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Results: The accelerometer data demonstrated no significant difference in light physical activity or MVPA mean minutes per day between the groups. Few children reported engaging in activities sufficient for meeting the physical activity guidelines outside the AFL program. Of the 119 total distributed child physical activity tracker sheets (7 per family), 55 were returned. Of the 55 returned physical activity tracker sheets, parents reported engaging in physical activity with their children only 7 times outside of the program over seven weeks.
Conclusion: The combined intervention strategies implemented throughout the 12-week study did not appear to be effective at increasing habitual mean minutes per day spent engaging in light and MVPA among children beyond the directed program. Methodological limitations and low adherence to intervention strategies may partially explain these findings. Further research is needed to test successful strategies within community programs to increase habitual light physical activity and MVPA among 6-11 year old children.
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Methods: Adults were recruited to a 4-week app-based health and well-being study. Participants were randomized into either a mindfulness meditation (i.e. Calm) group or a health education (POD) control group. Participants were asked to participate at least 10 minutes per day. Assessments were conducted for stress, anxiety, depression, mindfulness, physical activity, eating habits, and coping behaviors at pre- and post-intervention and voluntary phone interviews were held post-intervention. App usage data were collected subjectively through weekly participation logs and through objective app usage data provided by Calm.
Results: Eighty-three participants were enrolled into the study and 60 completed the intervention and were analyzed. Feasibility and demand benchmarks were met with 96% of participants satisfied with the intervention and 93% found it enjoyable, appropriate, and useful. There was a 70% adherence (minutes/week) to the meditation intervention. Recruitment of men into the intervention group was 38.1% and retention of men was 81.3%. Significant changes were not observed in stress, anxiety, depression, or mindfulness, physical activity, eating habits, and coping behaviors.
Conclusion: The findings of this study support the feasibility of a 4-week, mobile app-based mindfulness meditation intervention (i.e. Calm) in middle-aged adults. These finding do not demonstrate preliminary efficacy of Calm to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression or improvement of mindfulness, physical activity, eating habits, or coping behaviors among middle-aged adults who report elevated stress. These results can be applied for improved design of future studies.
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National and state organizations have developed policies calling upon afterschool programs (ASPs, 3–6 pm) to serve a fruit or vegetable (FV) each day for snack, while eliminating foods and beverages high in added-sugars, and to ensure children accumulate a minimum of 30 min/d of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA). Few efficacious and cost-effective strategies exist to assist ASP providers in achieving these important public health goals. This paper reports on the design and conceptual framework of Making Healthy Eating and Physical Activity (HEPA) Policy Practice in ASPs, a 3-year group randomized controlled trial testing the effectiveness of strategies designed to improve snacks served and increase MVPA in children attending community-based ASPs. Twenty ASPs, serving over 1800 children (6–12 years) will be enrolled and match-paired based on enrollment size, average daily min/d MVPA, and days/week FV served, with ASPs randomized after baseline data collection to immediate intervention or a 1-year delayed group. The framework employed, STEPs (Strategies To Enhance Practice), focuses on intentional programming of HEPA in each ASPs' daily schedule, and includes a grocery store partnership to reduce price barriers to purchasing FV, professional development training to promote physical activity to develop core physical activity competencies, as well as ongoing technical support/assistance. Primary outcome measures include children's accelerometry-derived MVPA and time spend sedentary while attending an ASP, direct observation of staff HEPA promoting and inhibiting behaviors, types of snacks served, and child consumption of snacks, as well as, cost of snacks via receipts and detailed accounting of intervention delivery costs to estimate cost-effectiveness.
