Yoxas/statistical_literacy huggingface dataset:
While there is a recognized role of optimizing lifestyle (diet and physical activity) behaviours in the management of infertility, the best practice remains unknown and factors influencing the lifestyle of people with infertility are not well understood. This systematic review evaluated barriers and enablers to a healthy lifestyle in people with infertility, from the perspectives of people with infertility and health professionals, in order to inform optimal behavioural change strategies. Ovid MEDLINE(R), PsycINFO, EMBASE, EBM Reviews, and CINAHL were searched from inception to 28 August 2023. Eligible studies were qualitative and quantitative primary studies that explored barriers and/or enablers to lifestyle for infertility management. Quality assessment was performed using the Centre for Evidence-Based Management Critical Appraisal of a Survey Tool and the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme Qualitative Checklist. Data were analysed by thematic analysis with themes mapped to the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation and Behaviour (COM-B) model and Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF). After screening 12 326 abstracts and 99 full-texts, 27 studies were included (12 quantitative, 6 qualitative and 9 mixed-methods) with 22 studies of women with infertility (n = 2524), 11 studies of men with infertility (n = 1407), and 6 studies of health professionals (n = 372). We identified barriers and enablers relating to capability (e.g. strategies for behaviour change), opportunity (e.g. limited time, resources, and money), and motivation (e.g. interplay between lifestyle and emotional state). Based on the identified themes, suggested intervention components to integrate into lifestyle management of infertility include facilitating development of self-management skills to support lifestyle change (e.g. self-monitoring, action planning, and goal setting) and incorporating mental health strategies (e.g. providing information about the benefits of healthy lifestyle behaviours for mental health and encouraging patients to reframe healthy lifestyle behaviours as self-care strategies). The findings have identified important factors that influence lifestyle management in people with infertility and have suggested relevant intervention components to consider when designing interventions. Given the paucity of qualitative studies identified, more research is needed to further understand the complex and interacting factors that shape lifestyle during the fertility journey.
Whilst surgeons and robotic companies are key stakeholders involved in the adoption of robotic assisted surgery (RS), the public's role is overlooked. However, given that patients hold ultimate power over their healthcare decisions, public acceptance of RS is crucial. Therefore, this study aims to identify public understanding, opinions, and misconceptions about RS. An online questionnaire distributed between February and May 2021 ascertained the views of UK adults on RS. The themes of questions included familiarity, experience and comfort with RS, opinions on its ethical implications, and the impact of factual information provided to the participant. The data were evaluated using thematic and statistical analysis, including assessing for statistical differences in age, gender, education level, and presence in the medical field. Overall, 216 responses were analysed. Participants were relatively uninformed about RS, with a median knowledge score of 4.00(2.00-6.00) on a 10-point Likert scale. Fears surrounding increased risk, reduced precision and technological failure were identified, alongside misconceptions about its autonomous nature. However, providing factual information in the survey about RS statistically increased participant comfort (p = < 0.0001). Most (61.8%) participants believed robot manufacturers were responsible for malfunctions, but doctors were held accountable more by older, less educated, and non-medical participants. Our findings suggest that there is limited public understanding of RS. The numerous common misconceptions identified present a major barrier to the widespread acceptance of RS, since inaccurate fears about its nature could discourage potential patients from engaging with robotic procedures.
WHO, as requested by its member states, launched the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) in 1974 to make life-saving vaccines available to all globally. To mark the 50-year anniversary of EPI, we sought to quantify the public health impact of vaccination globally since the programme's inception. In this modelling study, we used a suite of mathematical and statistical models to estimate the global and regional public health impact of 50 years of vaccination against 14 pathogens in EPI. For the modelled pathogens, we considered coverage of all routine and supplementary vaccines delivered since 1974 and estimated the mortality and morbidity averted for each age cohort relative to a hypothetical scenario of no historical vaccination. We then used these modelled outcomes to estimate the contribution of vaccination to globally declining infant and child mortality rates over this period. Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children younger than 5 years of whom 101 million were infants younger than 1 year. For every death averted, 66 years of full health were gained on average, translating to 10·2 billion years of full health gained. We estimate that vaccination has accounted for 40% of the observed decline in global infant mortality, 52% in the African region. In 2024, a child younger than 10 years is 40% more likely to survive to their next birthday relative to a hypothetical scenario of no historical vaccination. Increased survival probability is observed even well into late adulthood. Since 1974 substantial gains in childhood survival have occurred in every global region. We estimate that EPI has provided the single greatest contribution to improved infant survival over the past 50 years. In the context of strengthening primary health care, our results show that equitable universal access to immunisation remains crucial to sustain health gains and continue to save future lives from preventable infectious mortality. WHO.
