Innovative ways to assist young anxious children

Although anxiety disorders have been shown to be one of the most common psychological disorders of childhood, aggressive, acting-out children are more often referred for treatment. This continues to be the case even though anxious distress in children affects both social adjustment and academic performance and has a widespread interference in most areas of their lives. This paper explores the incorporation of play therapy techniques into developmentally appropriate, educationally sound programs which recognise and cater for individual differences.

Campbell, Alan Johnston (1895–1982)

Born in 1895, Alan Johnston Campbell was a grazier and political party organiser. In December 1914 he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force and saw action with the 2nd Light Horse Regiment at Gallipoli and, as a lance corporal, in the Sinai and Palestine. After the war Campbell became active in the Roma branch of the Maranoa Graziers’ Association. In 1935, at Roma, he formed one of the first branches of the Queensland Country Party. In 1943, Campbell was elected president of the QCP. Impressed by the Australian Labor Party’s organisation, Campbell centralised power and rebuked parliamentarians whom he believed were neglecting their constituents. By 1951 the highly disciplined structure had attracted 35,000 members. Campbell died in 1982.

Years lived with disability (YLDs) for 1160 sequelae of 289 diseases and injuries 1990–2010 : a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010

Background Non-fatal health outcomes from diseases and injuries are a crucial consideration in the promotion and monitoring of individual and population health. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) studies done in 1990 and 2000 have been the only studies to quantify non-fatal health outcomes across an exhaustive set of disorders at the global and regional level. Neither effort quantified uncertainty in prevalence or years lived with disability (YLDs). Methods Of the 291 diseases and injuries in the GBD cause list, 289 cause disability. For 1160 sequelae of the 289 diseases and injuries, we undertook a systematic analysis of prevalence, incidence, remission, duration, and excess mortality. Sources included published studies, case notification, population-based cancer registries, other disease registries, antenatal clinic serosurveillance, hospital discharge data, ambulatory care data, household surveys, other surveys, and cohort studies. For most sequelae, we used a Bayesian meta-regression method, DisMod-MR, designed to address key limitations in descriptive epidemiological data, including missing data, inconsistency, and large methodological variation between data sources. For some disorders, we used natural history models, geospatial models, back-calculation models (models calculating incidence from population mortality rates and case fatality), or registration completeness models (models adjusting for incomplete registration with health-system access and other covariates). Disability weights for 220 unique health states were used to capture the severity of health loss. YLDs by cause at age, sex, country, and year levels were adjusted for comorbidity with simulation methods. We included uncertainty estimates at all stages of the analysis. Findings Global prevalence for all ages combined in 2010 across the 1160 sequelae ranged from fewer than one case per 1 million people to 350 000 cases per 1 million people. Prevalence and severity of health loss were weakly correlated (correlation coefficient −0·37). In 2010, there were 777 million YLDs from all causes, up from 583 million in 1990. The main contributors to global YLDs were mental and behavioural disorders, musculoskeletal disorders, and diabetes or endocrine diseases. The leading specific causes of YLDs were much the same in 2010 as they were in 1990: low back pain, major depressive disorder, iron-deficiency anaemia, neck pain, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, anxiety disorders, migraine, diabetes, and falls. Age-specific prevalence of YLDs increased with age in all regions and has decreased slightly from 1990 to 2010. Regional patterns of the leading causes of YLDs were more similar compared with years of life lost due to premature mortality. Neglected tropical diseases, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and anaemia were important causes of YLDs in sub-Saharan Africa. Interpretation Rates of YLDs per 100 000 people have remained largely constant over time but rise steadily with age. Population growth and ageing have increased YLD numbers and crude rates over the past two decades. Prevalences of the most common causes of YLDs, such as mental and behavioural disorders and musculoskeletal disorders, have not decreased. Health systems will need to address the needs of the rising numbers of individuals with a range of disorders that largely cause disability but not mortality. Quantification of the burden of non-fatal health outcomes will be crucial to understand how well health systems are responding to these challenges. Effective and affordable strategies to deal with this rising burden are an urgent priority for health systems in most parts of the world. Funding Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Reply to William B. Grant

THE UVI working group acknowledges the contribution of Vitamin D to bone health as stated in our paper. However, we concluded that an optimal level of Vitamin D for humans has not yet been established with any certainty...

Cungellela by William ‘Dura Danje’ Leisha and Shem ‘Curan Danje’ Leisha

Research background: Cungelela is an intercultural music project undertaken in collaboration with William ‘Dura Danje’ Leisha and Shem ‘Curan Danje’ Leisha. The project contributes to cultural maintenance for Australian First Nations peoples, and is informed by prior work in this area by scholars including Peter Dunbar-Hall, Chris Gibson and Karl Neuenfeldt. These existing studies have discussed the complexities of intercultural collaboration, and the types of cultural politics that are involved when Indigenous and non-Indigenous musicians and scholars work together on projects of cultural significance. Critical race theory has also informed the creative work, as a means of interpreting the implicit and explicit discourses of race that arise through intercultural creative practice. The project asked the research question, in what ways can collaborative music making contribute to intercultural understanding and support cultural maintenance for Australian First Nations people affected by the Stolen Generations? Research contribution: This project has identified that collaborative production of recorded popular music can produce shared affective, embodied and transformative forms of knowledge about the impact of the Stolen Generations on Australian First Nations peoples. Research significance: The compact disc was presented by Aunty Anne Leisha as part of an invited presentation at the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium in New Mexico, 2013. The work also formed part of a refereed conference presentation at the 2013 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music held at the University of Oviedo, Gijon, Spain.

