certified home health agencies through change-of-ownership files linked to publicly available Medicare data from 2016 to 2019. They were compared with 2,330 matched controls before and after the ownership transaction.

In the three years after ownership changes, quarterly star ratings increased by 0.18 relative to controls, with greater increases seen among home health agencies that converted from nonprofit/public to for-profit. Per-capita payments from Medicare also increased within two years of the ownership change. Sixty-day hospital admission rates and emergency department visits, however, remained the same.

The increased home health spending per patient, Hou said, could be because home health agencies are shifting resources toward more profitable services or treating patients for multiple home health episodes following the ownership change, which highlights the need for future research.

“Although we find an increase in the home health star rating, this measure is mostly composed of self-reported quality measures from the home health agencies, so there might be room for upcoding,” Hou said. “The more objective claims-based quality measures, such as 60-day hospital admissions and outpatient emergency room visits, did not change.”

Most concerning, Hou said, was the reduction in staffing levels: down 17% in nurses and 26% in home health aides. There was also a reduction in per-visit minutes for patients: down 5% for skilled nursing, 3% for physical therapy, and 11% for home health aide care.

“Overall, our results are consistent with the growing evidence of corporate consolidation in other health care sectors, which paints concerning implications of ownership changes on the quality of care,” Hou said.

Co-first authors were Zhanji Zhang, MSc, of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; and Kun Li, PhD, postdoctoral associate at Duke University. Co-authors were Siyi Wang, BS, of Rice University, and Shekinah Fashaw-Walters, PhD, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

 

 

Exposure to particular sources of air pollution is harmful to children’s learning and memory, a USC study shows



Research contributes to mounting cvidence that shows that fine particulates PM2.5 are detrimental for memory and cognition for people of all ages.




University of Southern California





A new USC study involving 8,500 children from across the country reveals that a form of air pollution, largely the product of agricultural emissions, is linked to poor learning and memory performance in 9- and 10-year-olds.

The specific component of fine particle air pollution, or PM2.5, ammonium nitrate, is also implicated in Alzheimer’s and dementia risk in adults, suggesting that PM2.5 may cause neurocognitive harm across the lifespan. Ammonium nitrate forms when ammonia gas and nitric acid, produced by agricultural activities and fossil fuel combustion, respectively, react in the atmosphere.

The findings appear in Environmental Health Perspectives.

“Our study highlights the need for more detailed research on particulate matter sources and chemical components,” said senior author Megan Herting, an associate professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “It suggests that understanding these nuances is crucial for informing air quality regulations and understanding long-term neurocognitive effects.”

For the last several years, Herting has been working with data from the largest brain study across America, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, or ABCD, to understand how PM2.5 may affect the brain.

PM2.5, a key indicator of air quality, is a mixture of dust, soot, organic compounds and metals that come in a range of particle sizes less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter. PM2.5 can travel deep into the lungs, where these particles can pass into the bloodstream, and bypass the blood-brain barrier, causing serious health problems.

Fossil fuel combustion is one of the largest sources of PM2.5, especially in urban areas, but sources like wildfires, agriculture, marine aerosols and chemical reactions are also important.

In 2020, Herting and her colleagues published a paper in which they looked at PM2.5 as a whole, and its potential impact on cognition in children, and did not find a relationship.

For this study, they used special statistical techniques to look at 15 chemical components in PM2.5 and their sources. That’s when ammonium nitrate — which is usually a result of agricultural and farming operations — in the air appeared as a prime suspect.

“No matter how we examined it, on its own or with other pollutants, the most robust finding was that ammonium nitrate particles were linked to poorer learning and memory,” Herting said. “That suggests that overall PM2.5 is one thing, but for cognition, it’s a mixture effect of what you’re exposed to.”

For their next project, the researchers hope to look at how these mixtures and sources may map on to individual differences in brain phenotypes during child and adolescent development.

In addition to Herting, other study authors include Rima Habre, Kirthana Sukumaran, Katherine Bottenhorn, Jim Gauderman, Carlos Cardenas-Iniguez, Rob McConnell and Hedyeh Ahmadi, all of the Keck School of Medicine; Daniel A. Hackman of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work; Kiros Berhane of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health; Shermaine Abad of University of California, San Diego; and Joel Schwartz of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health [NIEHS R01ES032295, R01ES031074, P30ES007048] and the Environmental Protection Agency [RD 83587201, RD 83544101].