Validation of PARADISE 24 and Development of PARADISE-EDEN 36 in Patients with Dementia.

Dementia was one of the conditions focused on in an EU (European Union) project called "PARADISE" (Psychosocial fActors Relevant to brAin DISorders in Europe) that later produced a measure called PARADISE 24, developed within the biopsychosocial model proposed in the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF). The aims of this study are to validate PARADISE 24 on a wider sample of patients with mild to moderate dementia to expand PARADISE 24 by defining a more specific scale for dementia, by adding 18 questions specifically selected for dementia, which eventually should be reduced to 12. We enrolled 123 persons with dementia, recruited between July 2017 and July 2019 in home care and long-term care facilities, in Italy, and 80 participants were recruited in Warsaw between January and July 2012 as part of a previous cross-sectional study. The interviews with the patient and/or family were conducted by health professionals alone or as a team by using the Paradise data collection protocol. The psychometric analysis with the Rasch analysis has shown that PARADISE 24 and the selection of 18 additional condition-specific items can be expected to have good measurement properties to assess the functional state in persons with dementia.

Urban elementary school students' perceptions of fighting behavior and concerns for personal safety.

This study assessed urban elementary school students' experience with weapon carrying and violence, concerns for personal safety, and perceptions of passive and direct interventions in resolving fights. The survey was completed by 1,912 urban students in the fourth and fifth grades. This cross-sectional study found that one in 12 students reported weapon carrying one or more times during the past month. One-third indicated that they would hit peers back if struck by them. One-quarter of students did not feel safe going to or from school, and 23%-43% worried about being physically attacked in or around school. Adjusted odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals were calculated using logistic regression. Significant associations were found between the independent variables of age, race, gender, and academic success (grades) and the dependent variables of weapon carrying, hitting a peer back, concerns of safety, and passive solutions or direct interventions for peer fighting.