Variations in the timing of first sexual experiences among populations with physical disabilities in the United States

Background

Timing of first sex has important implications for later sexual health, but little research has considered this in populations with physical disabilities.

Rethinking “Elective” Procedures for Women's Reproduction during Covid-19

Common hospital and surgical center responses to the Covid-19 pandemic included curtailing “elective” procedures, which are typically determined based on implications for physical health and survival. However, in the focus solely on physical health and survival, procedures whose main benefits advance components of well-being beyond health, including self-determination, personal security, economic stability, equal respect, and creation of meaningful social relationships, have been disproportionately deprioritized. We describe how female reproduction-related procedures, including abortion, surgical sterilization, reversible contraception devices and in vitro fertilization, have been broadly categorized as “elective,” a designation that fails to capture the value of these procedures or their impact on women's overall well-being. We argue that corresponding restrictions and delays of these procedures are problematically reflective of underlying structural views that marginalize women's rights and interests and therefore threaten to propagate gender injustice during the pandemic and beyond. Finally, we propose a framework for triaging reproduction-related procedures during Covid-19 that is more individualized, accounts for their significance for comprehensive well-being, and can be used to inform resumption of operations as well as subsequent restriction phases.     

The Women's Health Initiative: A Landmark Resource for Skeletal Research Since 1992

The Women's Health Initiative (WHI) is a large longitudinal study designed to investigate strategies for the prevention and control of common chronic diseases in postmenopausal women, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporotic fractures. The WHI consisted of three overlapping clinical trials of hormone therapy, diet modification to reduce total dietary fat, and calcium/vitamin D supplementation. Women who were ineligible for the hormone therapy or diet modification trials or not interested were invited to participate in the observational study. Women were recruited into WHI from 1993 to 1998 at 40 US clinical centers. WHI enrolled 26,046 underrepresented minority women and 135,762 white women. Women could participate in each trial if eligible. The final enrollment included 27,347 women in the hormone trial; 48,835 women in the diet modification trial; 36,282 women in the calcium/vitamin D trial, and 93,676 in the observational study. After the main study ended in 2005, women were invited to continue follow-up for exposures and outcomes through two extensions to 2020. Proposals were recently submitted to continue follow-up through 2027. Information was collected on an extensive number of risk factors for fractures at baseline and over the follow-up, including fall and fracture history, weight patterns, comorbidities, diet, reproductive history, medications, anthropometry, and biomarkers. Bone mineral density was measured at three WHI clinical centers (n = 11,020) chosen to maximize race/ethnic diversity. WHI encourages outside investigators to make use of the publicly available WHI data and to access the biobank of specimens ( www.whi.org ). © 2020 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.     

Novel genetic variants in KIF16B and NEDD4L in the endosome-related genes are associated with nonsmall cell lung cancer survival

The endosome is a membrane-bound organ inside most eukaryotic cells, playing an important role in adaptive immunity by delivering endocytosed antigens to both MHC class I and II pathways. Here, by analyzing genotyping data from two published genome-wide association studies (GWASs), we evaluated associations between genetic variants in the endosome-related gene-set and survival of patients with nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The discovery included 44,112 (3,478 genotyped and 40,634 imputed) single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 220 genes in a singlelocus analysis for their associations with survival of 1,185 NSCLC patients from the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial. After validation of the 821 survival-associated significant SNPs in additional 984 NSCLC patients from the Harvard Lung Cancer Susceptibility Study, 14 SNPs remained significant. The final multivariate stepwise Cox proportional hazards regression modeling of the PLCO dataset identified three potentially functional and independent SNPs (i.e., KIF16B rs1555195 C>T, NEDD4L rs11660748 A>G and rs73440898 A>G) with an adjusted hazards ratio (HR) of 0.86 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.79–0.94, p = 0.0007), 1.31 (1.16–1.47, p = 6.0 × 10⁻⁵) and 1.27 (1.12–1.44, p = 0.0001) for overall survival (OS), respectively. Combined analysis of the adverse genotypes of these three SNPs revealed a trend in the genotype-survival association (p_trend < 0.0001 for OS and p_trend < 0.0001 for disease-specific survival). Furthermore, the survival-associated KIF16B rs1555195T allele was significantly associated with decreased mRNA expression levels of KIF16B in both lung tissues and blood cells. Therefore, genetic variants of the endosome-related genes may be biomarker for NSCLC survival, possibly through modulating the expression of corresponding genes.     

The Repository of Antemortem Injury Response (REPAIR): an online database for skeletal injuries of known ages

An accurate assessment of time since fracture is an essential component of abuse and death investigations; however, little evidence-based research exists on dating fractures, especially those of the cranial vault. This is primarily due to difficulties in procuring human fracture specimens of known posttraumatic survival times. The aim of this article is to introduce a new database through which limitations imposed by sample procurement may be mitigated. The Repository of Antemortem Injury Response (REPAIR) is a digitally accessible database of cranial vault fractures of known ages with extensive contextual information and visual documentation in the form of photography, radiography, and histological photomicrographs. This repository is a multifunctional tool that serves as a case submission portal for cranial fractures of known posttraumatic survival time, a sample database for research on fracture healing and rates of repair, a resource for comparative assessments of cranial fractures in forensic casework, and an educational tool for healing fracture histomorphology.