Epiphanies, velcro balls and McDonaldization: highlights from the 5th Meeting of the International Society for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity

This commentary provides an overview and selected highlights from the scientific program of the 5th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity.

Health-related religious rituals of the Greek Orthodox Church : their uptake and meanings

Aim
To examine the uptake of religious rituals of the Greek Orthodox Church by relatives of patients in critical condition in Greece and to explore their symbolic representations and spiritual meanings.
Background
Patients and their relatives want to be treated with respect and be supported for their beliefs, practices, customs and rituals. However nurses may not be ready to meet the spiritual needs of relatives of patients, while the health-related religious beliefs, practices and rituals of the Greek Orthodox Christian denomination have not been explored.
Method
This study was part of a large study encompassing 19 interviews with 25 informants, relatives of patients in intensive care units of three large hospitals in Athens, Greece, between 2000 and 2005. In this paper data were derived from personal accounts of religious rituals given by six participants.
Results
Relatives used a series of religious rituals, namely blessed oil and holy water, use of relics of saints, holy icons, offering names for pleas and pilgrimage.
Conclusion
Through the rituals, relatives experience a sense of connectedness with the divine and use the sacred powers to promote healing of their patients.
Implications for nursing management
Nurse managers should recognize, respect and facilitate the expression of spirituality through the practice of religious rituals by patients and their relatives.

Conference report: Proceedings of the 2015 meeting of the Australasian section of the American Oil Chemists' Society (AAOCS)

The Australasian section of the American Oil Chemists’ Society (AAOCS) held their 9th biennial meeting in Geelong, Australia from 9 to 11 September 2015. Over 100 scientists, researchers and industry representatives gathered for the conference and two industry focused workshops. The conference theme was “looking back, thinking forward” which reflected on the history of the science and industry while also predicting future trends and issues.

T.S. Eliot`s idea of the clerisy, and its discussion by Karl Mannheim and Michael Polanyi in the context of J.H. Oldham`s moot

In 1938, Joseph Oldham, a leading British Christian ecumenist, formed a discussion group that came to be known as the Moot. The Moot met in a retreat setting for several long weekends each year until early 1947, its discussions carefully organized and convened by Oldham. More than anything else, the discussions of the Moot revolved around the topic of order and, more particularly, around the problem of how order might be restored in British society and culture in the context of a ‘world turned upside down’. Oldham and most members of the group sought a central place for Christian ideas and ideals in British social life.

A striking feature of the Moot was the intellectual stature and the diversity of interests of its members. Among its 16 or so regular members were Oldham (1874-1969), his close friend T.S. Eliot (1888-1963) and Karl Mannheim (1893-1947). Among the later ‘visitors’ to Moot meetings was Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), who first came to the 20th Moot meeting in June of 1944.1

This article presents several papers that were produced for the Moot discussion of 15-18 December 1944 by Eliot, Mannheim and Polanyi. These papers have intrinsic and historical interest, and are published together for the first time here. The initial paper, written by Eliot, treats the role in society of ‘the clerisy’2 - a term borrowed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge that points to an intellectual elite or vanguard. Eliot requested that Oldham solicit responses to his paper from Mannheim and Polanyi. Mannheim’s response was a set of detailed answers to four questions that Eliot posed at the end of his essay. Polanyi’s response was a short, coherent essay, which he identified as ‘my own position with respect’ to Eliot’s discussion; his essay outlines a brief account of the role of the clerisy in science.3 Eliot wrote short comments on the responses of both Mannheim and Polanyi. These five pieces, which have a natural unity, should be of interest to anyone working in the history of social thought. We have abridged only Mannheim’s lengthy response and have eliminated a few lines of illustrative material from Eliot’s reply to Mannheim, but these excisions in no way detract from the clarity of the authors’ perspectives in this rich trilogue.

A review of terrestrial bird atlases of the world and their application

We reviewed 272 bird atlases (standardised surveys intended to document the distribution of birds) from around the world. Atlases we located were conducted in 50 countries from six continents with most (82.4%) from Europe and North America. Atlases were mostly run by ornithological societies (67.1%), had amassed at least 27.9 million records of birds over an area roughly 31.4% of the land area of the Earth, and had involved at least 108 000 contributors. They had a modal data collection period of 4 years (some ran over several decades) and varied greatly in scale, covering local areas to entire continents (21 km² – 10 390 000 km²); atlases that covered larger areas involved more observers and generated more records. Most atlases (88.3%) were constrained to particular seasons, and most of these focussed on the main local breeding period (81.0%). Spatial sampling units ranged from 0.02 km² (2 ha) to 3092 km² and temporal units of sampling varied from 20 minutes to several years. Little information is available on the application of data generated by atlases. We focussed on five major atlases for which information was available. We located 97 scientific publications drawing on data from these five major atlases; papers most frequently focussed on bird distribution (26.8%), ecology (20.6%) and land-use planning (17.5%). Atlas books were cited often, 7–31 times per year. Provision of data to third parties from two major atlases (one from Australia and one from Britain and Ireland) was frequent and remarkably similar. Data were requested mostly for environmental impact studies (almost half of all requests), conservation policy and planning (~20%), research (~20%) and other mapping (~13%). Despite the uses we describe, atlas data seem under-utilised.

