The geometry of tube shape can be represented as a ratio between length and width. A perfectly cylindrical vortex has a ratio of 1:1, while the classic almond-shaped tube is nearer 3:1. When width exceeds length, the tube is described as “square”. Wave-shape-intensity.svg.
“Involvement in positive leisure activities is a key way for young people to develop resilience and social and emotional skills. This paper outlines the evaluation of a six-week surfing intervention, the Wave Project, which aimed to boost wellbeing and confidence among 84 young people aged eight to 18, all of whom faced mental health issues or social exclusion.
The intervention resulted in a significant and sustained increase in wellbeing. One year later, 70% of clients regularly attend a surf club and many have become trained as session volunteers. Parents and referrers noticed an increase in positive attitude and better communication, as well as improved self-management and behaviour at both home and school. It is concluded that the Wave Project provides a demonstrable and cost-effective way to deliver mental health care, mentoring and social integration of young people. Further service evaluation of accessibility and long-term outcomes is also recommended.”
Learn more on The positive impact of structured surfing courses on the wellbeing of vulnerable young people via Community Practitioner.
Join BCCHR and WHRI every month as we dive deeper into a different aspect of conducting digital health research.
The BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute (BCCHR) and the Women’s Health Research Institute (WHRI) are collaborating to host a digital health education series.
On Thursday, July 7, between 12:00-1:00 pm, join us for an exciting rapid fire panel discussion.
Objectives:
Understand the value of academic research from an industry perspective and how to engage with digital health companies for collaborative research partnerships.
Identify challenges and facilitators for collaborating on digital health research related to funding, product or intervention development, and more.
Learn about companies in Canada innovating in digital health interested in partnering for digital health research.
“But perhaps above all, it was Black intellectuals who made Europe their pilgrimage. Du Bois went to Germany in 1892 after finishing his degree at Harvard College not because of his race but because of the intellectual opportunity. ‘Any American scholar who wanted preferment,’ he said, ‘went to Germany for study.’ Langston Hughes’ father urged him to go to Switzerland for college and learn French, German, and Italian all at once. (Hughes went to Harlem instead, though later he would try his hand at filmmaking in Russia.) Black newspapers reported how French universities were ‘open for business’; in 1955 James Baldwin estimated five hundred Black Americans were walking the streets of Paris ‘studying everything from the Sorbonne’s standard Cours de Civilisation Française to abnormal psychology, brain surgery, music, fine arts, and literature.’
Another ‘problem group’ for medical schools, Jewish students, had long looked to Europe for an education. (The dean of the Yale School of Medicine in the 1920s instructed his admission committee, ‘Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all.’) Officials from medical schools in Michigan and Alabama complained that if they admitted all the qualified Jewish students, the school would be so full of ‘undesirables’ that there would be no room for local students. In 1932 almost two thousand American Jewish students were studying medicine in Europe, mostly in the UK, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.
Black Americans followed, particularly after World War II. (Others had traveled the path long before. James McCune Smith, the first African American to earn a medical degree, had done so in Scotland in 1837. Black women, too, made the trip; Sarah Parker Remond, born in 1826, studied obstetrics in Florence and practiced in Italy for over twenty years.) It was a win-win situation for the students and the countries that accepted them. A 1932 Philadelphia Tribune article titled ‘French Universities Would Welcome U.S. Negro Students’ quoted an official French report on the rising number of American students in the country: ‘They return to their country and are excellent missionaries for our ideas, our books, our surgical instruments, our pharmaceutical products and health centers.'”
Doctors Without Borders: On the Black doctors who received their medical degrees and a new sort of freedom in Europe via Lapham’s Quarterly.
The Miraculous Journey, an installation by Damien Hirst outside the Sidra Medical & Research Centre in Doha, Qatar.
“Infants born to those who tested positive for COVID-19 during pregnancy may have neurodevelopmental issues after birth, according to new preliminary findings from two separate studies out of the U.S. and Spain.
The peer-reviewed U.S. study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open on June 9, looked at 7,772 infants delivered during the pandemic between March and September 2020 at six hospitals in Massachusetts, 222 of whom had prenatal exposure to SARS-CoV-2. Results showed that the latter group of infants were more likely to receive a neurodevelopmental diagnosis in the first year after birth.
Separately, a small Spanish study compared 21 cases where the parent tested positive during pregnancy and 21 babies who had no exposure during pregnancy at the Marqués de Valdecilla University Hospital in Santander, Spain. Analysis showed that infants who were exposed in utero demonstrated more motor skill difficulties six weeks after birth, findings that were presented at the 30th European Congress of Psychiatry in early June.”
More on Prenatal COVID exposure affects babies’ motor skills, speech, studies find via CTV News.
