PSYCO-SOCIAL HEALTH & WELLNESS

Grant to support new research to address alcohol-related partner violence among sexual minorities

Virginia Tech

 

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Meagan Brem, assistant professor in the College of Science, received a two-year, $436,586 grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

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Credit: Photo by Becca Halm for Virginia Tech.

Navigating the intersection of alcohol use and intimate partner violence amongst young couples is not an easy journey, and for bisexual+ couples, the road may be even more winding.  

“No study has examined the extent to which alcohol use increases intimate personal violence among bisexual+ young adults or daily experiences unique to them. Our study will look at factors such as minority stressors that may lead to alcohol-related partner violence,” said Meagan Brem, director of the Research for Alcohol and Couple’s Health Lab at Virginia Tech.

Alcohol use and intimate partner violence - defined as any action in a romantic relationship including psychological, emotional, physical, and sexual partner-directed aggression - are as or more prevalent among bisexual+ couples than heterosexual couples, according to Brem, who is also assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. However, compared with other sexual identities, the research has largely neglected this population, which includes individuals who identify as multi-gender attracted, pansexual, and omnisexual individuals.

This critical gap will be addressed by Brem and her research team as the result of a new, two-year $436,586 grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  

Brem and her collaborators will collect daily data for 60 consecutive days from 50 bisexual+ couples and will characterize the day-to-day processes that contribute to alcohol-related intimate partner violence within this understudied priority population. They will then identify subpopulations within bisexual+ couples — including same- or different-gender dyads and couples in which both partners have minoritized sexual identities — to inform future alcohol-related intimate partner violence research.

“This study will be the first step in a line of research that will inform interventions tailored to bisexual+ young adults, a population vulnerable to heavy drinking and partner violence,” said Brem, who is the project’s principal investigator. “If bisexual+ minority stress increases the odds of alcohol-related intimate partner violence, but partner support mitigates these odds, intervention refinements could be developed and tested to ensure that bisexual+ individuals and their partners strengthen their coping strategies and partner support, particularly in response to sexual minority stressors.” 

Project collaborators include

• Alexandra Hanlon, director of the Virginia Tech Center for Biostatistics and Health Data Science
• Ryan Shorey, associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
• Brian Feinstein, associate professor of psychology at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science

“This research will also increase awareness of the unique challenges facing bisexual people and inform interventions to improve their health and wellbeing,” Feinstein said. “It’s incredible to see the NIH supporting research on bisexual health, and I’m grateful to Meagan for her leadership." 

The project is a result of Brem’s previous research contribution to the development of an integrated theory of sexual minority alcohol-related intimate partner violence. Pilot data collected to apply for this grant was made possible through Virginia Tech’s Dean’s Discovery Fund.

In that past work, Brem and colleagues proposed that greater sexual minority stress, such as harassment, stigma, and discrimination, creates a salient state of negative, provocative stimuli that when paired with the pharmacological effects of alcohol increases odds of intimate partner violence perpetration. However, their preliminary findings among individuals — rather than couples — did not support this theory, which then led them to focus on the ways in which partners within each couple support and validate each other in response to sexual minority stressors at the daily level.  

Becuase of the higher rates of alcohol use, intimate partner violence, and lack of research among bisexual+ couples, Brem and her team decided to specifically focus on this population and improve upon their previous methods by assessing daily exposure to sexual minority stress and partner support.  

The team will also be partnering with local and national LGBTQ+ agencies to make sure that the results reach those who can benefit the most from this work.  

“No bisexual+ specific intervention targets have been identified or incorporated into existing alcohol-related intimate partner violence interventions,” Brem said. “Our study will identify sorely needed intervention targets for this priority population to enhance the inclusivity of interventions.”

 

State divorce laws, reproductive care policies, and pregnancy-associated homicide rates

JAMA Network Open

About The Study: 

In this cross-sectional study of pregnancy-associated homicide rates, barriers to divorce were associated with higher homicide rates and access to reproductive health care was associated with lower homicide rates. This study highlights the association between state legislation and pregnancy-associated homicide in the U.S., which is important information for policymakers. 

Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Kaitlin M. Boyle, PhD, email kb49@mailbox.sc.edu.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.44199)

Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

#  #  #

Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article This link will be live at the embargo time http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.44199?utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_term=110824

About JAMA Network Open: JAMA Network Open is an online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. On weekdays, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication. 

