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Does Hemoglobin A1c Influence the Relationship between Stressful Life Events and Cognition in Later Life? Findings from the VA Normative Aging Study
Full text linkWith Type 2 diabetes sharply growing in prevalence around the world, there has been an increased interest in adverse health outcomes resulting from excessively high blood sugar and the associated damage to blood vessels, increasing the risk of a variety of chronic illnesses and mortality. If untreated, high blood sugar can result in increased hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c), which can damage veins and arteries for the duration of these erythrocytes’ lifespan, resulting in accumulative damage and loss of efficiency of the circulatory system. Both HbA1c and stressful life events (SLEs) have demonstrated independent effects on cognition in late life, with higher levels of both stress and HbA1c impairing cognition. SLEs can influence a variety of physiological pathways, including HbA1c, thus it is possible that HbA1c can moderate the influence of SLEs on cognitive function. The present study investigated the mediating and moderating effects of HbA1c on the relationship between SLEs and cognitive outcomes in late life. Both global and fluid cognitive measures to investigate general and domain-specific declines associated with both SLEs and HbA1, and then age stratified these same analyses to examine whether the old-old (75+) are more vulnerable, will be used to investigate the potential relationships between these variables. The sample consisted of older adult males (N = 578) from the VA Normative Aging Study (M age = 74.3 years, SD = 6.5) . Structural equation models showed that both SLE and HbA1c exhibited direct effects that varied depending upon the cognitive outcome and type of analysis. However, SLE and HbA1c were unrelated in this sample, therefore no mediation effects were found. One moderation effect was found for the pattern recognition task in the general sample; however the interaction was in the opposite effect of the direct effects, and further investigation suggested a multicollinearity problems, potentially nullifying this result. The analyses stratified by age (< 75 and 75+) yielded some interesting results. Within age group, age was consistently an inversely associated with MMSE and word list total recall, but no significant relationship to verbal fluency and pattern recognition in the old-old group, suggesting either plateau effects, survivor effects, or potentially a specific vulnerability. Further, education appeared to be more protective against cognitive deficits in the old-old group when compared to the young-old group, and HbA1c was more consistently inversely related to cognition in the old-old group, while stress was more likely to have a significant relation in the young-old group. One moderation model for verbal fluency was significant for the old-old group, and results suggested that those high in HbA1c and SLE had lower scores for verbal fluency. Future research should be conducted with more diverse samples, and better aligning the timing of the stress and HbA1c assays. The implications of this work include, bolsters our understanding of how joint effects of physiology and stress may influence specific domains of cognitive function in aging, perhaps resulting in accelerated aging
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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The Effects of War Stressors and Psychosocial Factors on Mental Health among Korean Vietnam War Veterans
Full text linkThe purpose of this dissertation was to examine the effects of war stressors and psychosocial factors on negative and positive mental health outcomes among Korean Vietnam War veterans. The sample consisted of 367 male veterans who completed a self-reported survey conducted in 2017 (Mage = 72, SD = 2.66, range = 65-84). Most were married (86.89%), high school graduates or below (89.4%), and served at the Army (87.5%).
In Study 1, we examined the relative impacts of four types of war stressors (combat exposure, malevolent environments, perceived threat, and moral injury) on PTSD, depressive, and anxiety symptoms, controlling for demographics (education, income) and psychosocial factors (optimism, unit cohesion, and homecoming experience). Overall, combat exposure was significantly associated with the three types of psychological outcomes. However, its impact became non-significant when subjective war stressors (malevolent environments, perceived threat, and moral injury) were added to the models. Interestingly, malevolent environments, which may be regarded less severe but more chronic stressors, were consistently and strongly associated with higher levels of PTSD, depressive, and anxiety symptoms. Moral injury had a unique impact on PTSD and anxiety symptoms, while perceived threat was independently associated with depressive and anxiety symptoms. Among psychosocial factors, only optimism provided an independent impact on the three types of mental health outcomes in the final regression models. The results are in line with James et al. (2013) and Maguen et al. (2009), which showed stronger effects of moral injury or perceive threat over combat exposure on PTSD symptoms, but extended it by examining the unique effects of four types of war stressors on depressive or anxiety symptoms, as well as PTSD symptoms.
In Study 2, we sought to identify the classifications of veterans’ mental health, using late-onset stress symptomatology (LOSS), PTSD symptoms, and psychosocial well-being (WB). A latent profile analysis yielded five classes as the best phenotypes of mental health: 1) Low Affect (n = 45, low LOSS, low PTSD, and low WB), 2) Resilience (n = 43, middle LOSS, low PTSD, and high WB), 3) Normal (n = 134, middle LOSS, middle PTSD, and middle WB), 4) Moderate Distress (n = 109, moderate LOSS, moderate PTSD, and middle WB), and 5) Severe Distress (n = 24, high LOSS, high PTSD, and middle WB). The Resilience class showed the highest levels of optimism, desirable appraisals of military service, and social support from family, significant others, friends, and military peers. Undesirable appraisals of military service were highest in the Severe Distress class, and lowest in the Resilience and Low Affect classes. These results provide empirical evidence for the individual-level process model from Spiro, Settersten, and Aldwin (2016), which emphasized the beneficial impacts of resilience resources on negative and positive mental health outcomes.
Given that most research findings on veterans are from studies of Western veterans, the findings from this dissertation provide information about the long-term impacts of multiple types of war stressors on psychological distress and the importance of intervention focusing on resilience resources for mental health among Korean Vietnam War veterans, an Asian veteran sample. Specifically, it revealed relatively high levels of PTSD in this sample, suggesting a need of psychosocial interventions to improve the mental health in this group
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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SpiroLongTermOutcomesAppendixB.pdf
No full textMost research on military service focuses on its short-term negative consequences, especially the mental and physical injuries of those deployed in warzones. However, studies of long-term outcomes reveal surprisingly positive effects of military service—both those early in adulthood that grow over time and others that can emerge later in life. These multidomain effects have been found in veterans of World War II and the Korean War and are now being seen in veterans of the Vietnam War. Although some are directly attributable to public policies such as the GI Bill, which facilitate educational and economic gains, there are personal developmental gains as well, including autonomy, emotional maturity and resilience, mastery, and leadership skills, that lead to better health and well-being in later life. These long-term effects vary across persons, change over time within persons, and often reflect processes of cumulative advantage and disadvantage. We propose a life-span model of the effects of military service that provides a perspective for probing both long-term positive and negative outcomes for aging veterans. We further explicate the model by focusing on both sociocultural dynamics and individual processes. We identify public-use data that can be examined to evaluate this model, and offer a set of questions that can be used to assess military service. Finally, we outline an agenda for dedicated inquiry into such effects and consider policy implications for the health and well-being of aging veterans in later life.Keywords: Veterans, Mental health, Well-being, Health, ResilienceKeywords: Veterans, Mental health, Well-being, Health, ResilienceKeywords: Veterans, Mental health, Well-being, Health, ResilienceKeywords: Veterans, Mental health, Well-being, Health, Resilienc
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