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Youth who receive cash benefits from the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, the largest federal program that provides cash payments to low-income youth with severe disabilities and their families, face several challenges in transitioning into adulthood. From a human capital development perspective, the disabilities and health problems during childhood and early adulthood as well as the family environment form important inputs that will likely influence long-term adult outcomes. This paper provides a review of some of the challenges these youth face in transitioning into adulthood using a life-cycle framework and presents descriptive statistics on their challenges and outcomes into early adulthood. Our summary illustrates the challenges that SSI youth face as they make the transition to adulthood and shows how the long-term employment and program outcomes of this population have changed over time. The findings provide a broader framework for the remaining five papers in this issue and underscore the need for rigorous testing of promising interventions and a carefully balanced mix of statistical and econometric analyses based on longitudinal data sources with a long time horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parental and family inputs are particularly important for children with disabilities receiving benefits from the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. These children often need disability or health-related care, and nonfamily sources provide only limited access. This is the first study to analyze family and nonfamily caregiving for these children with disabilities based on nationally representative quantitative data from the National Survey of SSI Children and Families (NSCF), a survey focusing on SSI recipient children with disabilities. The data suggests substantial variability in the need for caregiving among children on SSI. We find that there is also substantial variation in family inputs related to parental education, living arrangements, the presence of other children of preschool age and other factors that affect the quality and quantity of caregiving. Our analysis confirms that family caregiving is much more substantial for these children than nonfamily caregiving, and that caregiving from both sources is associated with various indicators of the nature and extent of disabilities. We find some - but weaker - evidence of an association between the child's disabilities and parental employment. Overall, while there is some substitution between parental employment and caregiving there appears to be a substantial net burden on the family arising from the child's needs for caregiving. We also find that there are significant predictors of family caregiving and parental employment that are unrelated to the child's disabilities. Most of these show opposite relationships to caregiving and parental employment - negative for one, positive for the other or vice versa. However, better parental education substantially increases the odds of both caregiving and parental employment. Parental disability sharply reduces the odds of parental employment and somewhat increases the odds of reported family caregiving. Overall, the challenges are especially substantial for single mothers who cannot share the extra burden of raising a child with severe disabilities with a spouse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tumor progression is driven by the accumulation of genetic alterations, including both point mutations and copy number changes. Understanding the temporal sequence of these events is crucial for comprehending the disease but is not directly discernible from cross-sectional genomic data. Cancer progression models, including Mutual Hazard Networks (MHNs), aim to reconstruct the dynamics of tumor progression by learning the causal interactions between genetic events based on their co-occurrence patterns in cross-sectional data. Here, we highlight a commonly overlooked bias in cross-sectional datasets that can distort progression modeling. Tumors become clinically detectable when they cause symptoms or are identified through imaging or tests. Detection factors, such as size, inflammation (fever, fatigue), and elevated biochemical markers, are influenced by genomic alterations. Ignoring these effects leads to "conditioning on a collider" bias, where events making the tumor more observable appear anticorrelated, creating false suppressive effects or masking promoting effects among genetic events. We enhance MHNs by incorporating the effects of genetic progression events on the inclusion of a tumor in a dataset, thus correcting for collider bias. We derive an efficient tensor formula for the likelihood function and apply it to two datasets from the MSK-IMPACT study. In colon adenocarcinoma, we observe a significantly higher rate of clinical detection for TP53-positive tumors, while in lung adenocarcinoma, the same is true for EGFR-positive tumors. Compared to classical MHNs, this approach eliminates several spurious suppressive interactions and uncovers multiple promoting effects.

Purpose: To explore the relationships between weight status, weight perceptions, and perceptions of the body positivity movement on social media., Design: Cross-sectional., Setting: Online through the Qualtrics platform., Subjects: Participants (N = 521; mean 26.6 ± 5.1 years) were recruited using Qualtrics online panels., Measures: The study survey included questions about participant demographics, weight status, and weight perception. Subjects rated 6 study-specific viewpoint questions about the body positivity movement on a 5pt Likert scale., Analysis: Multinomial logistic regression models adjusted for relevant confounders assessed the associations between objective weight status, perceived weight status, and perceptions of the body positivity movement., Results: Objective weight status was not associated with perceptions of the body positivity movement. Perceptions of weight status were associated with perceptions of the body positivity movement in young women, with those that perceived themselves as overweight more likely (OR = 1.67, P < 0.05) to disagree with the statement that "the body positivity makes people less likely to lose weight.". However, young women that perceived themselves as having a lower weight status were less likely (OR = 0.54, P < 0.05) to agree with the statement that "the body positivity movement empowered women" as well as "being inclusive of people of all sizes" (OR = 0.56, P < 0.05)., Conclusion: Weight perception, rather than objective weight status, may be a stronger predictor of weight bias and views of the body positivity movement., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Motivation: Metastasis formation is a hallmark of cancer lethality. Yet, metastases are generally unobservable during their early stages of dissemination and spread to distant organs. Genomic datasets of matched primary tumors and metastases may offer insights into the underpinnings and the dynamics of metastasis formation., Results: We present metMHN, a cancer progression model designed to deduce the joint progression of primary tumors and metastases using cross-sectional cancer genomics data. The model elucidates the statistical dependencies among genomic events, the formation of metastasis, and the clinical emergence of both primary tumors and their metastatic counterparts. metMHN enables the chronological reconstruction of mutational sequences and facilitates estimation of the timing of metastatic seeding. In a study of nearly 5000 lung adenocarcinomas, metMHN pinpointed TP53 and EGFR as mediators of metastasis formation. Furthermore, the study revealed that post-seeding adaptation is predominantly influenced by frequent copy number alterations., Availability and Implementation: All datasets and code are available on GitHub at https://github.com/cbg-ethz/metMHN., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.)