American journal of preventive medicine
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An overall understanding of environmental factors that affect weight-related behaviors and outcomes in African American adults is limited. This article presents a summarization of the literature on the built environment and its association with physical activity, diet, and obesity among African Americans. ⋯ With relatively few studies in the literature focused on African Americans, more research is needed to draw conclusions on features of the built environment that are associated with physical activity, diet, and obesity.
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The most severe consequences of climate change will accrue to the poorest people in the poorest countries, despite their own negligible contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. In recent years, global health efforts in those same countries have grown dramatically. ⋯ We propose a collaborative learning initiative involving four areas: (1) increased awareness among current global health practitioners of climate change and its potential impacts for the most disadvantaged, (2) strengthening of the evidence base, (3) incorporation now of climate change-mitigation and -adaptation concerns into design of ongoing global health programs, and (4) alignment of current global health program targets and methods with larger frameworks for climate change and sustainable development. The great vulnerability to climate change of populations reached by current global health efforts should prompt all concerned with global health to take a leading role in advocating for climate change mitigation in their own countries.
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Review Meta Analysis
Preventing childhood falls at home: meta-analysis and meta-regression.
Childhood falls are an important global public health problem, but evidence on their prevention has not been quantitatively synthesized. Despite social inequalities in childhood injury rates, there is a lack of evidence examining the effect of fall-prevention practices by social group. ⋯ Home-safety education and the provision of safety equipment improved some fall-prevention practices, but the impact on fall-injury rates is unclear. There was some evidence that the effect of home-safety interventions varied by social group.
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Review
The ecology of team science: understanding contextual influences on transdisciplinary collaboration.
Increased public and private investments in large-scale team science initiatives over the past two decades have underscored the need to better understand how contextual factors influence the effectiveness of transdisciplinary scientific collaboration. Toward that goal, the findings from four distinct areas of research on team performance and collaboration are reviewed: (1) social psychological and management research on the effectiveness of teams in organizational and institutional settings; (2) studies of cyber-infrastructures (i.e., computer-based infrastructures) designed to support transdisciplinary collaboration across remote research sites; (3) investigations of community-based coalitions for health promotion; and (4) studies focusing directly on the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of scientific collaboration within transdisciplinary research centers and training programs. The empirical literature within these four domains reveals several contextual circumstances that either facilitate or hinder team performance and collaboration. A typology of contextual influences on transdisciplinary collaboration is proposed as a basis for deriving practical guidelines for designing, managing, and evaluating successful team science initiatives.
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To summarize the U.S. Public Health Service guideline Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence: 2008 Update, which provides recommendations for clinical interventions and system changes to promote the treatment of tobacco dependence. ⋯ This evidence-based, updated guideline provides specific recommendations regarding brief and intensive tobacco-cessation interventions as well as system-level changes designed to promote the assessment and treatment of tobacco use. Brief clinical approaches for patients willing and unwilling to quit are described.