Project description:The increase in knowledge in oncology and the possibility of creating personalized medicine by selecting a more appropriate therapy related to the different tumor subtypes, as well as the management of patients with cancer within a multidisciplinary team has improved the clinical outcomes [...].
Project description:The severity of the overdose epidemic underscores the urgent need for innovative and high impact interventions that promote the rapid penetration and scale up of evidence-based practices (EBPs) in communities profoundly affected by fatal opioid overdose. This special issue shares scientific advancements in implementation research design and evaluation of a novel data-driven community-based intervention. The HEALing (Helping End Addiction Long-Term) Communities Study (HCS) is a four-year study that is designed to examine the effectiveness of the Communities That HEAL (CTH) intervention. The CTH intervention supports the dissemination of EBPs in 67 communities across four high-burdened states-Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio. The diversity in these communities in terms of rural-urban status, race-ethnicity and other social determinants of health facilitates generalizability of results to other communities across the US. The nine papers in this special issue describe critical elements that constitute the HCS framework and design. This includes the implementation of EBPs that have a substantial impact on fatal and non-fatal opioid overdose, the Opioid-overdose Reduction Continuum of Care Approach, communication campaigns to increase awareness and demand for EBPs and reduce stigma against people with OUD and MOUD interventions, and the process of community engagement. This includes how to form community coalitions and gain their commitment, and steps taken to mobilize coalitions to pursue EBP implementation and ensure EBPs are adapted for community needs. The collective papers in this issue demonstrate that the design of any complex study must adapt to unanticipated temporal events, including the rapidly emerging COVID-19 crisis. Readers will learn about the scientific process of the design and implementation of a community-engaged intervention, its methodologies, guiding conceptual models, and research implementation strategies that can be applied to address other health issues.
Project description:The incidence of thyroid cancer has increased over the past 3 to 4 decades. Nonetheless, the mortality from thyroid cancer has remained stable. The thyroid gland may develop nodules encompassing several types of cell proliferation, from frankly benign to very aggressive forms with many intermediate challenging variants. For this reason, there is growing interest in evaluating thyroid nodules from many points of view, from the clinical to the molecular aspects, in the search for innovative diagnostic and prognostic parameters. The aim of this Special Issue was to provide an overview of recent developments in understanding the biology and molecular oncology of thyroid tumors of follicular cell derivation and their repercussions on the diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy. The contributions of many experts in the field made up a Special Issue of Cancers journal, that focusing on different aspects, including mechanistic and functional facets, gives the status of art of clinical and biological perspectives of thyroid cancer.
Project description:Readers of this journal are undoubtedly already aware that substance use disorders (SUDs) are a significant public health problem. More than 2% of the world population is living with a substance abuse disorder, and 1.4% of the global burden of disease is attributable to alcohol and illicit drug use. What readers may have had less opportunity to consider is that occupational therapists are an underutilized resource in our response to the substance use disorder crisis, and that occupational therapy researchers can provide key insights into the nature of substance use in individuals’ lives and in our communities. That is the focus of this special issue.
Project description:In 1957, Conrad H. Waddington published a paper in which he demonstrated the inheritance of an acquired characteristic in a population in response to an environmental stimulus [1].[...].
Project description:An extraordinary claim was made by one of the leading researchers within positive psychology, namely, there is a universal-invariant ratio between positive to negative emotions that serves as a unique tipping point between flourishing and languishing in individuals, marriages, organizations, and other human systems across all cultures and times. Known as the "critical positivity ratio," this finding was supposedly derived from the famous Lorenz equation in physics by using the mathematics of nonlinear dynamic systems, and was defined precisely as "2.9013." This exact number was widely touted as a great discovery by many leaders of positive psychology, had tremendous impact in various applied areas of psychology, and, more broadly, and was extensively cited in both the scientific literature and in the global popular media. However, this finding has been demonstrated to be bogus. Since its advent as a relatively new subdiscipline, positive psychology has claimed superiority to its precursor, the subdiscipline of humanistic psychology, in terms of supposedly both using more rigorous science and avoiding popularizing nonsense. The debunking of the critical positivity ratio demonstrates that positive psychology did not live up to these claims, and this has important implications, which are discussed in terms of "romantic scientism" and "voodoo science." In addition, articles in the special issue on the "Implications of Debunking the 'Critical Positivity Ratio' for Humanistic Psychology" are introduced, as they also delve into these concerns.
Project description:The goal of this Special Issue is to introduce prevention scientists to an emerging form of healthcare, called precision medicine. This approach integrates investigation of the mechanisms of disease and health-compromising behaviors with prevention, treatment, and cure resolved at the level of the individual. Precision Medicine and its derivative personalized prevention represents a promising paradigm for prevention science as it accounts for response heterogeneity and guides development of targeted interventions that may enhance program effect sizes. If successfully integrated into prevention science research, personalized prevention is an approach that can inform the development of decision support tools (screening measures, prescriptive algorithms) and enhance the utility of mobile health technologies that will enable practitioners to use personalized consumer data to inform decisions about the best type and/or intensity of a prevention strategy for particular individuals or subgroups of individuals. In this special issue, we present conceptual articles that provide a heuristic framework for precision-based, personalization prevention research and empirical studies that address research questions exemplary of a new generation of precision-based personalized preventive interventions focused on children's mental health, behavioral health, and education.