Catastrophic health expenditures for in-state and out-of-state abortion care

JAMA Network

About The Study:

 In this cross-sectional study of U.S. patients seeking abortion, many individuals and their households were estimated to incur catastrophic health expenditures, particularly those traveling from out of state. The financial and psychological burdens of abortion seeking have likely worsened after the Dobbs decision, as more people need to cross state lines to reach abortion care. The findings suggest expansion of insurance coverage to ensure equitable access to abortion care, irrespective of people’s state of residence, is needed.

Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Ortal Wasser, MSW, email ow345@nyu.edu.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.44146)

Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author c

ontributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

Heat waves and adverse health events among dually eligible individuals 65 years and older

JAMA Health Forum

About The Study: 

In this time-series study, heat waves were associated with increased adverse health events among dually eligible individuals 65 years and older. Without adaptation strategies to address the health-related impacts of heat, dually eligible individuals are increasingly likely to face adverse outcomes. 

Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Hyunjee Kim, PhD, email kihy@ohsu.edu.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2024.3884)

Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

#  #  #

Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article This link will be live at the embargo time https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2024.3884?utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_term=110824

About JAMA Health Forum: JAMA Health Forum is an international, peer-reviewed, online, open access journal that addresses health policy and strategies affecting medicine, health and health care. The journal publishes original research, evidence-based reports and opinion about national and global health policy; innovative approaches to health care delivery; and health care economics, access, quality, safety, equity and reform. Its distribution will be solely digital and all content will be freely available for anyone to read.

 

Intergenerational effects of adversity on mind-body health: Pathways through the gut-brain axis

A free webinar from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation

Brain & Behavior Research Foundation

The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) is hosting a free webinar, “Intergenerational Effects of Adversity on Mind-Body Health: Pathways Through the Gut-Brain Axis” on Tuesday, November 12, 2024, at 2:00 pm ET. The presenter, Bridget Laura Callaghan, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). At UCLA, Dr. Callaghan directs the Brain & Body Lab in the Department of Psychology and also heads the Mental Disorders and Pain research theme at the Goodman Luskin Microbiome Center. The webinar host, Jeffrey Borenstein, M.D., is the President & CEO of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and host of the Emmy® nominated television series Healthy Minds. Register today to explore how understanding the brain-gut axis can unlock new approaches for preventing and treating anxiety disorders.

Children’s early experiences impact their mental and physical health across the lifespan. Such early experiences can become biologically and psychologically embedded within an individual, contributing to intergenerational transmission of adversity. This presentation investigates the neurobiological mechanisms via which early experiences impact children’s mental and physical health, and how those experiences may be transmitted to impact future generations. Dr. Callaghan will present data from several studies demonstrating how early life adversity gets ‘under the skin’ to influence children’s emotional health, especially anxiety, and their physical health, paying particular attention to gastrointestinal distress, which is tightly connected to emotional wellbeing. Zooming in on the gastrointestinal and oral microbiomes, she will show how adversity impacts biological systems tied to emotional and physical wellbeing, and how the gastrointestinal microbiome is linked to emotional health indirectly through the brain. She will discuss how study of the brain-gut axis can open up new avenues for the prevention and intervention for anxiety disorders and other mental health problems.

About Brain & Behavior Research Foundation
The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation awards research grants to develop improved treatments, cures, and methods of prevention for mental illness. These illnesses include addiction, ADHD, anxiety, autism, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, eating disorders, OCD, PTSD, and schizophrenia, as well as research on suicide prevention. Since 1987, the Foundation has awarded more than $461 million to fund more than 5,600 leading scientists around the world. 100% of every dollar donated for research is invested in research. BBRF operating expenses are covered by separate foundation grants. BBRF is the producer of the Emmy® nominated public television series Healthy Minds with Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein, which aims to remove the stigma of mental illness and demonstrate that with help, there is hope. 

Cleveland Clinic announces updated findings in preventive breast cancer vaccine study

Data presented at Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer Annual Meeting

Cleveland Clinic

 

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Cleveland Clinic researchers are presenting updated findings from their novel study of a vaccine aimed at preventing triple-negative breast cancer.

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Credit: Cleveland Clinic

November 8, 2024, CLEVELAND: Cleveland Clinic researchers are presenting updated findings from their novel study of a vaccine aimed at preventing triple-negative breast cancer, the most aggressive and lethal form of the disease.

 

The study team found that the investigational vaccine was generally well tolerated and produced an immune response in most patients. The team described the side effects of the vaccine, showed the highest tolerated dose to date, and presented the immunologic effects of the vaccine. Findings are being presented at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer Annual Meeting.

