Current Epidemiology Reports最新文献

Purpose of review: To summarize recent research on the alcohol retail environment (sales, policies, availability) and interpersonal violence (assault, intimate partner violence, sexual assault), including methods utilized, theoretical frameworks employed, and associations by types of alcohol environmental exposure and violence.

Recent findings: Studies continue to demonstrate that reducing alcohol availability directly and indirectly lowers rates of interpersonal violence. Many of the 30 studies used state-of-the-art analytic methods and study designs. Few studies examined heterogeneity by minoritized identities or between alcohol environments and violence by other contextual characteristics. There was a dearth of theoretical frameworks and mechanisms explicated.

Summary: To increase impacts of alcohol control policies, specific, practical advice is needed about where, when, and for whom changes will reap the biggest effects. Methodological next steps include analyzing natural experiments, incorporating legal epidemiology, designing studies to examine heterogeneities, developing spatiotemporal simulations, and investigating how embodiment of historic injustices contributes to violence.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40471-022-00315-7.

Purpose of review: Survival analyses are common and essential in medical research. Most readers are familiar with Kaplan-Meier curves and Cox models; however, very few are familiar with multistate models. Although multistate models were introduced in 1965, they only recently receive more attention in the medical research community. The current review introduces common terminologies and quantities that can be estimated from multistate models. Examples from published literature are used to illustrate the utility of multistate models.

Recent findings: A figure of states and transitions is a useful depiction of a multistate model. Clinically meaningful quantities that can be estimated from a multistate model include the probability in a state at a given time, the average time in a state, and the expected number of visits to a state; all of which describe the absolute risks of an event. Relative risk can also be estimated using multistate hazard models.

Summary: Multistate models provide a more general and flexible framework that extends beyond the Kaplan-Meier estimator and Cox models. Multistate models allow simultaneous analyses of multiple disease pathways to provide insights into the natural history of complex diseases. We strongly encourage the use of multistate models when analyzing time-to-event data.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40471-022-00291-y.

Purpose of review: Community violence is a serious public health problem, and generational investments are being made to address it. Agent-based models (ABMs) are computational tools that can help to optimize allocation of those investments, analogous to how computer simulation models, broadly, have informed decision making in other fields, such as infectious disease control. In this review, we describe ABMs, explain their potential role in community violence research, discuss recent studies that have applied ABMs to community violence, and point to opportunities for further progress.

Recent findings: We identified three recent studies that applied ABMs to community violence research, which points to the paucity of this line of work. Each of these works leverages a major advantage of ABMs-their ability to study the natural evolution of a process governed by the actions of autonomous agents, and how that evolution changes under counterfactual conditions, such as different intervention strategies (e.g., violence interruption), and policy changes (e.g., alcohol outlet licensing policies).

Summary: ABMs continue to be an underutilized tool for the study of community violence. Their increased use could add important information to help stakeholders decide between competing intervention strategies in terms of their costs and the overall resulting changes in violence rates. In addition, ABMs have value in identifying unintended changes/diffusions resulting from interventions. Regardless of the application, ABMs can only be impactful if stakeholders believe and use the information, pointing to the importance of engaging policy makers and other stakeholders in the model formulation process when possible.

Purpose of review: Applying text mining to suicide research holds a great deal of promise. In this manuscript, literature from 2019 to 2021 is critically reviewed for text mining projects that use electronic health records, social media data, and death records.

Recent findings: Text mining has helped identify risk factors for suicide in general and specific populations (e.g., older adults), has been combined with structured variables in EHRs to predict suicide risk, and has been used to track trends in social media suicidal discourse following population level events (e.g., COVID-19, celebrity suicides).

Summary: Future research should utilize text mining along with data linkage methods to capture more complete information on risk factors and outcomes across data sources (e.g., combining death records and EHRs), evaluate effectiveness of NLP-based intervention programs that use suicide risk prediction, establish standards for reporting accuracy of text mining programs to enable comparison across studies, and incorporate implementation science to understand feasibility, acceptability, and technical considerations.

Purpose of review: The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the importance of considering social determinants of health, including factors such as structural racism. This review discusses some of the evidence that triangulates on this issue, including data from hate crime statistics, social media analysis, and survey-based research. It also examines the data needs for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (NHPI) communities.

