Risk factors relate to the variability of health outcomes as well as the mean: a GAMLSS tutorial

Background: Risk factors or interventions may affect the variability as well as the mean of health outcomes. Understanding this can aid aetiological understanding and public health translation, in that interventions which shift the outcome mean and reduce variability are typically preferable to those which affect only the mean. However, most commonly used statistical tools do not test for differences in variability. Tools that do have few epidemiological applications to date, and fewer applications still have attempted to explain their resulting findings. We thus provide a tutorial for investigating this using GAMLSS (Generalised Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape). Methods: The 1970 British birth cohort study was used, with body mass index (BMI; N=6,007) and mental wellbeing (Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale; N=7,104) measured in midlife (42-46 years) as outcomes. We used GAMLSS to investigate how multiple risk factors (sex, childhood social class and midlife physical inactivity) related to differences in health outcome mean and variability. Results: Risk factors were related to sizable differences in outcome variability-for example males had marginally higher mean BMI yet 28% lower variability; lower social class and physical inactivity were each associated with higher mean and higher variability (6.1% and 13.5% higher variability, respectively). For mental wellbeing, gender was not associated with the mean while males had lower variability (-3.9%); lower social class and physical inactivity were each associated with lower mean yet higher variability (7.2% and 10.9% higher variability, respectively). Conclusions: The results highlight how GAMLSS can be used to investigate how risk factors or interventions may influence the variability in health outcomes. This underutilised approach to the analysis of continuously distributed outcomes may have broader utility in epidemiologic, medical, and psychological sciences. A tutorial and replication syntax is provided online to facilitate this (https://osf.io/5tvz6/). Funding: DB is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/M001660/1), The Academy of Medical Sciences / Wellcome Trust ('Springboard Health of the Public in 2040' award: HOP001/1025); DB and LW are supported by the Medical Research Council (MR/V002147/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

The Decision-Making Constraints and Processes of Grant Peer Review, and Their Effects on the Review Outcome

When distributing grants, research councils use peer expertise as a guarantee for supporting the best projects. However, there are no clear norms for assessments, and there may be a large variation in what criteria reviewers emphasize – and how they are emphasized. The determinants of peer review may therefore be accidental, in the sense that who reviews what research and how reviews are organized may determine outcomes. This chapter deals with how the review process affects the outcome of grant review. It is a reprint of a study of the multitude of review procedures practiced in The Research Council of Norway (RCN) in the 1990s. While it is outdated as an empirical study of the RCN, it provides some general insights into the dynamics of grant review panels and the effects of different ways of organising the decision-making in the panels. Notably, it is still one of the few in-depth studies of grant review processes based on direct observation of panel meetings and full access to applications and review documents. A central finding is that rating scales and budget restrictions are more important than review guidelines for the kind of criteria applied by the reviewers. The decision-making methods applied by the review panels when ranking proposals are found to have substantial effects on the outcome. Some ranking methods tend to support uncontroversial and safe projects, whereas other methods give better chances for scholarly pluralism and controversial research.

Menjadikan Dewan Riset Daerah DKI Jakarta Sebagai Lembaga Intermediasi dan Alih Teknologi

Dewan Riset Daerah DKI Jakarta (DRD) dibentuk untuk memberdayakan lembaga penelitian dan pengembangan serta IPTEK pengembangan kegiatan penelitian dan pengembangan. Pelaksanaan tugas dan fungsi DRD tidak disertai peran intermediasi maupun alih teknologi, yang relatif vital, dimana didalamnya ada fungsi audit dan kliring kelayakan teknologi yang dihasilkan atau akan diadopsi melalui kegiatan penilaian tingkat kesiapterapan teknologi. Patut dipertimbangkan untuk mengubah struktur maupun kelembagaan, sehingga pemanfaatan teknologi untuk meningkatkan pelayanan maupun kesejahteraan masyarakat Provinsi DKI Jakarta dapat berjalan dengan baik. The DKI Jakarta Regional Research Council (DRD) was formed to empower research and development institutions as well as science and technology for the development of research and development activities. The implementation of DRD duties and functions is not accompanied by the role of intermediation or technology transfer, which is relatively vital, in which there is an audit function and clearing of the feasibility of the technology produced or to be adopted through technology readiness level assessment activities. It is worth considering changing the structure and institutions, so that the use of technology to improve services and the welfare of the people of DKI Jakarta Province can run well.

History of Emotions: Where Are We?

As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the CHE, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion (initially focusing on Europe 1100–1800 and with the late Professor Philippa Maddern as its founding Director) and the fifth anniversary of the launch of the journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society (founding Editors: Katie Barclay, Andrew Lynch, Giovanni Tarantino), it is only pertinent that we look back and assess our efforts by hearing from some prominent emotions scholars who contributed in different ways and capacities to this pathbreaking intellectual journey.

SNSF Datastory - Central role in the evaluation procedures: The evaluation panels and their members

The National Research Council of the SNSF decides whether an application is funded or not. The 89 evaluation panels prepare its decisions. Every year, they evaluate several thousand applications.

ImproveCog, a cognitive stimulation program for people with mild cognitive impairment and dementia: First stage of development

Cognitive stimulation seems to be an important tool to slow the rate of cognitive decline due to dementia. This study describes the development of a cognitive stimulation program (ImproveCog) for people with Mild Cognitive Impairment, Alzheimer’s Disease, and behavioral variant Frontotemporal Dementia, within the Medical Research Council framework. Stage 1 established the theoretical and evidence basis of the program through a review of the existing cognitive stimulation programs as well as cognitive exercises and their efficacy (Pre-Clinical Phase) and includes qualitative testing through five focus group with eighteen health professionals and twelve individual interviews with people with cognitive impairment (Phase I - Modeling). An initial version of the program, which consisted of twelve 90-min weekly sessions and included a manual with cognitive stimulation exercises to be performed at home, was ready to be implemented in a pilot study to create a final version of ImproveCog.

First person – Alessandra da Silva Dantas

ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Alessandra da Silva Dantas is first author on ‘ Crosstalk between the calcineurin and cell wall integrity pathways prevents chitin overexpression in Candida albicans’, published in JCS. Alessandra is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Neil Gow at the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Mycology at the University of Exeter, UK, and is interested in the mechanisms controlling cell division and death in human fungal pathogens.

Mobility Restrictions and Transnational Families: How COVID-19 Pandemic May Affect Families and Caring for Children?

In this article, we analyse how global mobility restrictions related to COVID-19 may affect Lithuanian transnational families and transnational practices of parenting. The article draws on the data from the quota-based survey, implemented while carrying out the research project ‘Global Migration and Lithuanian Family: Family Practices, Circulation of Care and Return Strategies’ (No. S-MIP-17-117), funded by the Lithuanian Research Council, to analyse the transnational care practices that require the mobility of family members. The challenges created by the pandemic are discussed while analysing the data from the case studies of transnational families. The article reveals that the free mobility of family members in the global world is an important part of the transnational care practices, ensuring continuity of family relations and childcare, regardless of the residence of the family members. The anti-mobility regimes create challenges to family unity, intergenerational relations and give ground to the emergence of new stigmas.