Whole body dissection, once a long-held method of learning and teaching in anatomy medical education, has largely been replaced by cost and time-reduced methods of teaching. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of student knowledge acquisition and retention, following six annual intensive eight-week elective anatomy by whole body dissection (AWBD) courses implemented between 2010 and 2015, utilizing a modified team-based learning (TBL) pedagogy. A total of 160 students completed the intensive full-time courses. During each course, students, in groups of five or six, completed the dissection of a whole cadaver. Students were assessed by a standardized practical test involving the accurate identification of 20 different tagged anatomical structures. All students (n = 160) completed pre-course and end-course individual assessments. Seventy students were assessed again 1 month after the course ended. A further 71 students were assessed 7 months later. A marked increase in topographical relational anatomical knowledge was demonstrated. The median pre-course score was 9/20 (interquartile range 5). The median end-course score was 19/20 (IQR 2), a statistically significant increase (p < 0.001). The assessments for the 70 students reassessed 1 month after the course ended showed no significant statistical change. The assessments for the further 71 students assessed 7 months later also showed no significant statistical change. The results of this study demonstrate that AWBD, provides significant acquisition and maintenance of three-dimensional regional relational anatomical knowledge. As an elective, AWBD has a place in the medical curricula, particularly for students interested in a surgical or procedural based specialty career.
Why do some fields of study in higher education yield higher wage returns in the labor market than others? Human capital perspectives suggest that differences in skills are a major source of between-fields wage differentials. We assess this explanation using data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). Our pooled analysis of 17,590 graduates from 29 countries indicates that differences in general cognitive (literacy and numeracy) skills matter relatively little, although numeracy skills do play a meaningful role in accounting for the high wages of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates. Specific skills, proxied by skill use on the job, explain a substantial portion of between-field wage differentials. Remarkably, we find that the sex composition of the field of study remains important after taking skills into account, particularly for explaining the wage advantage of STEM graduates. Comparative analyses grouping the 29 countries into four institutional clusters-Social-democratic, Conservative, Liberal, and Post-communist-show that these general patterns are broadly similar across different institutional contexts.
Why is it that the public can read and write but only a few understand statistical information? Why are elementary distinctions, such as that between absolute and relative risks, not better known? In the absence of statistical literacy, key democratic ideals, such as informed consent and shared decision making in health care, will remain science fiction. In this chapter, we deal with tools for transparency in risk communication. The focus is on graphical and analog representations of risk. Analog representations use a separate icon or sign for each individual in a population. Like numerical representations, some graphical forms are transparent, whereas others indiscernibly mislead the reader. We review cases of (1) tree diagrams for representing natural versus relative frequency, (2) decision trees for the representation of fast and frugal decision making, (3) bar graphs for representing absolute versus relative risk, (4) population diagrams for the analog representation of risk, and (5) a format of representation that employs colored tinker cubes for the encoding of information about individuals in a population. Graphs have long enjoyed the status of being "worth a thousand words" and hence of being more readily accessible to human understanding than long-winded symbolic representations. This is both true and false. Graphical tools can be just as well employed for transparent and nontransparent risk communications.
