Sociodemographic profile and clinical presentation of young children unintentionally exposed to marijuana: A single site retrospective cohort.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Legalization of medical marijuana has increased unintentional exposure to marijuana in young children. We aim to explore the sociodemographic disadvantage profile, prevalence, and clinical presentation of children diagnosed with unintentional exposure to marijuana. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective chart abstraction of 121 children (aged 0-6) seen at the Emergency Department (ED) at a single tertiary hospital center in Dayton, Ohio between January 01, 2010 and January 09, 2022. RESULTS: Majority were female (62.8%), white (50.4%), and with Medicaid as their primary insurance (84.3%). The median age at exposure was 1.8 years. There was a 14-fold increase in unintentional marijuana cases pre-2017 (7 cases) versus post-2017 (114 cases), the year of legalization of medical marijuana in the state of Ohio. Majority of the patients were using public assistance (66.4%). 26.7% of the cases had a prior social work consultation and 38.1% had a prior children services consultation. 51.3% of the children had a social disadvantage index score of 3 or greater (range 0-5) with higher scores indicating greater disadvantage. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: The number of patients presenting to the ED at the hospital has increased 14-fold since the legalization of medical marijuana in Ohio. Half of the children displayed a higher sociodemographic disadvantage index score. SCIENTIFIC SIGNIFICANCE: Our study is the first study investigating the sociodemographic profile of children exposed to marijuana. The findings of this study may be utilized to inform policy for safely dispensing recreational and medicinal marijuana products and focus the efforts on families with sociodemographic disadvantage.

Scenario-Based Messages on Social Media Motivate COVID-19 Information Seeking.

Communicating information about health risks empowers individuals to make informed decisions. To identify effective communication strategies, we manipulated the specificity, self-relevance, and emotional framing of messages designed to motivate information seeking about COVID-19 exposure risk. In Study 1 (N=221,829), we conducted a large-scale social media field study. Using Facebook advertisements, we targeted users by age and political attitudes. Episodic specificity drove engagement: Advertisements that contextualized risk in specific scenarios produced the highest click-through rates, across all demographic groups. In Study 2, we replicated and extended our findings in an online experiment (N=4,233). Message specificity (but not self-relevance or emotional valence) drove interest in learning about COVID-19 risks. Across both studies, we found that older adults and liberals were more interested in learning about COVID-19 risks. However, message specificity increased engagement across demographic groups. Overall, evoking specific scenarios motivated information seeking about COVID-19, facilitating risk communication to a broad audience.

Context is key: glucocorticoid receptor and corticosteroid therapeutics in outcomes after traumatic brain injury.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a global health burden, and survivors suffer functional and psychiatric consequences that can persist long after injury. TBI induces a physiological stress response by activating the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, but the effects of injury on the stress response become more complex in the long term. Clinical and experimental evidence suggests long lasting dysfunction of the stress response after TBI. Additionally, pre- and post-injury stress both have negative impacts on outcome following TBI. This bidirectional relationship between stress and injury impedes recovery and exacerbates TBI-induced psychiatric and cognitive dysfunction. Previous clinical and experimental studies have explored the use of synthetic glucocorticoids as a therapeutic for stress-related TBI outcomes, but these have yielded mixed results. Furthermore, long-term steroid treatment is associated with multiple negative side effects. There is a pressing need for alternative approaches that improve stress functionality after TBI. Glucocorticoid receptor (GR) has been identified as a fundamental link between stress and immune responses, and preclinical evidence suggests GR plays an important role in microglia-mediated outcomes after TBI and other neuroinflammatory conditions. In this review, we will summarize GR-mediated stress dysfunction after TBI, highlighting the role of microglia. We will discuss recent studies which target microglial GR in the context of stress and injury, and we suggest that cell-specific GR interventions may be a promising strategy for long-term TBI pathophysiology.

