HEALTH SERVICES/OUTCOMES RESEARCH
POSITIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES: The Department of Pharmaceutical Systems and Policy at the West Virginia University (WVU School of Pharmacy seeks applications for an Assistant Professor to join our health services/outcomes research team. This 12-month tenure track position is available immediately. Primary responsibilities include graduate and professional program teaching, graduate student mentoring, and developing an independently funded research program in health services and outcomes research. Salary and start-up packages are competitive.
QUALIFICATIONS: Ph.D. or equivalent degree with a strong research focus in patient-reported outcomes (e.g., Health Related Quality of Life, patient satisfaction , or chronic disease epidemiology. Candidates should have a promise for excellence in research and teaching in relevant areas, as well as peer-reviewed publications. Experience and participation in funded research is an advantage and excellent communication skills are important. Candidates should interact effectively with collaborators from diverse disciplines and be eligible for appointment to the graduate faculty in order to teach and mentor graduate students engaged in health services and outcomes research.
APPLICATION: Interested persons should submit an application consisting of a letter of interest, curriculum vitae, and contact information for three professional references to: Usha Sambamoorthi, Ph.D., West Virginia University School of Pharmacy, PO Box 9510, Morgantown, WV 26506 or by e-mail to usambamoorthi@hsc.wvu.edu with a copy to acframe@hsc.wvu.edu. Applications will be considered as they are received and will be accepted until position is filled.
SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY: The School of Pharmacy has a nationally recognized Ph.D. graduate program in health outcomes research with 15 Ph.D. students, the majority of whom are supported by external research funding. It offers exciting opportunities through the Rational Drug Therapy Program which is supported by West Virginia state agencies, the AHRQ funded West Virginia Collaborative Health Outcomes Research of Therapies and Services (CoHORTS center, and the newly established Wigner Institute for Advanced Pharmacy Practice Education and Research. Established partnerships with the state Medicaid program and the state health insurance program, managed care organizations, several pharmaceutical companies, and the nearby National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (N.I.O.S.H. and Mylan Pharmaceuticals offer potential opportunities for collaborative research. In addition, a newly launched School of Public Health and research faculty and graduate programs in business, communication, education, psychology, public administration, and sociology provide opportunities for multidisciplinary collaboration and research.
The School of Pharmacy is situated within a large state-assisted academic health sciences center which includes a 460-bed teaching hospital, a psychiatric hospital, rehabilitation hospital, and regional cancer center. West Virginia University (a Doctoral Research-Intensive University is the state's land-grant university with an enrollment of 29,000 students. WVU is located in Morgantown, a scenic rural area that has been featured in numerous publications for its high quality of life, cultural amenities, outdoor recreation, and is within easy driving distance to Pittsburgh, PA, and Washington, DC.
West Virginia University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. The WVU Health Sciences Center is a smoke free campus. West Virginia University is the recipient of an NSF ADVANCE award for gender equity.
Apply Here
It's hard to know these days which way the proverbial worm is turning when it comes to shifts in drug policy. Election years tend to do that. Despite an historical turn of events in Central America which saw Presidents of drug trafficking nations come together to call for world wide decriminalization of drugs, in an effort to end the violence and corruption of the drug trade, the US continues to demur, absurdly claiming that the "War on Drugs" has been a success. Even stranger is Canada's recent announcement that they plan to follow the US model of a "tough on crime" approach to drug policy, which threatens to swell their correctional system in the same ways as in the US. Still, good news abounds with recent studies showing that LSD can cure alcoholism, psychedelics can cure PTSD, and cannabis smoking is not nearly as harmful as the prohibition governments claim. ~ CS
Google+ Presents:
It's Time To End The War On Drugs
To liberalise or prohibit, that is the question. And to answer it the masters of live debate have joined forces with the masters of web technology to create a never-seen-before combination of Oxford debating and Silicon Valley prowess.
Prohibitionists argue that legalising anything increases its consumption. The world has enough of a problem with legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, so why add to the problem by legalising cannabis, cocaine and heroin?
