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Background/Aims: Adolescents who identify as nonbinary gender or as not heterosexual report higher levels of mental illness than their counterparts. Cannabis use is a commonly employed strategy to cope with mental illness symptoms among adolescents; however, cannabis use can have many deleterious health consequences for youth. Within the frame of minority stress theory, this study investigates the relationships between gender identity and sexual orientation, internalizing disorder symptoms, and cannabis use among adolescents. Method: A national cross-sectional survey of a generalizable sample of high school students in Canada from the 2017 wave (N = 15,191) of the Cancer Risk Assessment in Youth Survey was analyzed in spring 2019. Mediation analyses were completed to examine risk of internalizing disorder symptoms as a potential mediator of the association between (1) gender identity and (2) sexual orientation, and cannabis use. Results: Indirect effects in all models show significantly higher levels of reported internalizing disorder symptoms for female (OR = 3.44, 95% CI [2.84, 4.18]) and nonbinary gender (OR = 3.75, 95% CI [2.16, 6.51]) compared with male students. Sexual minority adolescents had higher odds of internalizing disorder risk relative to non-sexual minority adolescents (OR = 3.13, 95% CI [2.63, 3.74]). Students who reported higher rates of internalizing disorder symptoms were more likely to have ever used cannabis. Patterns of partial mediation are also present among all groups. Discussion/Conclusions: Findings can be used to better inform mental health interventions for adolescents. Future study should explore specific mental health stressors of vulnerable adolescent groups with respect to cannabis use as a coping mechanism.

Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) may serve as a non-invasive source of tumor material to investigate an individual's disease in real-time. The Parsortix® PC1 System, the first FDA-cleared medical device for the capture and harvest of CTCs from peripheral blood of metastatic breast cancer (MBC) patients for use in subsequent user-validated downstream analyses, enables the epitope-independent capture of CTCs with diverse phenotypes based on cell size and deformability. The aim of this study was to determine the proportion of MBC patients and self-declared female healthy volunteers (HVs) that had CTCs identified using immunofluorescence (IF) or Wright-Giemsa (WG) staining. Peripheral blood from 76 HVs and 76 MBC patients was processed on Parsortix® PC1 Systems. Harvested cells were cytospun onto a charged slide and immunofluorescently stained for identification of CTCs expressing epithelial markers. The IF slides were subsequently WG-stained and analyzed for CTC identification based on morphological features of malignant cells. All testing was performed by operators blinded to the clinical status of each subject. CTCs were identified on the IF slides in 45.3% (≥ 1) / 24.0% (≥ 5) of the MBC patients (range = 0 – 125, mean = 7) and in 6.9% (≥ 1) / 2.8% (≥ 5) of the HVs (range = 0 – 28, mean = 1). Among the MBC patients with ≥ 1 CTC, 70.6% had only CK + /EpCAM- CTCs, with none having EpCAM + /CK- CTCs. CTC clusters were identified in 56.0% of the CTC-positive patients. On the WG-stained slides, CTCs were identified in 42.9% (≥ 1) / 21.4% (≥ 5) of the MBC patients (range = 0 – 41, mean = 4) and 4.3% (≥ 1) / 2.9% (≥ 5) of the HVs (range = 0 – 14, mean = 0). This study demonstrated the ability of the Parsortix® PC1 System to capture and harvest CTCs from a significantly larger proportion of MBC patients compared to HVs when coupled with both IF and WG cytomorphological assessment. The presence of epithelial cells in subjects without diagnosed disease has been previously described, with their significance being unclear. Interestingly, a high proportion of the identified CTCs did not express EpCAM, highlighting the limitations of using EpCAM-based approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The school environment has the potential to influence student body mass index (BMI) through programs and policies. Our objective was to examine the effect of modifying obesity-related school policies and programs on youths' BMI trajectories. Methods: Obesity-related school policies and programs related to physical activity and healthy eating were collected from 41 schools across Ontario at baseline (2012-2013) and year 2 (2013-2014) of the COMPASS study. Self-reported height and weight were collected from the 4951 grades 9 and 10 students who attended those schools for 3 years. Linear mixed effects regression models examined the effect of modifying obesity-related school policies and programs on youths' BMI trajectories. Results: Between Y[subscript 1] and Y[subscript 2], 26 of the 41 schools implemented distinct new obesity-related programs or policies related to physical activity or healthy eating. Five of the interventions were associated with BMI trajectories of students attending those schools compared to students attending a pooled sample of control schools, predicting a higher BMI trajectory. Conclusions: Isolated programs and policies may not successfully improve youths' BMI trajectories. Further research is required to test the implementation of policies and programs that follow a comprehensive school health (CSH) approach, targeting BMI and associated behaviors.

