Proving promise and support: Preliminary evaluation of the Indiana Family Preservation Services.

BACKGROUND: As part of the implementation of Family First Preservation Services Act, and to meet legal requirements set by the Indiana State Legislature in 2019, Indiana Department of Child Services (DCS) implemented Indiana Family Preservation Services (INFPS) to maintain children in the home when it is deemed safe to do so. OBJECTIVE: This paper explores the effects of INFPS on child removal episodes and repeat maltreatment. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: This study compares all children and families receiving INFPS between January 1, 2021 to March 31, 2021 to a similar cohort of in-home cases that opened between January 1, 2019 and March 31, 2019. METHODS: Contribution analysis and a quasi-experimental design are employed by using administrative records and survey data collected from service providers. RESULTS: INFPS is associated with reduced repeat maltreatment by about 3-4 % at the case-level and about 2-3 % at the child-level. In contrast to repeat maltreatment, in both case-level and child-level analyses, INFPS was not significantly associated with decreased likelihood of child removal. CONCLUSION: Overall, these results identify short-term effectiveness of INFPS on reducing repeat maltreatment during the treatment period. Results highlight the potential utility of INFPS to improving such outcomes, through increased use of evidence-based practices (EBP). Current findings demonstrate the need for continued research on the long-term effects of INFPS on child and family outcomes.

Concordance in Adolescent and Caregiver Report of Social Determinants of Health.

INTRODUCTION: Screening youth for negative social determinants of health is a widespread practice across healthcare settings in the U.S., with such systems almost exclusively relying on caregiver reports. Little work has sought to identify the social determinants of health adolescents identify as having the largest influence on their health and well-being or the extent to which adolescents agree with their caregiver. This study sought to (1) identify the most prevalent and influential negative social determinants of health, according to adolescent reports, and (2) assess concordance between adolescent and caregiver reports of social determinants of health. METHODS: In Fall 2021, the study team conducted a cross-sectional, observational study within a predominately Latinx urban high school. The team invited all students and their caregivers to participate, resulting in 520 adolescent and 66 caregiver respondents (73% and 9% response rates, respectively). Data analyses occurred in 2022. RESULTS: The most frequent adolescent-reported negative social determinants of health was stress (67%), followed by financial hardship (27%). The negative social determinant of health with the highest ranking of preventing adolescents from living their best and healthiest lives was depression, followed by isolation and stress. Concordance between caregiver and adolescent report of negative social determinants of health was very low across all negative social determinants of health (Krippendorf's α= -0.08 to 0.21). Caregivers under-reported adolescents' social and mental health needs, whereas adolescents under-reported material needs. CONCLUSIONS: A hybrid informant approach may be a best practice for social determinants of health screening among adolescents, whereby caregivers and adolescents report material needs, and adolescents report social and mental health needs. Future work should evaluate the concordance between adolescent and caregiver social determinants of health reports in other settings.

Acoustic Emission Signatures During Failure of Vertebra and Long Bone.

Clinical classification of an injury has traditionally involved medical imaging, patient history, and physical examination. The pathogenesis or process of injury has been viewed as a crucial component to estimating fracture stability and direct treatment. However, injury classification systems generally exclude pathogenesis and injury mechanisms because these components are often difficult to elucidate. Furthermore, the development of bone damage relative to the mechanical response is difficult to quantify, which limits the ability to define injury and develop injury criteria. Past advents of new knowledge about the mechanisms and progression of fracture have refined safety standards and engineering design for limiting injury. Post-hoc methodologies for identifying and classifying injuries for post-mortem human surrogate (PMHS) research are well established. Though bone fractures can be classified post hoc, questions remain. Surface acoustic sensing (SAS) is an effective approach to augment PMHS experimentation. The objective was to develop and validate an acoustic-emission-based method to characterize bone fractures during injurious loading conditions using acoustic emissions (AEs) in two bone types: vertebral body (VB) and long bone (LB). The newly developed method incorporated the Stockwell transform to estimate the relative energy release rate (RERR) from bone fracture using acoustic signal processing. Fractures were characterized through AE burst durations and frequency content. Results indicated that VB fractures from compression are prolonged processes compared to LB fracture, which was staccato in nature. Significant (p < 0.01) differences between burst duration and frequency content were identified between the two bone types.

Subject-Specific Multiscale Modeling to Investigate Effects of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.

