scholarly journals Commentary: Race and Ethnicity in Biomedical Research – Classifications, Challenges, and Future Directions

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 561-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dame Idossa ◽  
Narjust Duma ◽  
Katerina Chekhovskiy ◽  
Ronald Go ◽  
Sikander Ailawadhi

The use of race and ethnicity in biomedical research has been a subject of debate for the past three decades. Initially the two ma­jor race categories were: White and Black, leaving other minorities uncounted or inap­propriately misclassified. As the science of health disparities evolves, more sophisticat­ed and detailed information has been add­ed to large databases. Despite the addition of new racial classifications, including multi-racial denominations, the quality of the data is limited to the data collection process and other social misconceptions. Although race is viewed as an imposed or ascribed status, ethnicity is an achieved status, making it a more challenging variable to include in biomedical research. Ambiguity between race and ethnicity often exists, ultimately affecting the value of both variables. To bet­ter understand specific health outcomes or disparities of groups, it is necessary to col­lect subgroup-specific data. Cultural percep­tions and practices, health experiences, and susceptibility to disease vary greatly among broad racial-ethnic groups and requires the collection of nuanced data to understand. Here, we provide an overview of the clas­sification of race and ethnicity in the United States over time, the existing challenges in using race and ethnicity in biomedical re­search and future research directions. Ethn Dis. 2018;28(4):561-564; doi:10.18865/ed.28.4.561.

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (04) ◽  
pp. 1542-1573 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathilde Cohen

Despite the importance of judicial diversity for litigants and the broader public, no previous study has examined this issue within the French judiciary. This article begins to fill this gap by using original, qualitative data that shed light on judges’, prosecutors', and other legal actors' discourses on racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity. Its main contribution is to show that these legal professionals deploy three strategies—linguistic, institutional, and geographic—to dodge or downplay the relevance of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. The first, linguistic, form of avoidance lies in refusing to name and discuss race and ethnicity explicitly; the second, institutional, in denying that the judiciary has a diversity problem or that the problem lies within its power; and the third, geographic, consists in relegating the issue of diversity to distant places—the United States and overseas France. The article concludes by discussing key directions for future research.


Author(s):  
Thomas E. Fuller-Rowell ◽  
David S. Curtis ◽  
Adrienne M. Duke

Conceptual frameworks for racial/ethnic health disparities are abundant, but many have received insufficient empirical attention. As a result, there are substantial gaps in scientific knowledge and a range of untested hypotheses. Particularly lacking is specificity in behavioral and biological mechanisms for such disparities and their underlying social determinants. Alongside lack of political will and public investment, insufficient clarity in mechanisms has stymied efforts to address racial health disparities. Capitalizing on emergent findings from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study and other longitudinal studies of aging, this chapter evaluates research on health disparities between black and white US adults. Attention is given to candidate behavioral and biological mechanisms as precursors to group differences in morbidity and mortality and to environmental and sociocultural factors that may underlie these mechanisms. Future research topics are discussed, emphasizing those that offer promise with respect to illuminating practical solutions to racial/ethnic health disparities.


Author(s):  
Gert Kootstra ◽  
Xin Wang ◽  
Pieter M. Blok ◽  
Jochen Hemming ◽  
Eldert van Henten

