The Female Athlete Triad: An Assessment of Current Practices in Primary Care and Benefit of Educational Intervention

Background. The Female Athlete Triad (Triad) is characterized by negative energy balance, disordered menstrual cycles, and low bone mineral density. The understanding and practices of primary care physicians (PCPs) regarding the Triad and the benefit of an educational intervention were assessed. Methods. PCPs attending a regional conference were surveyed prior to, immediately after, and three months following the plenary lecture on the Triad. Surveys included knowledge about the components, diagnostics, treatment, clinician practice, and comfort level with regard to the Triad. Results. The pre-test survey was completed by 84 of 126 (67%) attendees. The lecture increased from 53% to 98% the proportion of PCPs who identified the three domains of the Triad. Knowledge scores improved over the course of the lecture (from 3.4 to 5.1, p < 0.05), particularly regarding Triad components (effect size = 1.2) and treatment (effect size = 1.6) with only small gains in diagnostic knowledge (effect size = 0.1 to 0.3). The three-month follow-up survey, completed by only seven clinicians (8%), suggested good retention of knowledge though little practice changes. Conclusions. A 50-minute educational session improved knowledge about the Triad. Particular improvement was noted in understanding the underlying etiology and treatment

Team 4 VCU: Ram Resources: Helping Faculty Help Students

The Ram Resources Project seeks to provide students with an environment that encourages their well-being by connecting them with resources needed to succeed in their academic career at VCU. Ram Resources will help reduce the detrimental impact of the number-one problem affecting students’ academic performance: stress. Faculty are uniquely situated both to recognize changes in students’ behavior and to assist students with improving their well-being. Beginning with New Faculty Orientation, Ram Resources will educate faculty about resources for well-being available to students. By creating a brochure, a website, and establishing a program of faculty ambassadors to familiarize faculty with the resources available to identify the warning signs of stress, the team proposes to help faculty help students

Mind Your Meds: Safe Opioid Disposal Awareness

Driven by the effects of the opioid epidemic on friends, family members, students, and patients, members of the 2019 GEHLI Team “Mission Possible” are dedicated to bolstering educational awareness of safe leftover opioid disposal methods to decrease the supply of opioids in our community. On average, over 2/3 of opioid prescription medications are leftover and lead to later misuse or abuse (JAMA Survey). Despite a decrease in prescription writing for pain medication over the years, the mortality rate from overdose, and the rate of infants born to mothers with opioid abuse continues to steadily increase in Virginia (VDH). Team Mission Possible seeks to promote awareness of both the need and resources available for safe opioid disposal by educating prescribers in the VCU Health system and spreading knowledge to VCU patients, students, faculty, staff, and members of the surrounding community through: educational events on the Monroe Park and Medical campuses; teaming up with Miss Virginia’s “Mind your Meds campaign”; live Facebook interviews; and educational flyers

Reflected Light from Sand Grains in the Terrestrial Zone of a Protoplanetary Disk

We show that grains have grown to ~mm size (sand sized) or larger in the terrestrial zone (within ~3 AU) of the protoplanetary disk surrounding the 3 Myr old binary star KH 15D. We also argue that the reflected light in the system reaches us by back scattering off the far side of the same ring whose near side causes the obscuration.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures. To be published in Nature, March 13, 2008. Contains a Supplemen

RamStart

According to the 2015 Bureau of Labor Statistics, nationally, students with disabilities are less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s degree and more likely to be unemployed.1 At VCU, these students are served by the Student Accessibility and Educational Opportunity Office (SAEO), which currently has only two case managers for 1500 registered students while the Association for Higher Education and Disabilities (AHEAD) recommends an individual case load of 350 or fewer students. While these students attend New Student Orientation, there are currently no programs or sessions specifically designed to address their needs. RamStart is a model for presemester transition workshops for new students who have been granted accommodations through SAEO for disabilities and their families which is designed to provide them with tools for self-advocacy and independence. The goal of these workshops is to help ease the students’ transition to VCU by educating them and their parents about SAEO’s services, their rights and responsibilities, Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), campus resources, and University policies and procedures to improve their chances of success

From participation to dropout

The academic e-learning practice has to deal with various participation patterns and types of online learners with different support needs. The online instructors are challenged to recognize these and react accordingly. Among the participation patterns, special attention is requested by dropouts, which can perturbate online collaboration. Therefore we are in search of a method of early identification of participation patterns and prediction of dropouts. To do this, we use a quantitative view of participation that takes into account only observable variables. On this background we identify in a field study the participation indicators that are relevant for the course completion, i.e. produce significant differences between the completion and dropout sub-groups. Further we identify through cluster analysis four participation patterns with different support needs. One of them is the dropout cluster that could be predicted with an accuracy of nearly 80%. As a practical consequence, this study recommends a simple, easy-to-implement prediction method for dropouts, which can improve online teaching. As a theoretical consequence, we underline the role of the course didactics for the definition of participation, and call for refining previous attrition models

Large-area epitaxial growth of curvature-stabilized ABC trilayer graphene.

The properties of van der Waals (vdW) materials often vary dramatically with the atomic stacking order between layers, but this order can be difficult to control. Trilayer graphene (TLG) stacks in either a semimetallic ABA or a semiconducting ABC configuration with a gate-tunable band gap, but the latter has only been produced by exfoliation. Here we present a chemical vapor deposition approach to TLG growth that yields greatly enhanced fraction and size of ABC domains. The key insight is that substrate curvature can stabilize ABC domains. Controllable ABC yields ~59% were achieved by tailoring substrate curvature levels. ABC fractions remained high after transfer to device substrates, as confirmed by transport measurements revealing the expected tunable ABC band gap. Substrate topography engineering provides a path to large-scale synthesis of epitaxial ABC-TLG and other vdW materials

Genetic variation at CHRNA5-CHRNA3-CHRNB4 interacts with smoking status to influence body mass index

Cigarette smoking is associated with lower body mass index (BMI), and a commonly cited reason for unwillingness to quit smoking is a concern about weight gain. Common variation in the CHRNA5-CHRNA3-CHRNB4 gene region (chromosome 15q25) is robustly associated with smoking quantity in smokers, but its association with BMI is unknown. We hypothesized that genotype would accurately reflect smoking exposure and that, if smoking were causally related to weight, it would be associated with BMI in smokers, but not in never smokers

The age of anxiety? It depends where you look: changes in STAI trait anxiety, 1970–2010

Purpose Population-level surveys suggest that anxiety has been increasing in several nations, including the USA and UK. We sought to verify the apparent anxiety increases by looking for systematic changes in mean anxiety questionnaire scores from research publications. Methods We analyzed all available mean State–Trait Anxiety Inventory scores published between 1970 and 2010. We collected 1703 samples, representing more than 205,000 participants from 57 nations. Results Results showed a significant anxiety increase worldwide, but the pattern was less clear in many individual nations. Our analyses suggest that any increase in anxiety in the USA and Canada may be limited to students, anxiety has decreased in the UK, and has remained stable in Australia. Conclusions Although anxiety may have increased worldwide, it might not be increasing as dramatically as previously thought, except in specific populations, such as North American students. Our results seem to contradict survey results from the USA and UK in particular. We do not claim that our results are more reliable than those of large population surveys. However, we do suggest that mental health surveys and other governmental sources of disorder prevalence data may be partially biased by changing attitudes toward mental health: if respondents are more aware and less ashamed of their anxiety, they are more likely to report it to survey takers. Analyses such as ours provide a useful means of double-checking apparent trends in large population surveys