HPV vaccination and cervical screening: the knowledge and attitudes of mothers of adolescent girls.

OBJECTIVE: Mothers play a significant role in decision making about human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination for their daughters and about cervical screening attendance for themselves. This study had three objectives, to explore: (1) mothers' knowledge and attitudes about HPV and HPV vaccination, (2) their knowledge and attitudes about cervical cancer and screening, and (3) whether their daughter's HPV vaccination invitation was an opportunity to nudge mothers to attend screening. DESIGN: 138 women from North Staffordshire completed a cross-sectional survey and 15 took part in follow-up focus groups. RESULTS: Despite high self-reported engagement with both the cervical screening and HPV vaccination programmes, relatively low levels of knowledge and some uncertainty were evident. There was mixed opinion about the potential of using the vaccination invite as an opportunity to nudge mothers to attend cervical screening. CONCLUSION: Even amongst women who do engage positively with the programmes, knowledge is not as complete and certain as it could be. Further research is needed with women who are less likely to accept the vaccination for their daughters. Women need to be better informed, which may go some way to reversing the decline in screening and maintaining high levels of vaccination.

Attitudes towards and knowledge about Human Papillomavirus (HPV) and the HPV vaccination in parents of teenage boys in the UK.

The incidence of cancers attributable to Human Papillomavirus (HPV) that affect males is on the rise. Currently in the UK teenage boys are not vaccinated against HPV while teenage girls are. The rationale for not vaccinating boys is that vaccinating girls should provide herd immunity to boys, however this does not protect men who have sex with men or men who have sex with unvaccinated women. The issue of whether to vaccinate boys or not is a controversial one with considerable lobbying taking place to change the existing policy. On one side of the debate are financial considerations while on the other side health equality is important. One avenue that has not been presented is the parental perspective. The current study uses a self-report questionnaire to explore what parents of teenage boys know about HPV and the vaccine and whether they want the vaccine for their sons. Only half of the parents had heard of HPV prior to completing the survey. Of those who had heard of HPV, knowledge about the health sequelae of HPV for men was poor relative to their knowledge about its impact on female health. Parents who would be willing to vaccinate their sons had higher levels of knowledge about HPV than those parents who would be unwilling or unsure. Irrespective of whether they had previously heard of HPV or not, once provided with a brief description of HPV, the majority of parents thought that boys should be offered the vaccination. There is a pressing need for public education about the potential impact of HPV on male health in order to facilitate uptake of the vaccine in the event of the vaccination programme being extended to men or to facilitate informed decision making about seeking the vaccine privately in the event that it isn't.

Cerebellar BOLD signal during the acquisition of a new lexicon predicts its early consolidation.

Cerebellar contributions to language are presently poorly understood, but it has been argued that the cerebellar role in motor learning can be extended to learning in cognitive and linguistic domains. Here, we used fMRI to investigate whether the cerebellum is recruited in mapping novel words onto existing semantic concepts. On separate days, participants performed a Basque vocabulary learning task and a control English synonym task in the MRI scanner. Learning-related BOLD activity was found in left inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral insula, pre-SMA, left superior parietal cortex, right caudate, the right cerebellar vermis and right cerebellar Crus II. The extent to which the cerebellar regions, but not the cerebral areas, were recruited during learning correlated positively with participants' off-line improvement in performance after the learning task. These data provide evidence for a cerebellar role in lexical learning, and suggest that the right cerebellum may contribute toward consolidation of lexico-semantic associations in the language network.