Abstract Purpose of Review The world-wide demand for agricultural products is rapidly growing. However, despite the growing population, labor shortage becomes a limiting factor for agricultural production. Further automation of agriculture is an important solution to tackle these challenges. Recent Findings Selective harvesting of high-value crops, such as apples, tomatoes, and broccoli, is currently mainly performed by humans, rendering it one of the most labor-intensive and expensive agricultural tasks. This explains the large interest in the development of selective harvesting robots. Selective harvesting, however, is a challenging task for a robot, due to the high levels of variation and incomplete information, as well as safety. Summary This review paper provides an overview of the state of the art in selective harvesting robotics in three different production systems; greenhouse, orchard, and open field. The limitations of current systems are discussed, and future research directions are proposed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanzeel Rehman Charan ◽  
Muhammad Aqeel Bhutto ◽  
Mihr Ali Bhutto ◽  
Azhar Ali Tunio ◽  
Ghulam Murtaza Khuhro ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Nanomaterials of curcumin with hyaluronic acid have gained a lot of attention for potential therapeutic applications of curcumin and hyaluronic acid with or without other additional drugs. Overall studies of curcumin and hyaluronic acid show that nanomaterials of curcumin with hyaluronic acid accelerate the efficacy of curcumin in the treatment of various disorders like arthritis, cancer, hepatic fibrosis, neural disorders, wound healing, and skin regeneration, it is largely due to the combined effect of hyaluronic acid and curcumin. However, due to limited clinical trials and experiments on humans and animals, there is a substantial gap in research for the safety and efficacy of nanomaterials of curcumin-hyaluronic acid in the treatment of curcumin and hyaluronic acid targeted diseases and disorders. Main body of the abstract In this current review, we have first described various reported synthetic nanomaterials of curcumin-hyaluronic acid, then in the next section, we have described various fields, disorders, and diseases where these are being applied and in the final section of this review, we discussed the research gap, and future research directions needed to propose the fabricated nanocurcumin-hyaluronic acid biomaterials. Short conclusion There are substantial gaps in research for the safety and efficacy of nanomaterials of curcumin with hyaluronic acid due to limited available data of clinical trials and experiments of nanocurcumin-hyaluronic acid biomaterials on humans and animals. So, it entirely requires serious and committed efforts through the well-organized system of practical and clinical trials which provide results, data, and detections that lead to the formulation of the best drug from curcumin with hyaluronic acid for the treatment of curcumin and hyaluronic acid targeted diseases and disorders.


2021 ◽  
pp. 014556132110376
Author(s):  
Wei Wang ◽  
Xinxin Dong ◽  
Jianwen Qu ◽  
Yangyang Lin ◽  
Lei Liu

Objective: Microtia is a congenital auricular malformation with a hypoplastic external ear that ranges in severity from a slightly smaller auricle to complete the absence of the auricle. The present study was conducted to identify and analyze the characteristics of microtia-related articles published from 2006 to 2020 by using bibliometric analyses. Method: Microtia-related studies published from 2006 to 2020 were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database. Keywords, first author, citations, date of publication, and publication journal were extracted and quantitatively analyzed using Bibliographic Item Co-Occurrence Matrix Builder software and the Bibliometric ( https://bibliometric.com/app ). VOSviewer was used to visualize research and form a network map on keywords and citations. Results: A total of 1031 articles from 2006 to 2020 were included. The number of articles showed an overall trend of growth over time. The United States and China are the top 2 countries in terms of the number of microtia-related articles. From the analysis of keyword clustering, keywords could be mainly divided into 4 clusters in the field of microtia research: surgery, tissue engineering, epidemiology, and rehabilitation including hearing-related treatments, evaluation of effects, and quality of life after surgery. The top 10 most frequently cited papers from 2006 to 2020 were also extracted and analyzed. Conclusion: A bibliometric research of microtia-related articles from 2006 to 2020 was conducted. This study may be helpful to understand the current research status of microtia and find the research trends in this field, thus proposing future directions for microtia research.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Beltrán ◽  
Mireya S. García-Vázquez ◽  
Jenny Benois-Pineau ◽  
Luis Miguel Gutierrez-Robledo ◽  
Jean-François Dartigues

An opportune early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) would help to overcome symptoms and improve the quality of life for AD patients. Research studies have identified early manifestations of AD that occur years before the diagnosis. For instance, eye movements of people with AD in different tasks differ from eye movements of control subjects. In this review, we present a summary and evolution of research approaches that use eye tracking technology and computational analysis to measure and compare eye movements under different tasks and experiments. Furthermore, this review is targeted to the feasibility of pioneer work on developing computational tools and techniques to analyze eye movements under naturalistic scenarios. We describe the progress in technology that can enhance the analysis of eye movements everywhere while subjects perform their daily activities and give future research directions to develop tools to support early AD diagnosis through analysis of eye movements.