Communicating COVID-19 exposure risk with an interactive website counteracts risk misestimation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals depended on risk information to make decisions about everyday behaviors and public policy. Here, we assessed whether an interactive website influenced individuals' risk tolerance to support public health goals. We collected data from 11,169 unique users who engaged with the online COVID-19 Event Risk Tool (https://covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu/) between 9/22/21 and 1/22/22. The website featured interactive elements, including a dynamic risk map, survey questions, and a risk quiz with accuracy feedback. After learning about the risk of COVID-19 exposure, participants reported being less willing to participate in events that could spread COVID-19, especially for high-risk large events. We also uncovered a bias in risk estimation: Participants tended to overestimate the risk of small events but underestimate the risk of large events. Importantly, even participants who voluntarily sought information about COVID risks tended to misestimate exposure risk, demonstrating the need for intervention. Participants from liberal-leaning counties were more likely to use the website tools and more responsive to feedback about risk misestimation, indicating that political partisanship influences how individuals seek and engage with COVID-19 information. Lastly, we explored temporal dynamics and found that user engagement and risk estimation fluctuated over the course of the Omicron variant outbreak. Overall, we report an effective large-scale method for communicating viral exposure risk; our findings are relevant to broader research on risk communication, epidemiological modeling, and risky decision-making.

TDP-1 and FUST-1 co-inhibit exon inclusion and control fertility together with transcriptional regulation.

Gene expression is a multistep process and crosstalk among regulatory layers plays an important role in coordinating gene expression. To identify functionally relevant gene expression coordination, we performed a systematic reverse-genetic interaction screen in C. elegans, combining RNA binding protein (RBP) and transcription factor (TF) mutants to generate over 100 RBP;TF double mutants. We identified many unexpected double mutant phenotypes, including two strong genetic interactions between the ALS-related RBPs, fust-1 and tdp-1, and the homeodomain TF ceh-14. Losing any one of these genes alone has no effect on the health of the organism. However, fust-1;ceh-14 and tdp-1;ceh-14 double mutants both exhibit strong temperature-sensitive fertility defects. Both double mutants exhibit defects in gonad morphology, sperm function, and oocyte function. RNA-Seq analysis of double mutants identifies ceh-14 as the main controller of transcript levels, while fust-1 and tdp-1 control splicing through a shared role in exon inhibition. A skipped exon in the polyglutamine-repeat protein pqn-41 is aberrantly included in tdp-1 mutants, and genetically forcing this exon to be skipped in tdp-1;ceh-14 double mutants rescues their fertility. Together our findings identify a novel shared physiological role for fust-1 and tdp-1 in promoting C. elegans fertility and a shared molecular role in exon inhibition.

TDP-1 and FUST-1 co-inhibit exon inclusion and control fertility together with transcriptional regulation.

Gene expression is a multistep, carefully controlled process, and crosstalk between regulatory layers plays an important role in coordinating gene expression. To identify functionally relevant coordination between transcriptional and post-transcriptional gene regulation, we performed a systematic reverse-genetic interaction screen in C. elegans . We combined RNA binding protein (RBP) and transcription factor (TF) mutants, creating over 100 RBP; TF double mutants. This screen identified a variety of unexpected double mutant phenotypes, including two strong genetic interactions between the ALS-related RBPs, fust-1 and tdp-1 , and the homeodomain TF ceh-14 . Losing any one of these genes alone has no significant effect on the health of the organism. However, fust-1; ceh-14 and tdp-1; ceh-14 double mutants both exhibit strong temperature-sensitive fertility defects. Both double mutants exhibit defects in gonad morphology, sperm function, and oocyte function. RNA-seq analysis of double mutants identifies ceh-14 as the main controller of transcript levels, while fust-1 and tdp-1 control splicing through a shared role in exon inhibition. We identify a cassette exon in the polyglutamine-repeat protein pqn-41 which tdp-1 inhibits. Loss of tdp-1 causes the pqn-41 exon to be aberrantly included, and forced skipping of this exon in tdp-1; ceh-14 double mutants rescues fertility. Together our findings identify a novel shared physiological role for fust-1 and tdp-1 in promoting C. elegans fertility in a ceh-14 mutant background and reveal a shared molecular function of fust-1 and tdp-1 in exon inhibition.