Quality of reporting of randomized clinical trials in abstracts of the 2005 annual meeting of the American College of Rheumatology.

Objective: To determine the quality of abstracts reporting randomized clinical trials (RCT) at the 2005 Annual Scientific Meeting of the American College of Rheumatology.

Methods: All 2005 abstracts including late-breaking abstracts were assessed. An abstract was deemed to be reporting an RCT if it indicated that participants were randomized in the title or body of the abstract. RCT were excluded if they included only pharmacokinetic data. The CONSORT checklist was applied and relevant data extracted. We defined manufacturer support as acknowledgment of industry support or industry employee as co-author.

Results: Of 2146 abstracts, 143 (6.7%) reported RCT. Of these, 78.3% were drug trials, and 63.6% indicated manufacturer support. Only 30.8% of abstracts used "randomized" in the title, 44.1% did not explicitly state whether blinding was undertaken, and only 7.0% clearly stated who was blinded. Thirty percent of studies did not give an explicit definition of eligibility criteria of participants. While 84.6% explicitly described the experimental intervention, only 37.1% explicitly described the comparator intervention. Only 21% explicitly stated that an intention to treat analysis was performed. Baseline demographic and clinical characteristics were reported in 48.3%. While most abstracts reported summary results for each treatment group, only 35.7% reported effect size with its precision.

Conclusion: The quality of reporting is suboptimal in many RCT abstracts. Abstracts reporting RCT would benefit from a structured approach that ensures more detailed reporting of eligibility criteria, active and comparator interventions, flow of participants, and adequate summary and precision of results.

Medulloblastoma Down Under 2013 : a report from the third annual meeting of the International Medulloblastoma Working Group.

Medulloblastoma is curable in approximately 70% of patients. Over the past decade, progress in improving survival using conventional therapies has stalled, resulting in reduced quality of life due to treatment-related side effects, which are a major concern in survivors. The vast amount of genomic and molecular data generated over the last 5-10 years encourages optimism that improved risk stratification and new molecular targets will improve outcomes. It is now clear that medulloblastoma is not a single-disease entity, but instead consists of at least four distinct molecular subgroups: WNT/Wingless, Sonic Hedgehog, Group 3, and Group 4. The Medulloblastoma Down Under 2013 meeting, which convened at Bunker Bay, Australia, brought together 50 leading clinicians and scientists. The 2-day agenda included focused sessions on pathology and molecular stratification, genomics and mouse models, high-throughput drug screening, and clinical trial design. The meeting established a global action plan to translate novel biologic insights and drug targeting into treatment regimens to improve outcomes. A consensus was reached in several key areas, with the most important being that a novel classification scheme for medulloblastoma based on the four molecular subgroups, as well as histopathologic features, should be presented for consideration in the upcoming fifth edition of the World Health Organization's classification of tumours of the central nervous system. Three other notable areas of agreement were as follows: (1) to establish a central repository of annotated mouse models that are readily accessible and freely available to the international research community; (2) to institute common eligibility criteria between the Children's Oncology Group and the International Society of Paediatric Oncology Europe and initiate joint or parallel clinical trials; (3) to share preliminary high-throughput screening data across discovery labs to hasten the development of novel therapeutics. Medulloblastoma Down Under 2013 was an effective forum for meaningful discussion, which resulted in enhancing international collaborative clinical and translational research of this rare disease. This template could be applied to other fields to devise global action plans addressing all aspects of a disease, from improved disease classification, treatment stratification, and drug targeting to superior treatment regimens to be assessed in cooperative international clinical trials.

Review article: Emergency department data sharing to reduce alcohol-related violence: a systematic review of the feasibility and effectiveness of community-level interventions.

The present paper aims to review current evidence for the effectiveness and/or feasibility of using inter-agency data sharing of ED recorded assault information to direct interventions reducing alcohol-related or nightlife assaults, injury or violence. Potential data-sharing partners involve police, local council, liquor licensing regulators and venue management. A systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature was conducted. The initial search discovered 19,506 articles. After removal of duplicates and articles not meeting review criteria, n = 8 articles were included in quantitative and narrative synthesis. Seven of eight studies were conducted in UK EDs, with the remaining study presenting Australian data. All studies included in the review deemed data sharing a worthwhile pursuit. All studies attempting to measure intervention effectiveness reported substantial reductions of assaults and ED attendances post-intervention, with one reporting no change. Negative logistic feasibility concerns were minimal, with general consensus among authors being that data-sharing protocols and partnerships could be easily implemented into modern ED triage systems, with minimal cost, staff workload burden, impact to patient safety, service and anonymity, or risk of harm displacement to other licensed venues, or increase to length of patient stay. However, one study reported a potential harm displacement effect to streets surrounding intervention venues. In future, data-sharing systems should triangulate ED, police and ambulance data sources, and assess intervention effectiveness using randomised controlled trials that account for variations in venue capacity, fluctuations in ED attendance and population levels, seasonal variations in assault and injury, and control for concurrent interventions.