OBJECTIVE: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is an effective intervention in noninvasive neuromodulation used to treat a number of neurophysiological disorders. Predicting the spatial extent to which neural tissue is affected by TMS remains a challenge. The goal of this study was to develop a computational model to predict specific locations of neural tissue that are activated during TMS. Using this approach, we assessed the effects of changing TMS coil orientation and waveform. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We integrated novel techniques to develop a subject-specific computational model, which contains three main components: 1) a figure-8 coil (Magstim, Magstim Company Limited, Carmarthenshire, UK); 2) an electromagnetic, time-dependent, nonhomogeneous, finite element model of the whole head; and 3) an adaptation of a previously published pyramidal cell neuron model. We then used our modeling approach to quantify the spatial extent of affected neural tissue for changes in TMS coil rotation and waveform. RESULTS: We found that our model shows more detailed predictions than previously published models, which underestimate the spatial extent of neural activation. Our results suggest that fortuitous sites of neural activation occur for all tested coil orientations. Additionally, our model predictions show that excitability of individual neural elements changes with a coil rotation of ±15°. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that the extent of neuromodulation is more widespread than previous published models suggest. Additionally, both specific locations in cortex and the extent of stimulation in cortex depend on coil orientation to within ±15° at a minimum. Lastly, through computational means, we are able to provide insight into the effects of TMS at a cellular level, which is currently unachievable by imaging modalities.

Emergence of community structure in terrestrial mammal-dominated ecosystems.

We present a paper that combines empirical and theoretical research about the trophic organization of biological communities. Some regularities are observed in the analysis of the relationship between the trophic structure (how the species are distributed among a set of feeding groups) of a number of African large mammal communities and the type of ecosystem. Different types of ecosystems are characterized by specific patterns in the trophic structure of the mammal community. In order to explain the origin of these patterns, we propose a model defining the underlying dynamic of mammal-dominated ecosystems. The main aim of this study is to show that it is possible to obtain a dynamic explanation of those patterns. The model is shown to spontaneously define different types of structures in community organization, related to those observed. We propose a model that could help to explain the correlation between different environmental factors and the abundance or diversity of herbivores, and which establishes a general mechanism that makes it possible to understand how some rules constrain the assembly of the communities. In addition, the proposed model leads us to see how biological communities can operate in an integrated way, which allows for the acceptance of their changes on large time-scales as evolutionary. In summary, we suggest that communities are unitary structures with coherent properties that result from the self-organizing dynamic of the whole system.

Cellular oscillators in animal segmentation.

Kinetic modeling of developmental dynamics requires detailed knowledge about genetic and metabolic networks that underlie developmental processes. However, such knowledge is not available for a vast majority of developmental processes. Here, we present an coarse-grained, phenomenological model of periodic pattern formation in multicellular organisms based on cellular oscillators (CO) that can be applied to systems for which little or no molecular data is available. An oscillatory process within cells serves as a developmental clock whose period is tightly regulated by cell-autonomous and non-autonomous mechanisms. A spatial pattern is generated as a result of an initial temporal ordering of the cell oscillators freezing into spatial order as the clocks slow down and stop at different times or phases in their cycles. When applied to vertebrate somitogenesis, the CO model can reproduce the dynamics of periodic gene expression patterns observed in the presomitic mesoderm. Different somite lengths can be generated by altering the period of the oscillation. There is evidence that a CO-type mechanism might also underlie segment formation in certain invertebrates, such as annelids and short germ insects. This suggests that the dynamical principles of sequential segmentation might be equivalent throughout the animal kingdom although most of the genes involved in segment determination differ between distant phyla.

Tyramine conjugation deficit in patients with chronic idiopathic temporomandibular joint and orofacial pain.

This study was carried out to explore the value of the tyramine conjugation test, an established trait marker for 'endogenous unipolar depression', in patients with chronic idiopathic temporomandibular joint and orofacial pain. Our results show that the pain patients excrete significantly lower amounts of tyramine sulphate than controls (P < 0.0004). Psychiatric assessment by the structured clinical interview for the diagnosis of mental disorders according to DSM-III-R revealed that 48% of the patients had a history of depression and 10% were currently depressed. However, the never-depressed group of patients had the lowest tyramine sulphate excretion values. These findings suggest that a common biological abnormality underlies the pathogenesis of both chronic idiopathic facial pain and depression.

Ether-induced segmentation disturbances in Drosophila melanogaster.

Drosophila embryos, exposed to ether between 1 and 4 h after oviposition, develop defects ranging from the complete lack of segmentation to isolated gaps in single segments. Between these extremes are varying extents of incomplete and abnormal segmentation. On the basis of both their temporal and spatial characteristics, five major phenotype classes may be distinguished: headless - unsegmented or incompletely segmented anteriorly; gap - interruptions of segmentation not obviously periodic; alternating segment gaps - interruptions with double segment periodicities; fused segments; and short segments - truncations with single segment periodicities. Many defects resemble known mutant phenotypes. The disturbances in segmentation are predominantly global and frequently accompanied by alterations in segment specification, such that the segments obtained show no resemblance to the normal homologues. These features, together with the distinctive spatiotemporal characteristics of the defects, all point to segmentation as a dynamic process. The regular spacing of the segments and the fact that the entire range of defects is inducible by ether are further consistent with the hypothesis that at least part of the segmentation process may consist of physicochemical reactions coordinated over the whole body. The relationship between our data and data from genetic and other analyses are briefly discussed.