William James, Sciences of Mind, and Anti-imperial Discourse

In the past few decades, the humanities and social sciences have developed new methods of reorienting their conceptual frameworks in a “world without frontiers.” In this book, Bernadette M. Baker offers an innovative approach to rethinking sciences of mind as they formed at the turn of the twentieth century, via the concerns that have emerged at the turn of the twenty-first. The less-visited texts of Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James provide a window into contemporary debates over principles of toleration, anti-imperial discourse, and the nature of ethics. Baker revisits Jamesian approaches to the formation of scientific objects including the child mind, exceptional mental states, and the ghost to explore the possibilities and limits of social scientific thought dedicated to mind development and discipline formation around the construct of the West.

Genetic studies of body mass index yield new insights for obesity biology

Obesity is heritable and predisposes to many diseases. To understand the genetic basis of obesity better, here we conduct a genome-wide association study and Metabochip meta-analysis of body mass index (BMI), a measure commonly used to define obesity and assess adiposity, in up to 339,224 individuals. This analysis identifies 97 BMI-associated loci (P < 5 × 10−8), 56 of which are novel. Five loci demonstrate clear evidence of several independent association signals, and many loci have significant effects on other metabolic phenotypes. The 97 loci account for ~2.7% of BMI variation, and genome-wide estimates suggest that common variation accounts for >20% of BMI variation. Pathway analyses provide strong support for a role of the central nervous system in obesity susceptibility and implicate new genes and pathways, including those related to synaptic function, glutamate signalling, insulin secretion/action, energy metabolism, lipid biology and adipogenesis.

FTO genotype is associated with phenotypic variability of body mass index

There is evidence across several species for genetic control of phenotypic variation of complex traits1, 2, 3, 4, such that the variance among phenotypes is genotype dependent. Understanding genetic control of variability is important in evolutionary biology, agricultural selection programmes and human medicine, yet for complex traits, no individual genetic variants associated with variance, as opposed to the mean, have been identified. Here we perform a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies of phenotypic variation using ~170,000 samples on height and body mass index (BMI) in human populations. We report evidence that the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs7202116 at the FTO gene locus, which is known to be associated with obesity (as measured by mean BMI for each rs7202116 genotype)5, 6, 7, is also associated with phenotypic variability. We show that the results are not due to scale effects or other artefacts, and find no other experiment-wise significant evidence for effects on variability, either at loci other than FTO for BMI or at any locus for height. The difference in variance for BMI among individuals with opposite homozygous genotypes at the FTO locus is approximately 7%, corresponding to a difference of ~0.5 kilograms in the standard deviation of weight. Our results indicate that genetic variants can be discovered that are associated with variability, and that between-person variability in obesity can partly be explained by the genotype at the FTO locus. The results are consistent with reported FTO by environment interactions for BMI8, possibly mediated by DNA methylation9, 10. Our BMI results for other SNPs and our height results for all SNPs suggest that most genetic variants, including those that influence mean height or mean BMI, are not associated with phenotypic variance, or that their effects on variability are too small to detect even with samples sizes greater than 100,000.

Thinking critically about rural crime: The influence of William J. Chambliss

William J. Chambliss (Bill) is well-known for his path-breaking theories of lawmaking and for his innovative research on state-organized crime. However, rarely discussed is the fact that his study of the original vagrancy laws marked the birth of rural critical criminology. The main objective of this article is twofold: (1) to show how Bill helped shape contemporary rural critical criminology and (2) to provide suggestions for further critical theoretical and empirical work on rural crime and social control.

Directional dominance on stature and cognition in diverse human populations

Homozygosity has long been associated with rare, often devastating, Mendelian disorders1, and Darwin was one of the first to recognize that inbreeding reduces evolutionary fitness2. However, the effect of the more distant parental relatedness that is common in modern human populations is less well understood. Genomic data now allow us to investigate the effects of homozygosity on traits of public health importance by observing contiguous homozygous segments (runs of homozygosity), which are inferred to be homozygous along their complete length. Given the low levels of genome-wide homozygosity prevalent in most human populations, information is required on very large numbers of people to provide sufficient power3, 4. Here we use runs of homozygosity to study 16 health-related quantitative traits in 354,224 individuals from 102 cohorts, and find statistically significant associations between summed runs of homozygosity and four complex traits: height, forced expiratory lung volume in one second, general cognitive ability and educational attainment (P < 1 × 10−300, 2.1 × 10−6, 2.5 × 10−10 and 1.8 × 10−10, respectively). In each case, increased homozygosity was associated with decreased trait value, equivalent to the offspring of first cousins being 1.2 cm shorter and having 10 months’ less education. Similar effect sizes were found across four continental groups and populations with different degrees of genome-wide homozygosity, providing evidence that homozygosity, rather than confounding, directly contributes to phenotypic variance. Contrary to earlier reports in substantially smaller samples5, 6, no evidence was seen of an influence of genome-wide homozygosity on blood pressure and low density lipoprotein cholesterol, or ten other cardio-metabolic traits. Since directional dominance is predicted for traits under directional evolutionary selection7, this study provides evidence that increased stature and cognitive function have been positively selected in human evolution, whereas many important risk factors for late-onset complex diseases may not have been.