Recent findings: The available data provides evidence that the pandemic has contributed to an increase in anti-Asian sentiment and discriminatory incidents. Many reports have surfaced showing a surge in anti-Chinese discrimination, which has "spilled over" into other Asian communities. Research is beginning to emerge to show that such discrimination may also impact health issues such as psychological distress. Given prior research, we would expect many more studies to emerge in the future. Also, the pandemic has illustrated the major gaps in data available to disentangle the health and social concerns facing Asian Americans and NHPI communities. Significant issues include the lack of systematic reporting of data for these communities both across states, and even among agencies within a state; erroneous aggregation of Asians with NHPIs; and censoring of data. These gaps and issues contribute to bias that obscures objective data and amplifies health inequalities.

Summary: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a negative impact on the well-being of Asian American and NHPI communities. It is critical to provide disaggregated data, not only so that we can have accurate reporting, but also to ensure data and health equity.

Purpose of review: This review aims to assess the contemporary community-based participatory research (CBPR) literature seeking to improve the cardiovascular health of racial and ethnic minority groups in the USA with a higher burden of cardiovascular risk factors and social determinants of health. It summarizes recent CBPR studies based on the American Heart Association Life's Simple 7 (LS7) framework, delineating seven modifiable health behaviors and clinical factors to promote cardiovascular health.

Recent findings: Although limited in quantity, studies demonstrated preliminary effectiveness in improving individual and a composite of LS7 indicators by employing strategies centered around fortifying social networks, integrating group activities, leveraging technology, incorporating faith-based and spiritual practices, and implementing changes to the built environment.

Summary: Future directions for investigators engaged in CBPR include building on the existing body of evidence through more comprehensive studies, scaling effective interventions, and translating CBPR findings to influence health policy to better address health disparities.

Purpose of review: Racial and socioeconomic inequities in respiratory pandemics have been consistently documented, but little official guidance exists on effective action to prevent these. We systematically reviewed quantitative evaluations of (real or simulated) interventions targeting racial and socioeconomic inequities in respiratory pandemic outcomes.

Recent findings: Our systematic search returned 10,208 records, of which 5 met inclusion criteria, including observational (n = 1), randomized trial (n = 1), and simulation (n = 3) studies. Interventions studied included vaccination parity, antiviral distribution, school closure, disinfection, personal protective equipment, and paid sick leave, with a focus on Black (n = 3) and/or Latinx (n = 4) or low-SES (n = 2) communities. Results are suggestive that these interventions might be effective at reducing racial and/or SES disparities in pandemics.

Summary: There is a dearth of research on strategies to reduce pandemic disparities. We provide theory-driven, concrete suggestions for incorporating equity into intervention research for pandemic preparedness, including a focus on social and economic policies.

Purpose of review: Firearm policies have the potential to alleviate the public health burden of firearm violence, yet it is unclear which policies are effective. The current review aims to summarize studies that use synthetic control methods to overcome previous methodological limitations when examining the impacts of firearm policies.

Recent findings: Evidence from studies using synthetic control methods find compelling evidence that purchasing licensing laws for all individuals (e.g., permit-to-purchase) have a preventive effect on firearm deaths. Otherwise, the effects of other firearm policies targeting firearm availability, ownership, sales, and use varied across studies and contexts.

Summary: Synthetic control evaluations find heterogenous effects of firearm policies, suggesting that previous inconsistent findings might reflect their varying impacts across regions rather than methodological limitations alone. Future research should aim to exploit the complementary biases of synthetic control methods to triangulate evidence across evaluation approaches and understand why firearm policies have differential impacts.

Purpose of reviews: The purpose of this review was to summarize the current state of the literature on the use of "mHealth" (the use of mobile devices for health promotion) for injury prevention and control.

Recent findings: mHealth is being used to measure, predict, and prevent the full spectrum of injuries. However, most literature remains preliminary or in a pilot stage. Use of best-of-class design principles (e.g., user-centered design, theory-based development) is uncommon, and wide-scale dissemination of effective monitoring or intervention tools is rare.

Summary: mHealth for injury prevention holds promise, but further work is needed across the full spectrum of development and translation.

Purposeof review: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a complex traumatic experience that often co-occurs, or is causally linked, with other forms of structural violence and oppression. However, few IPV interventions integrate this social-ecological perspective. We examine trauma- and violence-informed care (TVIC) in the context of existing IPV interventions as an explicitly equity-oriented approach to IPV prevention and response.

Recent findings: Systematic reviews of IPV interventions along the public health prevention spectrum show mixed findings, with those with a theoretically grounded, structural approach that integrates a trauma lens more likely to show benefit.

Summary: TVIC, embedded in survivor-centered protocols with an explicit theory of change, is emerging as an equity-promoting approach underpinning IPV intervention. Explicit attention to structural violence and the complexity of IPV, systems and sites of intervention, and survivors' diverse and intersectional lived experiences has significant potential to transform policy and practice.