Longitudinal Relations Between Emotion Regulation and Internalizing Symptoms in Emerging Adults During the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Background: Maladaptive and adaptive emotion regulation are putative risk and protective factors for depression and anxiety, but most prior research does not differentiate within-person effects from between-person individual differences. The current study does so during the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic when internalizing symptoms were high. Methods: A sample of emerging adult undergraduate students (N = 154) completed online questionnaires bi-weekly on depression, anxiety, and emotion regulation across eight weeks during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic (April 2nd to June 27th, 2020). Results: Depression demonstrated significantly positive between-person correlations with overall maladaptive emotion regulation, catastrophizing, and self-blame, and negative correlations with overall adaptive emotion regulation and reappraisal. Anxiety demonstrated significantly positive between-person correlations with overall maladaptive emotion regulation, rumination, and catastrophizing, and a negative correlation with reappraisal. After controlling for these between-person associations, however, there were generally no within-person associations between emotion regulation and internalizing symptoms. Conclusions: Emotion regulation and internalizing symptoms might be temporally stable individual differences that cooccur with one another as opposed to having a more dynamic relation. Alternatively, these dynamic mechanisms might operate over much shorter or longer periods compared to the two-week time lag in the current study. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10608-023-10366-9.

A Conserved Role for Stomatin Domain Genes in Olfactory Behavior.

The highly-conserved stomatin domain has been identified in genes throughout all classes of life. In animals, different stomatin domain-encoding genes have been implicated in the function of the kidney, red blood cells, and specific neuron types, although the underlying mechanisms remain unresolved. In one well-studied example of stomatin domain gene function, the Caenorhabditis elegans gene mec-2 and its mouse homolog Stoml3 are required for the function of mechanosensory neurons, where they modulate the activity of mechanosensory ion channels on the plasma membrane. Here, we identify an additional shared function for mec-2 and Stoml3 in a very different sensory context, that of olfaction. In worms, we find that a subset of stomatin domain genes are expressed in olfactory neurons, but only mec-2 is strongly required for olfactory behavior. mec-2 acts cell-autonomously and multiple alternatively-spliced isoforms of mec-2 can be substituted for each other. We generate a Stoml3 knock-out (KO) mouse and demonstrate that, like its worm homolog mec-2, it is required for olfactory behavior. In mice, Stoml3 is not required for odor detection, but is required for odor discrimination. Therefore, in addition to their shared roles in mechanosensory behavior, mec-2 and Stoml3 also have a shared role in olfactory behavior.

Familiarity Facilitates Detection of Angry Expressions.

Personal familiarity facilitates rapid and optimized detection of faces. In this study, we investigated whether familiarity associated with faces can also facilitate the detection of facial expressions. Models of face processing propose that face identity and face expression detection are mediated by distinct pathways. We used a visual search paradigm to assess if facial expressions of emotion (anger and happiness) were detected more rapidly when produced by familiar as compared to unfamiliar faces. We found that participants detected an angry expression 11% more accurately and 135 ms faster when produced by familiar as compared to unfamiliar faces while happy expressions were detected with equivalent accuracies and at equivalent speeds for familiar and unfamiliar faces. These results suggest that detectors in the visual system dedicated to processing features of angry expressions are optimized for familiar faces.

Heuristic decision-making across adulthood.

In general, research on aging and decision-making has grown in recent years. Yet, little work has investigated how reliance on classic heuristics may differ across adulthood. For example, younger adults rely on the availability of information from memory when judging the relative frequency of plane crashes versus car accidents, but it is unclear if older adults are similarly reliant on this heuristic. In the present study, participants aged 20-90 years old made judgments that could be answered by relying on five different heuristics: anchoring, availability, recognition, representativeness, and sunk-cost bias. We found no evidence of age-related differences in the use of the classic heuristics-younger and older adults employed anchoring, availability, recognition, and representativeness to equal degrees in order to make decisions. However, replicating past work, we found age-related differences in the sunk-cost bias-older adults were more likely to avoid this fallacy compared to younger adults. We explain these different patterns by drawing on the distinctive roles that stored knowledge and personal experience likely play across heuristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Reasons for Receiving or Not Receiving Bivalent COVID-19 Booster Vaccinations Among Adults - United States, November 1-December 10, 2022.