Aims: In Canada, enteric diseases pose substantial health and economic burdens. The distribution of these diseases is uneven across both geography and time and understanding these patterns is therefore important for the prevention of future outbreaks. We evaluated temporal, spatial and space–time clustering of laboratory‐confirmed cases of Campylobacter spp. (n = 28,728), non‐typhoidal Salmonella spp. (n = 22,640), Shiga toxin‐producing Escherichia coli (STEC; n = 1340), Yersinia spp. (n = 1674) and Listeria monocytogenes (n = 471) infections, reported between 2010 and 2017 inclusive in Ontario, the most populous province in Canada (population ~ 13,500,000 in 2016). Methods and Results: For each enteric pathogen, we calculated the mean incidence rates (IRs) for Ontario's 35 public health unit (PHU) areas and visualized them using choropleth maps. We identified temporal, spatial and space–time high infection rate clusters using retrospective Poisson scan statistics. Campylobacter and Salmonella infections had the highest IRs, while Listeria infections had the lowest. Campylobacter, Salmonella, STEC and Listeria mostly clustered temporally in the spring/summer and sometimes extended into fall, while Yersinia showed a less clear seasonal pattern. The IR visualizations and spatial and space–time scan statistics showed geographic heterogeneity of infection rates with high infection rate clusters detected mainly in PHUs across the southwestern and central‐western regions of Ontario for Campylobacter, Salmonella and STEC infections, and mainly in PHUs located in the central‐eastern regions for Yersinia and Listeria. A high proportion of cases in some of the significant Salmonella, STEC and Listeria infection clusters were linked to disease outbreaks. Conclusions: Results from this study will inform heightened public health surveillance, and prevention and control programmes, in populations and regions of high infection rates. Further research is needed to determine the pathogen‐specific socioeconomic, environmental and agricultural risk factors that may be related to the temporal and spatial disease patterns we observed in our study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Group work can form a substantial component of degree programme assessments. To satisfy institutional and student expectations, students must often be assigned individual marks for their contributions to the group project, typically by mapping a single holistic group mark to individual marks using peer assessment scores. Since the early 1990s, various mapping methods that use self- and peer ratings have been developed. They are based on (normalised) individual weighting factors, partial scaling of the group mark, inter-rater agreement corrections or parabolic functions. We show that no single existing method can be successfully applied to most practical peer assessment scenarios such as different marking scale interpretations, intra-group ranking errors, biased free-riders and marks exceeding 100%. We present a combined analytical mapping method that incorporates the benefits of existing mechanisms, but alleviates their weaknesses with minimum computational effort and tutor input. The robustness of the method is illustrated through problematic assessment examples and empirically evaluated in multiple group work environments involving a total of 243 students and five different disciplines.

When faced with intelligibility problems, listeners resort to contextual information. The present study explores the use of lexical context by listeners when identifying segments with various degrees of foreign accent. Native English listeners identified words into which a single Spanish-accented segment from a 5-step continuum had been inserted. Listeners also identified vowel-consonant or consonant-vowel sequences containing the same accented segments. While lexical context helped, the lexical advantage was largely independent of degree of foreign accent, with a slight benefit only for the most accented consonants. To examine the influence of listeners' first language on the usefulness of lexical context, a second experiment was carried out with Spanish, Japanese and Czech non-native listeners. As was the case for native listeners, there was little evidence that a lexical context helps more for foreign-accented than native segments. Normalised for word familiarity, overall non-native identification patterns were comparable to native listeners' perceptions. Listeners' first language phonetic inventory had an effect on identification levels, particularly in the case of vowels. Lexical context benefits for vowel identification can be explained by their generally less categorical processing, their realisational variability in English, and symbol mapping issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]