Emotions, Strategies, and Health: Examining the Impact of an Educational Program on Tanzanian Preschool Children.

Around the world, well-produced television programming can engage vulnerable, hard-to-reach audiences by offering informal education and enrichment. Akili and Me is an animated children's educational program available in Sub-Saharan Africa that provides age and culturally appropriate lessons. In 2018, the producers created socio-emotional and health content. This study examines the relationship between children's exposure to the new Akili and Me content and socio-emotional and health outcomes. Participants included low-income school children (mean age 5.32 years, SD = 0.82) from Arusha, Tanzania. Researchers conducted one-on-one baseline and post-intervention surveys with each participant. Over 12 weeks, the children attended afterschool sessions with screenings of Akili and Me, with distinct content screened on different days. The research team recorded children's attendance and assessed children's receptivity to the program through character identification. Using MLM regression models with data from 411 participants from 10 public schools, the analyses showed that a greater exposure and receptivity to Akili and Me predicted improved outcomes scores on the socio-emotional and health outcomes, controlling for sex, age, baseline scores, and general media receptivity (non-Akili and Me characters). Contributing to the literature on educational media, this study shows that exposure to an animated program can teach vulnerable preschool children socio-emotional and health content.

Gradual Rarefaction of Hematopoietic Precursors and Atrophy in a Depleted microRNA 29a, b and c Environment.

BACKGROUND: The self-renewing ability of HSCs is fundamental for the maintenance of a pool of bone marrow precursors throughout the life of an individual. The genetic mechanisms underlying such a complex process are still poorly understood. RESULTS AND SIGNIFICANCE: Here, we show that constitutive in vivo deletion of miR29ab1 leads to reduced number of HSCs and that miR29ab1 deficient bone marrow cannot repopulate the bone marrow of irradiated mice. An Affymetrix analysis of the miR29ab1 knockout mice identifies key proteins that could be responsible for this phenotype, as DNMT3a and b. Moreover, our findings reveal that whereas miR29b2c knockout mice do not exhibit any spontaneous abnormality, the double knock out--miR29ab1b2c--has marked generalized atrophy, raising the possibility that the two bi-cistrons might cooperate in order to maintain the stem cell number in general, not only limited to the bone marrow.

Src homology 2 domain-containing inositol-5-phosphatase and CCAAT enhancer-binding protein beta are targeted by miR-155 in B cells of Emicro-MiR-155 transgenic mice.

We showed that Emicro-MiR-155 transgenic mice develop acute lymphoblastic leukemia/high-grade lymphoma. Most of these leukemias start at approximately 9 months irrespective of the mouse strain. They are preceded by a polyclonal pre-B-cell proliferation, have variable clinical presentation, are transplantable, and develop oligo/monoclonal expansion. In this study, we show that in these transgenic mice the B-cell precursors have the highest MiR-155 transgene expression and are at the origin of the leukemias. We determine that Src homology 2 domain-containing inositol-5-phosphatase (SHIP) and CCAAT enhancer-binding protein beta (C/EBPbeta), 2 important regulators of the interleukin-6 signaling pathway, are direct targets of MiR-155 and become gradually more down-regulated in the leukemic than in the preleukemic mice. We hypothesize that miR-155, by down-modulating Ship and C/EBPbeta, initiates a chain of events that leads to the accumulation of large pre-B cells and acute lymphoblastic leukemia/high-grade lymphoma.