Clinical course and treatment interventions for adolescents who vaped during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vaping nicotine and marijuana have been increasing among adolescents in the past 5 years. Tetrahydrocannabinol is the psychoactive cannabinoid in marijuana. The COVID-19 pandemic created gaps in healthcare access and visits, making it difficult to collect accurate data on adolescent vaping, willingness to quit and methods used to quit. In addition, the literature lacks information regarding effective evidence-based treatment measures for adolescents who vape. In this report, we seek to address this using two patient cases and detailing the interventions a managed care organisation enacted during this timeframe. Our investigation revealed a relationship between social stressors and vaping among teens. Addressing these underlying stressors and eliciting and treating mental health symptoms and polysubstance use appears to be critical to curbing vaping.

Normal susceptibility to visual illusions in abnormal development: evidence from Williams syndrome.

The perception of visual illusions is a powerful diagnostic of implicit integration of global information. Many illusions occur when length, size, orientation, or luminance are misjudged because neighboring visuospatial information cannot be ignored. We asked if people with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetic disorder that results in severely impaired global visuospatial construction abilities, are also susceptible to the context of visual illusions. Remarkably, we found that illusions influenced WS individuals to the same degree as normal adults, although size discrimination was somewhat impaired in WS. Our results are evidence that illusions are a consequence of the brain's bias to implicitly integrate visual information, even in a population known to have difficulty in explicitly representing spatial relationships among objects. Moreover, these results suggest that implicit and non-implicit integration of spatial information have different vulnerabilities in abnormal development.

Maternal mid-arm circumference and other anthropometric measures of adiposity in relation to infant birth size among Zimbabwean women.

BACKGROUND: To examine relationships between maternal anthropometric measures in Zimbabwean women and indices of infant birth size. METHODS: We conducted a cross-sectional study of pregnant women admitted for labor and delivery at the Harare Maternity Hospital from July 1998 to March 1999. The study population was comprised of 498 participants who delivered singleton infants. Anthropometric measures (height, weight, and mid-arm circumference) were taken during participants' postpartum hospital stay. Logistic regression and least-squares regression procedures were used to assess the association of maternal measures with infant size. RESULTS: Women in the highest weight quartile (>67 kg) were 58% less likely to have a low-birth-weight infant when compared to women in the lowest quartile (<57 kg) (OR = 0.42, 95% CI 0.19-0.90). Women in the highest body mass index quartile were 75% less likely to have a low-birth-weight infant compared to women in the lowest quartile (>27 versus <23 kg/m2: OR = 0.25, 95%CI 0.10-0.60). Similar trends were seen for risk of low birth weight in relation to mid-arm circumference. Maternal mid-arm circumference was most strongly related with the four infant size indices measured. Each unit increase in maternal mid-arm circumference resulted in a 36.1-g increase in infant birth weight (p<0.001). In general, women who were heavier at the time of delivery were less likely to have a low-birth-weight infant than women who were lighter. CONCLUSIONS: In areas where food security is a public health concern, as it is in most parts of the developing world, pregnant women may not be meeting their own nutritional needs and those of their fetus.