 

Launched in 2021 and funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the ongoing clinical trial is evaluating safety and monitoring immune response of the vaccine. The phase 1 study, conducted at Cleveland Clinic’s main campus in partnership with Anixa Biosciences, Inc., has included 26 patients to date across three cohorts:

• Phase 1a - patients who completed treatment for early-stage, triple-negative breast cancer within the past three years and are currently tumor-free but at high risk for recurrence.
• Phase 1b - individuals who are cancer-free and at high risk for developing breast cancer who have elected to voluntarily have a preventative mastectomy to lower their risk. Primarily, these are women with BRCA1, BRCA2 and PALB2 mutations.
• Phase 1c - patients with early-stage triple-negative breast cancer who have received preoperative chemoimmunotherapy and surgery, and are being treated with pembrolizumab following surgery. These patients have residual cancer in the breast tissue, making them at risk of recurrence.
   

Anixa is planning a phase 2 study to evaluate the efficacy of the vaccine. The trial is expected to begin in 2025 and is projected to last approximately two to three years.

 

“Triple-negative breast cancer is the form of the disease for which we have the least effective treatments,” said G. Thomas Budd, M.D., of Cleveland Clinic’s Cancer Institute and principal investigator of the phase 1 study. “Long term, we are hoping that this can be a true preventive vaccine that would be administered to individuals who are cancer-free to prevent them from developing this highly aggressive disease.”

 

According to Dr. Budd, there is a great need for improved treatments for triple-negative breast cancer, which does not have biological characteristics that typically respond to hormonal or targeted therapies. Despite representing only about 10-15% of all breast cancers, triple-negative breast cancer accounts for a disproportionately higher percentage of breast cancer deaths, according to American Cancer Society. It is twice as likely to occur in Black women, and approximately 70-80% of the breast tumors that occur in women with mutations in the BRCA1 gene are triple-negative breast cancer.

 

The investigational vaccine is based on pre-clinical research led by the late Vincent Tuohy, Ph.D., who was the Mort and Iris November Distinguished Chair in Innovative Breast Cancer Research at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute. Dr. Tuohy’s decades of groundbreaking research led to the development of this investigational vaccine. 

The vaccine targets a lactation protein, α-lactalbumin, which is no longer found after lactation in normal, aging breast tissues but is present in most triple-negative breast cancers. If breast cancer develops, the vaccine is designed to prompt the immune system to attack the tumor and keep it from growing. 

The study is based on Dr. Tuohy’s research that showed that activating the immune system against α-lactalbumin was safe and effective in preventing breast tumors in mice. The research, originally published in Nature Medicine, was funded in part by philanthropic gifts from more than 20,000 people over the last 12 years.

“It was Dr. Tuohy’s hope that this vaccine would demonstrate the potential of immunization as a new way to control breast cancer, and that a similar approach could someday be applied to other types of malignancy,” said Dr. Budd.

Anixa is the exclusive worldwide licensee of the novel breast cancer vaccine technology developed at Cleveland Clinic. Cleveland Clinic is entitled to royalties and other commercialization revenues from the company. 

For more information and eligibility requirements visit clinicaltrials.gov.

Faster measurement of response to antibiotic treatment in sepsis patients using Dimeric HNL

Uppsala University

The biomarker human neutrophil lipocalin HNL, which was previously shown to be a useful indicator of bacterial infections, may also in the form of Dimeric HNL be used to effectively monitor the success of antibiotic treatment in sepsis. The first promising results in this regard were published in 2019 and now the research group has confirmed these results in a larger study. The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Sepsis, the costliest disease to health care, is a life-threatening condition with high mortality if not diagnosed and treated early and effectively. Mostly the cause is a bacterial infection. Thus, early and effective antibiotic treatment is lifesaving. The use of broad-spectrum antibiotics increases the likelihood of an effective treatment but may also add to the development of antibiotic resistance. The 2013 World Economic Forum classified antibiotic resistance as one of the biggest threats to global health. 1.27 million deaths were caused directly by antimicrobial resistance in 2019 and 13.66 million had sepsis as an immediate or intermediate cause of death. https://www.healthdata.org/research-analysis/health-risks-issues/antimicrobial-resistance-amr.

In a new study the scientists wanted to investigate if the use of HNL Dimer as a blood biomarker would be useful in the monitoring of antibiotic treatment of patients with sepsis and provide more reliable and faster response than the currently used biomarkers. 

