scholarly journals Integrated approaches for the assessment of health impacts of environmental chemicals: our experience in the GraMo cohort study

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
J P Arebola ◽  
P Martin-Olmedo ◽  
F M Pérez-Carrascosa ◽  
J León ◽  
R Echeverría ◽  
...  

Abstract The assessment of the health implications of human exposure to low doses of multiple environmental chemical pollutants represents an important challenge for environmental epidemiology. Current studies must go beyond simple exposure-disease associations and need further characterization of a complete exposure disease continuum, including exposure routes, adverse outcome pathways, potential subclinical effects, interactions between chemicals, and intra-individual susceptibility. This needs an effective synergism with basic sciences, which can enrich epidemiologic findings with very detailed information at a molecular level, but also with clinicians, who would help to provide accurate diagnoses and interpretation in a real-world scenario. On the other hand, environmental exposures can affect the general population at different levels, including economic and social dimensions, which have been frequently overlooked. These approaches would require specific methodologies that are relatively novel in the field of environmental epidemiology, such as cost-benefit analyses and qualitative techniques. Public health campaigns can clearly benefit from these mixed approaches.

Author(s):  
David C. Byrne ◽  
Christa L. Themann ◽  
Deanna K. Meinke ◽  
Thais C. Morata ◽  
Mark R. Stephenson

An audiologist should be the principal provider and advocate for all hearing loss prevention activities. Many audiologists equate hearing loss prevention with industrial audiology and occupational hearing conservation programs. However, an audiologist’s involvement in hearing loss prevention should not be confined to that one particular practice setting. In addition to supervising occupational programs, audiologists are uniquely qualified to raise awareness of hearing risks, organize public health campaigns, promote healthy hearing, implement intervention programs, and monitor outcomes. For example, clinical audiologists can show clients how to use inexpensive sound level meters, noise dosimeters, or phone apps to measure noise levels, and recommend appropriate hearing protection. Audiologists should identify community events that may involve hazardous exposures and propose strategies to minimize risks to hearing. Audiologists can help shape the knowledge, beliefs, motivations, attitudes, and behaviors of individuals toward self-protection. An audiologist has the education, tools, opportunity, and strategic position to facilitate or promote hearing loss surveillance and prevention services and activities. This article highlights real-world examples of the various roles and substantial contributions audiologists can make toward hearing loss prevention goals.


Author(s):  
Jessica M. Rath ◽  
Marisa Greenberg ◽  
Ollie Ganz ◽  
Lindsay Pitzer ◽  
Elizabeth Hair ◽  
...  

Campaign costs are rising, making ad execution testing more critical to determine effectiveness prior to media spending. Premarket testing occurs prior to messages’ airing while in-market testing examines message attributes when messages are aired within a real-world setting, where context plays an important role in determining audience response. These types of ad testing provide critical feedback to help develop and deploy campaigns. Due to recent changes in media delivery platforms and audience tobacco use behavior, this study analyzes two nationally representative youth samples, aged 15-21, to examine if pre-market ad testing is an indicator of in-market ad performance for public health campaigns, which rely on persuasive messages to promote or reduce health behaviors rather than selling a product. Using data from the truth® campaign, a national tobacco use prevention campaign targeted to youth and young adults, findings indicate strong associations between pre-market scores and in-market ad performance metrics.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feifei Bu ◽  
Hei Wan Mak ◽  
Jessica K Bone ◽  
Daisy Fancourt

Aims: This study aimed to examine potential heterogeneity in longitudinal changes in home-based arts engagement during the first national lockdown and following gradual easing of restrictions in the UK. Further, it sought to explore factors that were associated with patterns of longitudinal changes in home-based arts engagement. Methods: Data were from the UCL COVID-19 Social Study. The analytical sample consisted of 29,147 adults in the UK who were followed up for 22 weeks from 21st March to 21st August 2020. Data were analysed using growth mixture models. Results: Our analyses identified five classes of growth trajectories. There were two stable classes showing little change in arts engagement over time (64.4% in total), two classes showing initial increases in arts engagement followed by declines as restrictions were eased (29.8%), and one class showing slight declines during strict lockdown followed by an increase in arts engagement after the easing of restrictions (5.9%). A range of factors were found to be associated with class membership of these arts engagement trajectories, such as age, gender, education, income, employment status, and health. Conclusions: There is substantial heterogeneity in longitudinal changes in home-based arts engagement. For participants whose engagement changed over time, growth trajectories of arts engagement were related to changes in lockdown measures. These findings suggest that some individuals may have drawn on the arts when they needed them the most, such as during the strict lockdown period, even if they usually had lower levels of arts engagement before the pandemic. Overall, our results indicate the importance of promoting arts engagement during pandemics and periods of lockdown as part of public health campaigns.


Children ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Robert J. Wellman ◽  
Catherine M. Sabiston ◽  
Matthis Morgenstern

Adolescents who engage in heavy episodic drinking (HED—i.e., 5+ drinks on a single occasion) increase risks for psychopathology, alcohol dependence, and similar negative consequences in adulthood. We explored associations among depressive symptoms, positive alcohol beliefs, and progression of heavy episodic drinking (HED) in 3021 German adolescents (M(SD) age at baseline = 12.4 (1.0)) followed for 30 months in 4 waves, using a conditional parallel process linear growth model, with full information maximum likelihood estimation. By wave 4, 40.3% of participants had engaged in HED more than once; 16.4% had done so ≥5 times. Depressive symptoms were indirectly related to baseline values of HED (through positive beliefs and wave 1 drinking frequency and quantity) and to the rate of growth in HED (through positive beliefs and wave 1 quantity). Adolescents with higher levels of depressive symptoms and positive alcohol beliefs drink more frequently and at greater quantities, which is associated with initiating HED at a higher level and escalating HED more rapidly than peers with similar depressive symptoms who lack those beliefs. This suggests that, to the extent that positive alcohol beliefs can be tempered through public health campaigns, education and/or counseling, HED among depressed adolescents might be reduced.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Koed Madsen

Previous research concerning the effectiveness of public health campaigns have explored the impact of message design, message content, communication channel choice and other aspects of such campaigns. Meta analyses reported in the literature reveal, however, that the choice of endorsers in health campaigns remains unexplored. The present study addresses this gap in the literature by studying what makes doctors from public health campaigns appear trustworthy in the eyes of the receiver. The present research examines propensity for trust as well facets of trustworthiness of such expert doctors based on a survey carried out in the UK (155 respondents). Underlying factors of trustworthiness are explored to gain more insight into the understanding of how trust may affect the public’s belief updating and the formation of intentions. Exploratory factor analyses suggest four dimensions of trustworthiness. Multiple regression analyses demonstrate that these factors explain almost 70% of the variance in the participants’ expressed trust in doctors from public health campaigns. Doctors’ ethical stance and their care for the health of the general population appear to be more important for perceived trustworthiness than their actual professional background, although their abilities and competences are closely related to ethics and benevolence. For policy makers this has important implications when selecting endorsers for public health campaigns in order to design effective health related communication, for example to combat obesity.


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