Bivalent COVID-19 booster vaccines, developed to protect against both ancestral and Omicron BA.4/BA.5 variants, are recommended to increase protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe disease* (1,2). However, relatively few eligible U.S. adults have received a bivalent booster dose (3), and reasons for low coverage are unclear. An opt-in Internet survey of 1,200 COVID-19-vaccinated U.S. adults was conducted to assess reasons for receiving or not receiving a bivalent booster dose. Participants could select multiple reasons from a list of suggested reasons to report why they had or had not received a bivalent booster dose. The most common reasons cited for not receiving the bivalent booster dose were lack of awareness of eligibility for vaccination (23.2%) or of vaccine availability (19.3%), and perceived immunity against infection (18.9%). After viewing information about eligibility and availability, 67.8% of participants who had not received the bivalent booster dose indicated that they planned to do so; in a follow-up survey 1 month later, 28.6% of these participants reported having received the dose. Among those who had planned to receive the booster dose but had not yet done so, 82.6% still intended to do so. Participants who had still not received the booster dose most commonly reported being too busy to get vaccinated (35.6%). To help increase bivalent booster dose coverage, health care and public health professionals should use evidence-based strategies to convey information about booster vaccination recommendations and waning immunity (4), while also working to increase convenient access.

Breaking the Code: Considerations for Effectively Disseminating Mass Notifications in Healthcare Settings.

Many healthcare facilities use code-based alert systems to notify staff of ongoing emergencies via public announcement systems. This study sought to assess the ability of clinical and non-clinical employees across the State of Georgia to correctly identify their facility's emergency codes, assess employee's opinions of emergency alert systems, and identify significant predictors of emergency code identification accuracy. Anonymous electronic surveys asked 304 employees at five facilities to identify the codes for 14 different emergencies. Participants correctly identified the emergency codes with 44.37% accuracy on average. The codes for fire, infant abduction, and cardiac arrest were most commonly identified correctly. Code identification accuracy was significantly associated with training at orientation, knowledge of emergency code activation procedures, facility experience, and the total number of facilities in an employee's career. Most survey participants favored a code-based alert system over a plain language-based alert system, citing concerns of causing panic in patients and visitors, and of maintaining confidentiality and discretion. The low code identification accuracy suggests healthcare employees may have limited awareness of ongoing emergencies. Transitioning to plain language overhead emergency alerts will better position employees, as well as patients and visitors, to effectively respond to emergencies and disasters occurring within a healthcare facility.

Coping with COVID Stress: Maladaptive and Adaptive Response Styles Predicting College Student Internalizing Symptom Dimensions.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted daily life for undergraduates and introduced new stressors (e.g., campus closures). How individuals respond to stressors can interact with stress to increase disorder risk in both unique and transdiagnostic ways. The current study examined how maladaptive and adaptive stress response styles moderated the perceived severity of COVID-related stressors effect on general and specific internalizing dimensions at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in a combined undergraduate sample across two universities (N = 451) using latent bifactor modeling and LASSO modeling to identify optimal predictors. Results showed that perceived stress severity and maladaptive response styles (not adaptive response styles or interactions between stress and response styles) were associated with both common and specific internalizing dimensions. Results suggest additive associations of stress severity and maladaptive coping with internalizing symptoms during the pandemic's beginning, and provide important insights for screening, prevention, and intervention during future public health crises. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10862-022-09975-7.

Elevated Dopamine Synthesis as a Mechanism of Cognitive Resilience in Aging.

Aging is associated with declines in multiple components of the dopamine system including loss of dopamine-producing neurons, atrophy of the dopamine system's cortical targets, and reductions in the density of dopamine receptors. Countering these patterns, dopamine synthesis appears to be stable or elevated in older age. We tested the hypothesis that elevation in dopamine synthesis in aging reflects a compensatory response to neuronal loss rather than a nonspecific monotonic shift in older age. We measured individual differences in striatal dopamine synthesis capacity in cognitively normal older adults using [18F]Fluoro-l-m-tyrosine positron emission tomography cross-sectionally and tested relationships with longitudinal reductions in cortical thickness and working memory decline beginning up to 13 years earlier. Consistent with a compensation account, older adults with the highest dopamine synthesis capacity were those with greatest atrophy in posterior parietal cortex. Elevated dopamine synthesis capacity was not associated with successful maintenance of working memory performance overall, but had a moderating effect such that higher levels of dopamine synthesis capacity reduced the impact of atrophy on cognitive decline. Together, these findings support a model by which upregulation of dopamine synthesis represents a mechanism of cognitive resilience in aging.

Predicting others' knowledge in younger and older adulthood.