2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 484-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon B. Schmidt ◽  
Guihyun Park ◽  
Jessica Keeney ◽  
Sonia Ghumman

Work anecdotes and popular media programs such as Office Space, The Office, and Dilbert suggest that there are a number of workers in the United States who feel a sense of apathy toward their workplace and their job. This article develops these ideas theoretically and provides validity evidence for a scale of job apathy across two studies. Job apathy is defined as a type of selective apathy characterized by diminished motivation and affect toward one’s job. A scale of job apathy was developed and data from a sample of currently or recently employed college students supported two dimensions: apathetic action and apathetic thought. Job apathy was found to be empirically distinct from clinical apathy, negative affectivity, cynicism, and employee engagement. Job apathy was also found to have incremental validity in the prediction of personal initiative, withdrawal, and organizational deviance. Practical implications and future research directions for job apathy are discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-112
Author(s):  
Wu Aixia ◽  
Zhou Ying ◽  
Tommy Tanu Wijaya

With the deepening of China's educational reform, the evaluation of teaching quality has become an important aspect of teaching reform.And the evaluation of students'learning quality is an important part of teaching evaluation. Research on it will help to improve the teaching quality of our country and promote the overall improvement of students' morality, intelligence, physical fitness and beauty.Therefore, this study takes 108 literatures related to the study of learning quality evaluation in China as the research object, uses content analysis method, carries out statistical analysis on the annual number of literatures, Journal distribution, author status, paper influence, research content, etc., analyzes the current situation and existing problems of the study of learning quality evaluation in China, and puts forward the need for further deepening.On the basis of these questions, possible future research directions are proposed.


Assessment ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 107319112110386
Author(s):  
Violeta J. Rodriguez ◽  
Dominique L. La Barrie ◽  
Miriam C. Zegarac ◽  
Anne Shaffer

The limited inclusion of racial/ethnic minorities in the development and validation of parenting measures limits our understanding of whether parenting constructs are valid in racial and ethnic minorities. Tests of measurement invariance/equivalence (MI/E) of parenting measures can help evaluate the validity of parenting constructs among racial/ethnic minorities. This systematic review summarized studies on MI/E of parenting constructs by race/ethnicity and evaluated the strength of the evidence. A literature search was conducted using various databases and references to retrieve studies from the United States. Indeed, 10 studies were identified that tested for MI/E of eight parenting scales by race/ethnicity. Only one scale showed moderate evidence of MI/E, five showed weak evidence of MI/E, and two showed no evidence of MI/E. Most studies (80%) used factor analytic methods to test for MI/E, but only two studies (20%) examined all levels of invariance. These findings show that differences exist in how racial/ethnic minorities perceive parenting constructs. Further research is needed to develop more inclusive parenting measures, to protect against the ways in which biased measures may pathologize or misrepresent parenting practices among racial/ethnic minorities.


2016 ◽  
pp. 889-907
Author(s):  
Sandul Yasobant

Health promotion and the maintenance of the quality of life are realized recently. Advancement in technologies offer new possibilities for both the promotion of positive health behaviors that were unimaginable even a decade ago. Though promoting physical activity has been proven an important component of health promotion by many researchers, still a lot of efforts on how to improve physical activity being provided by group of researchers. Technology such as pedometers, accelerometers, and heart rate monitors have been used to promote physical activity for years. Newer technologies such as global positioning system (GPS), geographic information systems (GIS), interactive video games, and persuasive technology, Internet-based physical activity interventions have been used recently to promote and change exercise behavior. This chapter seeks to provide a complete insight of technologies used to changing health behaviors especially physical health promotion and will take a forward to analyses all the issues while using these technologies and future research directions.


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