The liberalisers say prohibition doesn’t work. By declaring certain drugs illegal we haven’t reduced consumption or solved any problem. Instead we’ve created an epidemic of crime, illness, failed states and money laundering.
Julian Assange and Richard Branson; Russell Brand and Misha Glenny; Geoffrey Robertson and Eliot Spitzer. Experts, orators and celebrities who’ve made this their cause – come and see them lock horns in a new Intelligence?/Google+ debate format. Some of our speakers will be on stage in London, others beamed in from Mexico City or Sao Paulo or New Orleans, all thanks to the “Hangout” tool on Google+.
The web will have its say, and so can you at the event in London. Be part of the buzz of the audience, be part of an event beamed across the web to millions. Come and witness the future of the global mind-clash at the first of our Versus debates, live at Kings Place
Source:
Intelligence 2 from Google +
North America
America's plague of incarceration
The message is (or should be deeply disturbing. Shouldn't the USA be ashamed at having the world's largest prison system and highest incarceration rate (754 per 100 000 people ? The richest country in the world has so many of its citizens in prison that it can't afford to house them with even basic minimum medical care (more than half of all prisoners have mental health or drug problems . Prison overcrowding itself has become so terrible in California, that in May, 2011, the US Supreme Court affirmed a lower court order that California release some 46 000 prisoners because of the inhuman conditions under which they were being held. In the Court's words, “A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in a civilised society.”
Source:
"
A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America,"
The Lancet.
International Women's Day: U.S. Must Address Impact of Mass Incarceration on Women.
More women are ending up behind bars than ever. Between 1980 and 1989, the number of women in U.S. prisons tripled. And the number of women in prison has continued to rise since. In the last 10 years, the number of women under jurisdiction of state or federal authorities
increased 21 percent to almost 113,000. During the same time period, the increase in the number of men in prison was 6 percentage points lower, at about 15 percent. The increase in women in the federal population was even larger- over 41 percent from 2000 to 2010.
Most women are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses. Over one-fourth are in prison for a drug offense, while 29.6 percent were convicted of a property crime. Addiction plays a large part in a number of women's property crimes, and a lack of available or appropriate treatment only serves to drive their contact with the justice system.
Source:
Justice Policy Institute
From Cell to Screen: The Story of Mumia Abu-Jamal -- Part I
Stephen Vittoria is that rare commodity in Hollywood today: a filmmaker with a conscience. To be more precise, a filmmaker with a strong political conscience. After making two feature films,>Black and White& Hollywood Boulevard (1996 , as well as three feature documentaries:Save Your Life -- The Life and Holistic Times of Dr. Richard Schulze (1998 ,;Keeper of the Flame (2005 and the award-winning art house hit One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern (2005 , a portrait of the South Dakota senator who tried to unseat Richard Nixon from the White House in 1972.
For his latest exploration into America's socio-political landscape, Vittoria joins forces with radio producer Noelle Hanrahan to bring Long Distance Revolutionary, the story of Mumia Abu-Jamal, to the screen. Born Wesley Cook in Philadelphia, Abu-Jamal made his name as a tireless writer and journalist during the racially-charged 1970s that often portrayed the City of Brotherly Love as anything but. With his intense coverage of the MOVE organization, a black empowerment group whose ongoing battle with the police and city hall came to a fiery end in 1985, Abu-Jamal become a constant thorn in the side of the city's powerful establishment. Things came to a sudden head for Abu-Jamal himself on the evening of December 9, 1981 when he was accused of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. He received a death sentence the following year, and has been on Pennsylvania's death row until early this year, when his death sentence was commuted to a life sentence in December, 2011.
Abu-Jamal's case remains one of the most controversial and heatedly debated in American legal history, with participants on both sides either protesting his innocence in the murder of Officer Daniel Faulkner or his absolute guilt with equal passion and more often, great vehemence.
Source:
Huffington Post
What’s In a Name? A Lot, When the Name is “Felon”
At a
recent conference of journalists at John Jay College, I raised an issue I have about language in the media: the frequent use of the word “felon” to describe a person who has been convicted of a crime.