Our beliefs about aging affect how we interact with others. For example, people know that episodic memory declines with age, and as a result, older adults' memories are less likely to be trusted. However, not all aspects of remembering decline with age; semantic memory (knowledge) increases across adulthood and is relatively unaffected in healthy aging. In the current work, we examined people's awareness of this pattern. Participants estimated the knowledge of hypothetical younger and older adults; in some studies, they also predicted and demonstrated their own knowledge on the same measures. Across studies, both younger and older adults estimated that older adults would perform better on a knowledge test, demonstrating awareness that knowledge is not impaired with aging. Furthermore, people's beliefs about their own knowledge influenced the predictions they made about others' knowledge. We discuss how this work informs theories of metacognition and contributes to positive self-perceptions in older adulthood.

Utilizing Social Media for Information Dispersal during Local Disasters: The Communication Hub Framework for Local Emergency Management.

In today's society, the use of social media has increased the public's desire to receive information quickly and to be able to interact with communicators. During a disaster, the trend to turn to social media for information has risen in popularity. Society's reliance on social media and quick access to information has led the field of emergency management and the role of a Public Information Officer to adapt to include social media as a crisis communication channel for information dispersal. Existing frameworks for the use of social media as a channel for crisis communications provide guidance for emergency management agencies across all levels of government but fail to account for the varying access to communication resources at the local level. Due to the differing access to communication resources and unique relationships with stakeholders at the local level, there is a need for guidance on how local emergency management agencies can use social media to disperse essential information. The proposed Communication Hub Framework utilizes local emergency management professionals' relationships with key community stakeholders to aid in the distribution of essential information to community members via social media during a disaster.

Author Correction: Hypoxia-mediated downregulation of miRNA biogenesis promotes tumour progression.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

The cultural evolutionary trade-off of ritualistic synchrony.

From Australia to the Arctic, human groups engage in synchronous behaviour during communal rituals. Because ritualistic synchrony is widespread, many argue that it is functional for human groups, encouraging large-scale cooperation and group cohesion. Here, we offer a more nuanced perspective on synchrony's function. We review research on synchrony's prosocial effects, but also discuss synchrony's antisocial effects such as encouraging group conflict, decreasing group creativity and increasing harmful obedience. We further argue that a tightness-looseness (TL) framework helps to explain this trade-off and generates new predictions for how ritualistic synchrony should evolve over time, where it should be most prevalent, and how it should affect group well-being. We close by arguing that synthesizing the literature on TL with the literature on synchrony has promise for understanding synchrony's role in a broader cultural evolutionary framework. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.

Helping may be Harming: unintended negative consequences of providing social support.

While social support is generally considered a helpful resource for employees, it can also serve as a job stressor. Unhelpful workplace social support (UWSS) is any action taken by a supervisor and/or colleague that the recipient believes was intended to benefit him or her but is perceived as unhelpful or harmful. Two studies, one qualitative and one quantitative, identified types of UWSS and demonstrated that unhelpful support can operate as a job stressor in relating to strains. In Study 1, critical incidents were collected from 116 employees, and a content analysis revealed 11 distinct categories of UWSS. In Study 2, the taxonomy of UWSS was further refined using quantitative methods. Results of two samples (176 diverse employees and 496 registered nurses) demonstrate that UWSS is associated with higher job-related negative affect, lower competence-based self-esteem, lower coworker satisfaction, higher work-related burnout, higher organisational frustration, and more physical symptoms (e.g. headache, nausea, and fatigue) among recipients. Together, the studies demonstrate that unhelpful workplace social support is a meaningful job stressor worthy of further investigation.

Idiosyncratic, Retinotopic Bias in Face Identification Modulated by Familiarity.

The perception of gender and age of unfamiliar faces is reported to vary idiosyncratically across retinal locations such that, for example, the same androgynous face may appear to be male at one location but female at another. Here, we test spatial heterogeneity for the recognition of the identity of personally familiar faces in human participants. We found idiosyncratic biases that were stable within participants and that varied more across locations for low as compared to high familiar faces. These data suggest that like face gender and age, face identity is processed, in part, by independent populations of neurons monitoring restricted spatial regions and that the recognition responses vary for the same face across these different locations. Moreover, repeated and varied social interactions appear to lead to adjustments of these independent face recognition neurons so that the same familiar face is eventually more likely to elicit the same recognition response across widely separated visual field locations. We provide a mechanistic account of this reduced retinotopic bias based on computational simulations.