School of Public Health

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1633

The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

Note: Prior to July 1, 2007, the School of Public Health was named the College of Health & Human Performance.

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    Maternal experiences of intimate partner violence and C-reactive protein levels in young children in Tanzania
    (Elsevier, 2018-12) Slopen, Natalie; Zhang, Jing; Urlacher, Samuel S.; De Silva, Gretchen; Mittal, Mona
    Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a critical public health issue that impacts women and children across the globe. Prior studies have documented that maternal experiences of IPV are associated with adverse psychological and physical health outcomes in children; however, research on the underlying physiological pathways linking IPV to these conditions is limited. Drawing on data from the 2010 Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey, we examined the relationship between maternal report of IPV in the past 12 months and inflammation among children ages 6 months to 5 years. Our study included 503 children who were randomly selected to provide a blood sample and had a mother who had ever been married and who had completed the Domestic Violence Module, which collected information on physical, sexual, and emotional violence. Analyses were stratified based on a threshold for acute immune activation status, defined by the threshold of CRP>1.1 mg/L for young children in Tanzania. In bivariate analyses, healthy children whose mothers reported IPV showed a marginally elevated median CRP level compared to children whose mothers did not report IPV (0.35 vs. 0.41 mg/L; p = 0.13). Similarly, among children with active or recent infections, those whose mothers reported IPV had an elevated median CRP compared to children whose mothers did not (4.06 vs 3.09 mg/L; p = 0.03). In adjusted multiple variable regression models to account for child, mother, and household characteristics, maternal IPV was positively associated with (log) CRP in both healthy children and children with active or recent infection. Although longitudinal research with additional biomarkers of inflammation is needed, our results provide support for the hypothesis that inflammation may function as a biological pathway linking maternal IPV to poor psychological and physical health outcomes among children of mothers who are victimized—and this may extend to very young children and children in non-Western contexts.
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    The Impact of Excluding Trials from Network Meta-Analyses - An Empirical Study
    (PLoS (Public Library of Science), 2016-12-07) Zhang, Jing; Yuan, Yiping; Chu, Haitao
    Network meta-analysis (NMA) expands the scope of a conventional pairwise meta-analysis to simultaneously compare multiple treatments, which has an inherent appeal for clinicians, patients, and policy decision makers. Two recent reports have shown that the impact of excluding a treatment on NMAs can be substantial. However, no one has assessed the impact of excluding a trial from NMAs, which is important because many NMAs selectively include trials in the analysis. This article empirically examines the impact of trial exclusion using both the arm-based (AB) and contrast-based (CB) approaches, by reanalyzing 20 published NMAs involving 725 randomized controlled trials and 449,325 patients. For the population-averaged absolute risk estimates using the AB approach, the average fold changes across all networks ranged from 1.004 (with standard deviation 0.004) to 1.072 (with standard deviation 0.184); while the maximal fold changes ranged from 1.032 to 2.349. In 12 out of 20 NMAs, a 1.20-fold or larger change is observed in at least one of the population- averaged absolute risk estimates. In addition, while excluding a trial can substantially change the estimated relative effects (e.g., log odds ratios), there is no systematic difference in terms of changes between the two approaches. Changes in treatment rankings are observed in 7 networks and changes in inconsistency are observed in 3 networks. We do not observe correlations between changes in treatment effects, treatment rankings and inconsistency. Finally, we recommend rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria, logical study selection process, and reasonable network geometry to ensure robustness and generalizability of the results of NMAs.