“Felon” is an ugly label that confirms the debased status that accompanies conviction. It identifies a person as belonging to a class outside many protections of the law, someone who can be freely discriminated against, someone who exists at the margins of society.
In short, a “felon” is a legal outlaw and social outcast.
Source:
The Crime Report
Addiction: Medical Disease or Moral Defect?
Scientific theories that addiction hijacks the brain have just increased the stigma that they were meant to stop. At least in the moralistic bad old days, addicts were still viewed as having free will. Here's an alternative to both of these no-win approaches.
Source:
The Fix
Scientists Explore Hallucinogen Treatments for PTSD, Sex Abuse Victims
Mind-altering compounds, such as LSD and psilocybin, stirred controversy in the 1960s. As the counter-culture’s psychedelic drugs of choice, the widespread use - and abuse - of hallucinogens prompted tougher anti-drug laws.
The Daily Mail today put a dampener on the approaching Mothers’ Day by telling us that it is our mum’s fault if we are “losing the fight against the flab”. The newspaper said that a new study has shown that our mother’s lifestyle may leave us “programmed to be fat”.
Thankfully for our relationships with our mums, the research does not actually say this. The study in question aimed to investigate whether DNA modifications in early life are linked to our size and body composition in later childhood. The modification in question does not change the underlying genetic code but it does decreases the amount of proteins the body makes using the instructions in our genes.
After stringent testing the researchers found only one significant link, between the modification of one gene and height rather than weight. None of the links between DNA modification and body mass index (BMI stood up to stringent testing, and even the study’s authors note that the study cannot prove that the DNA modification at birth definitely directly affected height. For the time being, it is probably best to work on improving our health and wellbeing by addressing the lifestyle factors that we can change.
Where did the story come from?
The study was carried out by researchers from Newcastle University and other research centres in the UK. It was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Special Trustees of Newcastle Hospitals, the UK Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the University of Bristol, Asthma UK, the medical nutrition firm Nutricia UK, and the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk.
The study was published in the peer-reviewed open access scientific journal PLoS One.
The story was covered by articles from the BBC News and the Daily Mail, which both featured headlines focusing on how factors in the womb might influence obesity. However, the study found only one outcome to be statistically significant – a link with height.
The BBC did state that only one link stood up to rigorous testing but did not say this was a link with height rather than BMI or body fat levels.
The study did not look at obesity itself, rather it looked at BMI and fat mass. It did not classify the children into weight categories such as ‘overweight’ or ‘obese’ in its analyses, nor did it look at ability to lose weight, as suggested by the Daily Mail’s headline about ‘losing the fight against the flab’.
Both sources mention factors that might influence these DNA modifications in the womb, such as diet, exercise, smoking or drinking alcohol. However, it is important to note that the study did not look at why the DNA modifications might have occurred, so they cannot be attributed to these or any other factors based on this study.
What kind of research was this?
The body uses DNA as the blueprint for producing a range of important proteins. Sections of DNA produce individual proteins are known as genes.
In this study, researchers looked at a type of DNA modification called ‘methylation’, where a chemical compound called a methyl group becomes attached to the outside edge of a DNA strand. This process does not change the underlying genetic code, but it does reduce the amount of protein the body produces using nearby genes. It is one of the ways the body can control how much of each protein is produced.
The study looked at whether the levels of DNA methylation shortly after birth had any relationship to body size later in childhood. To examine the issue it analysed information collected in two cohort studies: the Preterm Birth Growth Study (PBGS , and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC . The level of methylation after birth was calculated using analyses of umbilical cord blood.
What did the research involve?
The researchers initially wanted to identify which genes might be related to BMI composition in childhood. To do this they looked at a group of 24 children in the PBGS study whose BMIs had been measured when they were aged between 11 and 13 years (average 12.35 years . They then looked at how active various genes were in the children with the highest BMIs and those with the lowest BMIs. They did this to identify genes that could be affecting BMI, to target these genes for investigation in the next phase of the study.
