Drink Tap: A Multisector Program to Promote Water Access and Intake in San Francisco Parks.

Taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), or drinks with added sugars, show promise in decreasing purchases and consumption of SSBs. Some have called for coupling such taxes with improvements in access to safe drinking water as a strategy for reducing inequities in SSB intake, yet no studies have examined such an approach. Drink Tap is a San Francisco-based program in which public tap water stations were installed in parks and public spaces (winter 2017) and promotional efforts (fall and winter 2018) encouraged water intake. At the same time, San Francisco and surrounding communities were also implementing SSB taxes. We conducted a quasi-experimental study to examine whether water access and promotion combined with SSB taxes affected beverage intake habits more than SSB taxes alone. We conducted 1-hour observations (N = 960) at 10 intervention parks (Drink Tap plus SSB taxes) and 20 comparison parks (SSB taxes only) in San Francisco Bay Area cities before (July-September 2016) and after (June-August 2019) implementation of Drink Tap. We found significant adjusted percentage increases in drinking water among visitors to intervention parks, compared with comparison parks: water from park water sources (+80%, P < .001) and water from reusable bottles (+40%, P = .02). We found no significant reductions in visitors observed drinking bottled water, juices, or SSBs. The Drink Tap intervention led to increases in water intake from park sources and reusable bottles across parks that surpassed increases achieved through SSB taxes alone. Jurisdictions should consider coupling tap water access and promotion with policies for reducing intake of SSBs.

A pilot investigation of neuroimaging predictors for the benefits from pivotal response treatment for children with autism.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently exhibit language delays and functional communication deficits. Pivotal response treatment (PRT) is an effective intervention for targeting these skills; however, similar to other behavioral interventions, response to PRT is variable across individuals. Thus, objective markers capable of predicting treatment response are critically-needed to identify which children are most likely to benefit from this intervention. In this pilot study, we investigated whether structural neuroimaging measures from language regions in the brain are associated with response to PRT. Children with ASD (n = 18) who were receiving PRT to target their language deficits were assessed with MRI at baseline. T1-weighted images were segmented with FreeSurfer and morphometric measures of the primary language regions (inferior frontal (IFG) and superior temporal (STG) gyri) were evaluated. Children with ASD and language deficits did not exhibit the anticipated relationships between baseline structural measures of language regions and baseline language abilities, as assessed by the number of utterances displayed during a structured laboratory observation (SLO). Interestingly, the level of improvement on the SLO was correlated with baseline asymmetry of the IFG, and the size of the left STG at baseline was correlated with the level of improvement on standardized parental questionnaires. Although very preliminary, the observed associations between baseline structural properties of language regions and improvement in language abilities following PRT suggest that neuroimaging measures may be able to help identify which children are most likely to benefit from specific language treatments, which could help improve precision medicine for children with ASD.