Resilience and Social Support-Giving Scales: Conceptual and Empirical Validation.

OBJECTIVES: This report introduces National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) data users to 2 new measures-one that assesses older adults' resilience, defined as personal attributes that indicate an adaptive reserve that can be drawn on during adversity, and a second that expands on existing measures of social support received from others to also assess social support given to close others. METHOD: Data from 4,604 NSHAP respondents born 1920-1965 were used to conduct psychometric analyses and validation of our measures of resilience and social support-giving. RESULTS: Scale reliabilities were acceptable for the 4-item resilience scale, and the 2-item scales for family support-giving and friend support-giving. The 2 spousal support-giving items did not cohere well as a single scale. The resilience scale exhibited significant correlations with criterion validation variables, even after adjusting for correlated personality traits. The support-giving scales, and the spousal support-giving items, also exhibited significant correlations with criteria, and with the resilience scale, even after adjusting for social support receipt. Scale means exhibited demographic differences. DISCUSSION: The resilience and social support-giving measures have acceptable psychometric characteristics (with the exception of spousal support-giving), convergent validity, and predictive utility net of related variables. NSHAP data users are offered several suggestions (key points) in the use of these measures in future research.

Zinc Deficiency is Associated with Poor Clinical Outcomes in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

BACKGROUND: Zinc plays a pivotal role in wound repair, tissue regeneration, and the immune response. Although zinc deficiency is common in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), the impact of low serum zinc levels on disease course is not known. METHODS: Patients enrolled in a prospectively collected IBD registry with at least 2 serum zinc measurements were included in the analysis. Using a logistic regression model, rates of IBD-related surgeries, IBD-related hospitalizations, and IBD-related complications were evaluated after a diagnosis of zinc deficiency (serum concentration <0.66 µg/mL) compared with those with normal zinc concentrations. In patients who were zinc deficient, outcomes were also analyzed between those who had normalization of zinc levels within 12 months and those who remained deficient. RESULTS: A total of 773 patients with Crohn's disease (CD) and 223 with ulcerative colitis (UC) were included in the analysis. After adjusting for covariates, zinc deficiency was associated with an increased risk of subsequent hospitalizations, surgeries, and disease-related complications in patients with CD and UC (CD: hospitalizations, odds ratio 1.44, 95% confidence interval [1.02-2.04]; surgeries, 2.05 [1.38-3.05]; complications, 1.50 [1.04-2.15]; UC: hospitalizations, 2.14 [1.07-4.29]; surgeries, 1.64 [0.59-4.52]; complications, 1.97 [0.94-4.11]). Normalization of zinc was associated with improvement in these outcomes in patients with both CD and UC. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with IBD with serum zinc deficiency are more likely to have adverse disease-specific outcomes. As these outcomes improve with normalization of zinc, the results from this study support the role for close monitoring and replacement of zinc in patients with IBD.