Widespread inappropriate use of antimicrobial substances drives resistance development worldwide. In long-term care facilities (LTCF), antibiotics are among the most frequently prescribed medications. More than one third of antimicrobial agents prescribed in LTCFs are for urinary tract infections (UTI). We aimed to increase the number of appropriate antimicrobial treatments for UTIs in LTCFs using a multi-faceted antimicrobial stewardship intervention. We performed a non-randomized cluster-controlled intervention study. Four LTCFs of the Geriatric Health Centers Graz were the intervention group, four LTCFs served as control group. The main components of the intervention were: voluntary continuing medical education for primary care physicians, distribution of a written guideline, implementation of the project homepage to distribute guidelines and videos and onsite training for nursing staff. Local nursing staff recorded data on UTI episodes in an online case report platform. Two blinded reviewers assessed whether treatments were adequate. 326 UTI episodes were recorded, 161 in the intervention group and 165 in the control group. During the intervention period, risk ratio for inadequate indication for treatment was 0.41 (95% CI 0.19-0.90), p = 0.025. In theintervention group, the proportion of adequate antibiotic choices increased from 42.1% in the pre-intervention period, to 45.9% during the intervention and to 51% in the post-intervention period (absolute increase of 8.9%). In the control group, the proportion was 36.4%, 33.3% and 33.3%, respectively. The numerical difference between intervention group and control group in the post-intervention period was 17.7% (difference did not reach statistical significance). There were no significant differences between the control group and intervention group in the safety outcomes (proportion of clinical failure, number of hospital admissions due to UTI and adverse events due to antimicrobial treatment). An antimicrobial stewardship program consisting of practice guidelines, local and web-based education for nursing staff and general practitioners resulted in a significant increase in adequate treatments (in terms of decision to treat the UTI) during the intervention period. However, this difference was not maintained in the post-intervention phase. Continued efforts to improve the quality of prescriptions further are necessary. The trial was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04798365.
Wikipedia, the open crowdsourced encyclopedia that anyone can edit, ranks among the top ten most-visited websites globally. Its integration into university curriculum as an innovative educational tool is a slowly growing trend; however, many higher education institutions have yet to fully grasp its potential. In response, a specific optional module for Wikipedia editing, designed for the selected undergraduate science courses at the School of Advanced Studies, Russia, was implemented as an optional extra credit service-learning activity, a teaching methodology combining meaningful service to the community with curriculum-based learning. Students who chose to participate and those who preferred not to participate in the activity were invited to participate in a research project to explore their perspectives and experiences. In total, five sessions of focus group discussions were conducted with participants (12 females and 2 males) in one set and non-participants (5 females and 4 males) in another to identify students' perspectives on themes such as their interest in science, reasons for their choices, and their expectations before the activity while post-experience focus group discussions were used to identify the perspectives of participant students on themes, encompassing contribution of the service-learning activity, acquisition of new skills, and the development of prosocial behaviors. Students' opinions on integrating social responsibility topics into the curriculum were also explored. The results extracted from these focus group discussions, analyzed through consensual coding, revealed factors promoting student participation, like interest in the subject, novelty of the activity, and grade improvement opportunities, as well as factors deterring participation, such as concerns about academic benefits, workload, and time constraints. Furthermore, the results demonstrated that Wikipedia editing serves as a novel teaching methodology, promoting student learning and development in digital literacy and information literacy, which are among the twenty-first-century skills. Interestingly, at the same time, not all students could address the value of contributing to open, crowdsourced knowledge for public service or interpret this activity as an academic service-learning. These suggest that Wikipedia editing is an innovative teaching approach, fostering students' learning and development while also indicating its potential to enhance students' understanding of responsible citizenship and public service in the digital age.
Wikipedia's influence in shaping public perceptions of science underscores the significance of scientists being recognized on the platform, as it can impact their careers. Although Wikipedia offers guidelines for determining when a scientist qualifies for their own article, it currently lacks guidance regarding whether a scientist should be acknowledged in articles related to the innovation processes to which they have contributed. To explore how Wikipedia addresses this issue of scientific "micro-notability," we introduce a digital method called Name Edit Analysis, enabling us to quantitatively and qualitatively trace mentions of scientists within Wikipedia's articles. We study two CRISPR-related Wikipedia articles and find dynamic negotiations of micro-notability as well as a surprising tension between Wikipedia's principle of safeguarding against self-promotion and the scholarly norm of "due credit." To reconcile this tension, we propose that Wikipedians and scientists collaborate to establish specific micro-notability guidelines that acknowledge scientific contributions while preventing excessive self-promotion.