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Bacterial lipopolysaccharides (LPS) are structural components of the outer membranes of Gram-negative bacteria and also are potent inducers of inflammation in mammals. Higher vertebrates are extremely sensitive to LPS, but lower vertebrates, like fish, are resistant to their systemic toxic effects. However, the effects of LPS on the fish intestinal mucosa remain unknown. Edwardsiella ictaluri is a primitive member of the Enterobacteriaceae family that causes enteric septicemia in channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus). E. ictaluri infects and colonizes deep lymphoid tissues upon oral or immersion infection. Both gut and olfactory organs are the primary sites of invasion. At the systemic level, E. ictaluri pathogenesis is relatively well characterized, but our knowledge about E. ictaluri intestinal interaction is limited. Recently, we observed that E. ictaluri oligo-polysaccharide (O-PS) LPS mutants have differential effects on the intestinal epithelia of orally inoculated catfish. Here we evaluate the effects of E. ictaluri O-PS LPS mutants by using a novel catfish intestinal loop model and compare it to the rabbit ileal loop model inoculated with Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium LPS. We found evident differences in rabbit ileal loop and catfish ileal loop responses to E. ictaluri and S. Typhimurium LPS. We determined that catfish respond to E. ictaluri LPS but not to S. Typhimurium LPS. We also determined that E. ictaluri inhibits cytokine production and induces disruption of the intestinal fish epithelia in an O-PS-dependent fashion. The E. ictaluri wild type and ΔwibT LPS mutant caused intestinal tissue damage and inhibited proinflammatory cytokine synthesis, in contrast to E. ictaluri Δgne and Δugd LPS mutants. We concluded that the E. ictaluri O-PS subunits play a major role during pathogenesis, since they influence the recognition of the LPS by the intestinal mucosal immune system of the catfish. The LPS structure of E. ictaluri mutants is needed to understand the mechanism of interaction.
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Contemporary vaccine development relies less on empirical methods of vaccine construction, and now employs a powerful array of precise engineering strategies to construct immunogenic live vaccines. In this review, we will survey various engineering techniques used to create attenuated vaccines, with an emphasis on recent advances and insights. We will further explore the adaptation of attenuated strains to create multivalent vaccine platforms for immunization against multiple unrelated pathogens. These carrier vaccines are engineered to deliver sufficient levels of protective antigens to appropriate lymphoid inductive sites to elicit both carrier-specific and foreign antigen-specific immunity. Although many of these technologies were originally developed for use in Salmonella vaccines, application of the essential logic of these approaches will be extended to development of other enteric vaccines where possible. A central theme driving our discussion will stress that the ultimate success of an engineered vaccine rests on achieving the proper balance between attenuation and immunogenicity. Achieving this balance will avoid over-activation of inflammatory responses, which results in unacceptable reactogenicity, but will retain sufficient metabolic fitness to enable the live vaccine to reach deep tissue inductive sites and trigger protective immunity. The breadth of examples presented herein will clearly demonstrate that genetic engineering offers the potential for rapidly propelling vaccine development forward into novel applications and therapies which will significantly expand the role of vaccines in public health.
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Background: To be effective, orally administered live Salmonella vaccines must first survive their encounter with the low pH environment of the stomach. To enhance survival, an antacid is often given to neutralize the acidic environment of the stomach just prior to or concomitant with administration of the vaccine. One drawback of this approach, from the perspective of the clinical trial volunteer, is that the taste of a bicarbonate-based acid neutralization system can be unpleasant. Thus, we explored an alternative method that would be at least as effective as bicarbonate and with a potentially more acceptable taste. Because ingestion of protein can rapidly buffer stomach pH, we examined the possibility that the protein-rich Ensure® Nutrition shakes would be effective alternatives to bicarbonate.
Results: We tested one Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium and three Salmonella Typhi vaccine strains and found that all strains survived equally well when incubated in either Ensure® or bicarbonate. In a low gastric pH mouse model, Ensure® worked as well or better than bicarbonate to enhance survival through the intestinal tract, although neither agent enhanced the survival of the S. Typhi test strain possessing a rpoS mutation.
Conclusions: Our data show that a protein-rich drink such as Ensure® Nutrition shakes can serve as an alternative to bicarbonate for reducing gastric pH prior to administration of a live Salmonella vaccine.