The investigation was conducted on 277 patients admitted to the intensive care unit. Blood was drawn at admission and the next three consecutive days and later analysed in the laboratory. For comparison with HNL Dimer, several other blood biomarkers were analysed for the purpose of following their kinetics during successful antibiotic treatment. These were Procalcitonin, Heparin-Binding Protein and CRP (C-Reactive Protein) and are all highly elevated in blood in patients with bacterial infections such as sepsis. 

“The problem, however, with these biomarkers is that it often takes 4-5 days of successful treatment before any reduction in blood levels is seen. The levels of HNL Dimer are reduced much faster and often within a day of successful antibiotic treatment. Thus, by measuring HNL Dimer in blood in our patients we may gain important time savings of 3-4 days before we know the result of our antibiotic treatment” says Per Venge, MD and professor in Clinical Chemistry at the University of Uppsala in Sweden and who has conducted research for many years on Human Neutrophil Lipocalin as a biomarker of disease.

The assay of HNL Dimer is developed in close collaboration between Uppsala University and the company Diagnostics Development in Uppsala.

 

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Journal

PLOS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0310987 

Method of Research

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

HNL Dimer in plasma is a unique and useful biomarker for the monitoring of antibiotic treatment in sepsis

New research promises an unprecedented look at how psychosocial stress affects military service members’ heart health

UMass Amherst researcher awarded $1 million grant from Defense Department to analyze data from the Millenium Cohort Study

University of Massachusetts Amherst

A University of Massachusetts Amherst researcher will examine the role of cumulative psychosocial stress – as well as race, ethnicity and gender – among U.S. military personnel to gauge their impact on cardiovascular health and healthcare utilization.

The study is funded with a $1 million grant from the Defense Health Agency, part of the Department of Defense (DoD). The findings will help the military develop programs for health promotion and health readiness for active duty and Reserve/National Guard personnel. 

“One of the priorities of the Defense Health Agency is informing health promotion efforts for service members’ readiness and well-being,” says lead investigator Daniel López-Cevallos, associate professor of community health education in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences. “The strength of our study is that we are able to look at child abuse and neglect, bias and discrimination, and military stressors associated with health outcomes. We will be able to assess both the overall stress burden, as well as identify specific stressors that can affect heart health of U.S. service members.”

López-Cevallos is collaborating with Sheila Castañeda, a research epidemiologist in the Deployment Health Department at the Naval Health Research Center and deputy principal investigator of the Millenium Cohort Study. This cohort is the largest and longest-running prospective health study in U.S. military history, with more than 260,000 service members enrolled since 2001. The study is designed to examine the effects of military service on long-term health outcomes of service members and veterans.

The researchers will analyze survey data and DoD administrative and healthcare records from more than 58,000 military personnel who enrolled in the study in 2020-2021. Those participants were surveyed about adverse childhood experiences, experiences of hazing, bullying and discrimination, combat experiences, health diagnoses and other stressful life events.

“Previous epidemiological research indicates social determinants of health, such as increased exposure to stress, may contribute to cardiovascular disease disparities among certain racial and ethnic civilian groups,” Castañeda says. “Our study will determine the role of cumulative stress on heart health among service members in hopes of determining targets for integrated prevention efforts.” 

In addition to measuring the associations between various stressors and cardiovascular health, López-Cevallos and Castañeda will look at the moderating effects of protective factors – such as post-traumatic growth, social support, unit cohesion and military satisfaction – on the relationship between cumulative psychosocial stress and health outcomes. 

“One of the things we’re able to do in this study is to look at the cumulative or synergistic effects of experiencing multiple, both acute and chronic, stressors,” López-Cevallos says. “There is little research that has looked at disparities by gender and among racial and ethnic groups within the military.”

The researchers will use the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8, which are key measures of cardiovascular health, in their analysis. They include health behaviors, such as eating and sleeping well and not using tobacco, and health factors, such as blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes and body mass index. 

“We will look at the aggregate levels of stress of these service members and then also get more specific to tease out individual stressors, such as adverse childhood experiences or experiences with harassment and discrimination. Then we can recommend areas of focus within the military to inform programmatic and policy priorities,” López-Cevallos says.

Another goal is to effect better cardiovascular outcomes and reduce healthcare system burdens by addressing the psychosocial stressors. “The theory here is to tackle those upstream factors that would otherwise erode health outcomes and also increase utilization of more complex health services,” he adds.