A selection of the genes identified through this first phase of the study were then assessed in a second phase of the study, to see whether these differences in gene activity in later childhood and changes in BMI might be related to the level of DNA methylation that was in place from the time of birth. The genes selected for this second phase were selected because they could be assessed with the technology the lab had available.
In this second part of the study the researchers looked at the levels of DNA methylation in blood collected from the umbilical cord of 178 babies taking part in the ALSPAC study. These babies had been followed up through childhood, and had data on their body composition, including BMI, fat mass, lean mass, and height at about age nine (average age 9.8 years . Methylation was measured in up to three places within the selected genes. The researchers analysed whether the level of methylation of these genes at birth was related to body composition at age nine.
What were the basic results?
In the first part of their study, looking at children aged about 12 years, the researchers found that 514 genes had different levels of activity in those with higher BMIs and lower BMIs. From the genes they identified they selected 29 of these genes to look at in the second part of their study.
They found that four of these 29 genes were not methylated in the 178 cord blood samples tested, so they did not study these genes any further. The methylation levels of nine of the remaining genes were each related to at least one measure of body composition at age nine.
However, once the researchers took into account the number of statistical tests they had performed, the methylation level of only one gene was found to have a statistically significant association with a body composition measure. The gene in question was called ALPL, and higher levels of methylation of this gene in umbilical cord blood at birth were associated with being shorter at age nine. Each 1% increase in DNA methylation of ALPL was linked with a 0.15% decrease in height at age nine.
How did the researchers interpret the results?
The researchers conclude that the patterns of DNA methylation in cord blood showed some association with body size and composition in childhood. However, they note that their study is not able to say whether the changes in DNA methylation seen actually cause the differences in body size and composition in childhood, and further research is needed to investigate this.
Conclusion
In recent years there has been lots of scientific and public interest in how events early in the womb may relate to our health in later life. In this vein, the national press have picked up on this study, which investigated whether DNA modifications during early life might impact on later body size and composition in childhood.
While these press narratives have given the impression that this study has linked particular environmental exposures in the womb such as maternal smoking and drinking can lead to DNA modifications and later obesity, this is not the case:
- The news sources mention factors that might influence these DNA modifications in the womb, such as the mother’s diet, exercise, smoking, or drinking alcohol. However, it is important to note that the study did not look at how or why the DNA modifications might have occurred, so they cannot be attributed to these or any other factors based on this study.
- The study did not look at obesity, rather it looked at BMI and fat mass. It did not classify the children into weight categories such as ‘overweight’ or ‘obese’ in its analyses. It also did not look at whether participants had difficulty losing weight, as suggested by the Daily Mail’s headline about why some people may be ‘losing the fight against the flab’.
- The study was relatively small, and only looked at methylation of a small number of genes. Only one association between methylation of one gene at birth and height remained statistically significant after stringent testing. However, the authors themselves note that their study cannot prove that the DNA methylation pattern at birth caused the differences in height seen.
- None of the links between DNA methylation at birth and BMI or fat mass remained statistically significant in stringent tests. This means that they cannot be said to be real associations, as they may therefore have just occurred by chance.
If the results of the current study can be confirmed in other studies, researchers will need to try and work out if the link is causal. Even if the link is confirmed and found to be causal (and it is a big IF , it is not clear what if anything could be done to alter this.
For the time being, we are probably best working on improving our health by addressing the factors that we know we can change, rather than blaming our Mums for making us ‘programmed to be fat while in the womb’. Not a nice sentiment in the run-up to Mother’s day.
Analysis by Bazian
Links To The Headlines
Study links womb environment to childhood obesity. BBC News, March 15 2012
Losing the fight against the flab? It's your mum's fault! Research shows we are programmed to be fat while in the womb. Daily Mail, March 15 2012
Links To Science
Relton CL, Groom A, St. Pourcain B et al. DNA Methylation Patterns in Cord Blood DNA and Body Size in Childhood. PLoS ONE, 2012 7(3 : e31821
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