Wildfire events are becoming increasingly common across many areas of the United States, including North Carolina (NC). Wildfires can cause immediate damage to properties, and wildfire smoke conditions can harm the overall health of exposed communities. It is critical to identify communities at increased risk of wildfire events, particularly in areas with that have sociodemographic disparities and low socioeconomic status (SES) that may exacerbate incurred impacts of wildfire events. This study set out to: (1) characterize the distribution of wildfire risk across NC; (2) implement integrative cluster analyses to identify regions that contain communities with increased vulnerability to the impacts of wildfire events due to sociodemographic characteristics; (3) provide summary-level statistics of populations with highest wildfire risk, highlighting SES and housing cost factors; and (4) disseminate wildfire risk information via our online web application, ENVIROSCAN. Wildfire hazard potential (WHP) indices were organized at the census tract-level, and distributions were analyzed for spatial autocorrelation via global and local Moran's tests. Sociodemographic characteristics were analyzed via k-means analysis to identify clusters with distinct SES patterns to characterize regions of similar sociodemographic/socioeconomic disparities. These SES groupings were overlayed with housing and wildfire risk profiles to establish patterns of risk across NC. Resulting geospatial analyses identified areas largely in Southeastern NC with high risk of wildfires that were significantly correlated with neighboring regions with high WHP, highlighting adjacent regions of high risk for future wildfire events. Cluster-based analysis of SES factors resulted in three groups of regions categorized through distinct SES profiling; two of these clusters (Clusters 2 and 3) contained indicators of high SES vulnerability. Cluster 2 contained a higher percentage of younger (<5 years), non-white, Hispanic and/or Latino residents; while Cluster 3 had the highest mean WHP and was characterized by a higher percentage of non-white residents, poverty, and less than a high school education. Counties of particular SES and WHP-combined vulnerability include those with majority non-white residents, tribal communities, and below poverty level households largely located in Southeastern NC. WHP values per census tract were dispersed to the public via the ENVIROSCAN application, alongside other environmentally-relevant data.
Wildfire events have resulted in unprecedented social and economic losses worldwide in the last few years. Most studies on reducing wildfire risk to communities focused on modeling wildfire behavior in the wildland to aid in developing fuel reduction and fire suppression strategies. However, minimizing losses in communities and managing risk requires a holistic approach to understanding wildfire behavior that fully integrates the wildland's characteristics and the built environment's features. This complete integration is particularly critical for intermixed communities where the wildland and the built environment coalesce. Community-level wildfire behavior that captures the interaction between the wildland and the built environment, which is necessary for predicting structural damage, has not received sufficient attention. Predicting damage to the built environment is essential in understanding and developing fire mitigation strategies to make communities more resilient to wildfire events. In this study, we use integrated concepts from graph theory to establish a relative vulnerability metric capable of quantifying the survival likelihood of individual buildings within a wildfire-affected region. We test the framework by emulating the damage observed in the historic 2018 Camp Fire and the 2020 Glass Fire. We propose two formulations based on graph centralities to evaluate the vulnerability of buildings relative to each other. We then utilize the relative vulnerability values to determine the damage state of individual buildings. Based on a one-to-one comparison of the calculated and observed damages, the maximum predicted building survival accuracy for the two formulations ranged from [Formula: see text] for the historical wildfires tested. From the results, we observe that the modified random walk formulation can better identify nodes that lie at the extremes on the vulnerability scale. In contrast, the modified degree formulation provides better predictions for nodes with mid-range vulnerability values.
Wildfires in the Western United States are a growing and significant source of air pollution that is eroding decades of progress in air pollution reduction. The effects on preterm birth during critical periods of pregnancy are unknown. We assessed associations between prenatal exposure to wildland fire smoke and risk of preterm birth (gestational age < 37 weeks). We assigned smoke exposure to geocoded residence at birth for all live singleton births in California conceived 2007-2018, using weekly average concentrations of particulate matter ≤ 2.5 µm (PM2.5) attributable to wildland fires from United States Environmental Protection Agency's Community Multiscale Air Quality Model. Logistic regression yielded odds ratio (OR) for preterm birth in relation to increases in average exposure across the whole pregnancy, each trimester, and each week of pregnancy. Models adjusted for season, age, education, race/ethnicity, medical insurance, and smoking of the birthing parent. For the 5,155,026 births, higher wildland fire PM2.5 exposure averaged across pregnancy, or any trimester, was associated with higher odds of preterm birth. The OR for an increase of 1 µg/m3 of average wildland fire PM2.5 during pregnancy was 1.013 (95 % CI:1.008,1.017). Wildland fire PM2.5 during most weeks of pregnancy was associated with higher odds. Strongest estimates were observed in weeks in the second and third trimesters. A 10 µg/m3 increase in average wildland fire PM2·5 in gestational week 23 was associated with OR = 1.034; 95 % CI: 1.019, 1.049 for preterm birth. Preterm birth is sensitive to wildland fire PM2.5; therefore, we must reduce exposure during pregnancy.