Procedural skills are a fundamental part of family medicine; however, there is no formal curriculum for teaching these skills during residency. Our objective was to assess whether new graduates from the University of British Columbia (UBC) Family Medicine program feel that they are proficient in all core procedures identified by the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC) and to explore their learning experiences with the described procedures.
Residents interested in learning more about ophthalmology should check out the Virtual Introductory Summer Course in Ophthalmology (VISCO), which is a free virtual course on Sunday afternoons this summer that aims to provide increased accessibility to high quality ophthalmology teaching. The first session on Sunday June 19, 2022 3-5pm ET is case-based and focuses on common emergency presentations which your residents may encounter in clinical practice.
The course is composed of two parts:
Six weekly workshops presented by ophthalmology faculty and residents across Canada, and
A high-yield structured reading guide using curated resources that is meant to provide background knowledge to supplement the workshops.
During the course, you will have opportunities to win prizes and learn ophthalmology from incredible teachers.
The content and objectives of this course are based on a curated list of learning objectives endorsed by Canadian Undergraduate Medical Education Leads in Ophthalmology and reference resources from the Association of University Professors in Ophthalmology (AUPO) and the Medical Council of Canada (MCC).
These sessions are also eligible for Royal College Section 2 CME credits.
More information and links to register can be found here.
Background: Dostarlimab is a humanized monoclonal antibody that binds with high affinity to PD-1, resulting in inhibition of binding to PD-L1 and PD-L2. We report interim data from patients with endometrial cancer (EC) participating in a phase I trial of single-agent dostarlimab.
Methods: GARNET, an ongoing, single-arm, open-label, phase I trial of intravenous dostarlimab in advanced solid tumors, is being undertaken at 123 sites. Two cohorts of patients with EC were recruited: those with dMMR/MSI-H disease (cohort A1) and those with proficient/stable (MMRp/MSS) disease (cohort A2). Patients received dostarlimab 500 mg every 3 weeks for 4 cycles, then dostarlimab 1000 mg every 6 weeks until disease progression. The primary endpoints were objective response rate (ORR) and duration of response (DOR) per RECIST V.1.1, as assessed by blinded independent central review.
Results: Screening began on April 10, 2017, and 129 and 161 patients with advanced EC were enrolled in cohorts A1 and A2, respectively. The median follow-up duration was 16.3 months (IQR 9.5–22.1) for cohort A1 and 11.5 months (IQR 11.0–25.1) for cohort A2. In cohort A1, ORR was 43.5% (95% CI 34.0% to 53.4%) with 11 complete responses and 36 partial responses. In cohort A2, ORR was 14.1% (95% CI 9.1% to 20.6%) with three complete responses and 19 partial responses. Median DOR was not reached in either cohort. In the combined cohorts, the majority of treatment-related adverse events (TRAEs) were grade 1–2 (75.5%), most commonly fatigue (17.6%), diarrhea (13.8%), and nausea (13.8%). Grade≥3 TRAEs occurred in 16.6% of patients, and 5.5% discontinued dostarlimab because of TRAEs. No deaths were attributable to dostarlimab.
Conclusion: Dostarlimab demonstrated durable antitumor activity in both dMMR/MSI-H (ORR 43.5%) and MMRp/MSS EC (ORR 14.1%) with a manageable safety profile.
More on Safety and antitumor activity of dostarlimab in patients with advanced or recurrent DNA mismatch repair deficient/microsatellite instability-high (dMMR/MSI-H) or proficient/stable (MMRp/MSS) endometrial cancer: interim results from GARNET—a phase I, single-arm study via Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer.
“Background and Objectives: Transcutaneous electrical stimulation of low- and medium-frequency currents is commonly used in pain management. Interferential current (IFC) therapy, a medium frequency alternating current therapy that reportedly reduces skin impedance, can reach deeper tissues.
IFC therapy can provide several different treatment possibilities by adjusting its parameters (carrier frequency, amplitudemodulated frequency, sweep frequency, sweep mode or swing pattern, type of application (bipolar or quadripolar), time of application and intensity). The objective of this review article is to discuss the literature findings on the analgesic efficacy of IFC therapy.
Conclusions: According to the literature, IFC therapy shows significant analgesic effects in patients with neck pain, low back pain, knee osteoarthritis and post-operative knee pain. Most of the IFC parameters seem not to influence its analgesic effects. We encourage further studies to investigate the mechanism of action of IFC therapy.”
More on Analgesic Effects of Interferential Current Therapy: A Narrative Review via Medicina (Kaunas). 2022 Jan; 58(1): 141.
Family Medicine Residency Site: Abbotsford-Mission 