19683 research outputs found
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Muscle Size and Quality in People with Hip-Related Pain
No full textThis thesis is submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Allied Health, Human Services, and Sport, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia.</p
Factors Associated with Feeding Difficulties in Young Children
No full textSubmitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Psychology and Public Health, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia.</p
Keeping People with an Intellectual Disability Safe: A Case Study of Sexual Abuse
No full textA thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Allied Health, Human Services and Sport, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia.</p
Brief report: bidirectional association of core autism features and cognitive abilities in early childhood
No full textWe explored associations among the core behavioural features and developmental/cognitive abilities of 155 autistic children, assessed between ages 13–67 months and again around 1-year later to understand predictive directionality. Bidirectional, cross-domain association was apparent, albeit with stronger direction of effect from earlier cognition to later autism features (than vice versa). Exploratory sub-domain analysis showed that early non-verbal developmental/cognitive abilities (only) predicted subsequent social- and restricted/repetitive autism features, whereas early social features (only) predicted both subsequent verbal and non-verbal abilities. Although observational study design precludes causal inference, these data support contemporary notions of the developmental interconnectedness of core autism presentation and associated abilities—that behavioural autism features may influence cognitive development, but are likely also influenced by an individuals’ cognitive capacity
Tele-health coaches’ responses to clients' emotional cues and concerns and engagement with the Bump to Baby and Me Intervention
No full textObjective: To explore the relationship between health coaches’ responses to emotional cues/concerns and women's subsequent engagement with the health coaching mHealth platform. Methods: 24 face-to-face video-mediated initial conversations between participants and their health coaches were coded using the VR-CoDES-P method. Women with high risk of developing Gestational Diabetes Mellitus were selected from the study, based on their engagement with the smartphone health coaching platform. 12 women with very low engagement and 12 women with high engagement were identified. Results: In interactions with women with high goal engagement, coaches had significantly more counseling codes with prior other codes and no instances of non-explicit response codes that reduce space for further disclosure. Analysis showed that interactions with women with high goal engagement were more frequently met by the coach with affect-acknowledging and empathic responses prior to the counseling speech act. Conclusion: High goal engagement among women with Gestational Diabetes Mellitus may appear to be associated with coaches facilitating the frequent use of empathy. Practice implications: Findings can draw coaches’ attention to the impact that their counseling has on goal engagement, increasing the opportunity for intervention to be person-centered and effective
Engaging With Health Consumers in Scientific Conferences—As Partners not Bystanders
No full textIntroduction: It is now widely recognised that engaging consumers in research activities can enhance the quality, equity and relevance of the research. Much of the commentary about consumer engagement in research focuses on research processes and implementation, rather than dissemination in conference settings. This article offers reflections and learnings from consumers, researchers and conference organisers on the 12th Health Services Research Conference, a biennial conference hosted by the Health Services Research Association of Australia and New Zealand (HSRAANZ). Method: We were awarded funds via a competitive application process by Bellberry Limited, a national not-for-profit agency with a focus on improving research quality, to incorporate consumer engagement strategies in conference processes and evaluate their impact. Findings: Strategies included consumer scholarships, a buddy system, designated quiet space and consumer session co-chairs; the reflections explored in this paper were collected in the funded, independent evaluation. Our insights suggest a need for more structured consumer involvement in conference planning and design, as well as the development of specific engagement strategies. Conclusion: To move toward active partnership in scientific conference settings, our experience reinforces the need to engage consumers as members in designing and conducting research and in presenting research and planning conference content and processes. Public Contribution: Consumer engagement in research dissemination at conferences is the focus of this viewpoint article. Consumers were involved in the conception of this article and have contributed to authorship at all stages of revisions and edits
Fairness optimisation with multi-objective swarms for explainable classifiers on data streams
No full textRecently, advanced AI systems equipped with sophisticated learning algorithms have emerged, enabling the processing of extensive streaming data for online decision-making in diverse domains. However, the widespread deployment of these systems has prompted concerns regarding potential ethical issues, particularly the risk of discrimination that can adversely impact certain community groups. This issue has been proven to be challenging to address in the context of streaming data, where data distribution can change over time, including changes in the level of discrimination within the data. In addition, transparent models like decision trees are favoured in such applications because they illustrate the decision-making process. However, it is essential to keep the models compact because the explainability of large models can diminish. Existing methods usually mitigate discrimination at the cost of accuracy. Accuracy and discrimination, therefore, can be considered conflicting objectives. Current methods are still limited in controlling the trade-off between these conflicting objectives. This paper proposes a method that can incrementally learn classification models from streaming data and automatically adjust the learnt models to balance multi-objectives simultaneously. The novelty of this research is to propose a multi-objective algorithm to maximise accuracy, minimise discrimination and model size simultaneously based on swarm intelligence. Experimental results using six real-world datasets show that the proposed algorithm can evolve fairer and simpler classifiers while maintaining competitive accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art methods tailored for streaming data
Where do high‐risk drinking occasions occur more often? A cross‐sectional, cross‐country study
No full textIntroduction: The current paper examines the proportion of drinking occasions and total alcohol consumed that takes place at off-premise locations. Comparisons are made between high-income countries: Australia, New Zealand, England and Scotland, and across drinker-types: high-risk and lower-risk. Methods: Data were taken from the International Alcohol Control study in Australia (N = 1789), New Zealand (N = 1979), England (N = 2844) and Scotland (N = 1864). The cross-national survey measures location and beverage-specific alcohol consumption. The number of drinking occasions and mean consumption across on- and off-premise locations and the proportion of drinking occasions that high- and lower-risk drinkers had at on- and off-premise locations was estimated for each country. Results: The majority of drinking occasions among high-risk drinkers occurred at off-premise locations across all four countries; Australia 80.1%, New Zealand 72.0%, England 61.7% and Scotland 60.7%. High-risk drinkers in Australia had significantly larger proportions of drinking occasions occurring at off-premise locations compared to England and Scotland. Across all countries, high-risk drinkers and lower-risk drinkers consumed significantly larger quantities of alcohol per occasion at off-premise locations compared to on-premises locations. Finally, the majority of total alcohol consumed occurred at off-premise locations across all countries for high- and lower-risk drinkers. Discussion and Conclusions: As the accessibility to alcohol outside of licensed premises continues to increase, particularly with the expansion of home delivery services, it is important to be mindful of the high proportion of heavy drinking occasions that occur off-premise.</p
A Panel of miRNA Biomarkers Common to Serum and Brain-Derived Extracellular Vesicles Identified in Mouse Model of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
No full textAmyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive motor neuron disease characterised by the deposition of aggregated proteins including TAR DNA-binding protein 43 (TDP-43) in vulnerable motor neurons and the brain. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) facilitate the spread of neurodegenerative diseases and can be easily accessed in the bloodstream. This study aimed to identify a panel of EV miRNAs that can capture the pathology occurring in the brain and peripheral circulation. EVs were isolated from the cortex (BDEVs) and serum (serum EVs) of 3 month-old and 6-month-old TDP-43*Q331K and TDP-43*WT mice. Following characterisation and miRNA isolation, the EVs underwent next-generation sequencing where 24 differentially packaged miRNAs were identified in the TDP-43*Q331K BDEVs and 7 in the TDP-43*Q331K serum EVs. Several miRNAs, including miR-183-5p, were linked to ALS. Additionally, miR-122-5p and miR-486b-5p were identified in both panels, demonstrating the ability of the serum EVs to capture the dysregulation occurring in the brain. This is the first study to identify miRNAs common to both the serum EVs and BDEVs in a mouse model of ALS