BACKGROUND: Depression in later life is a common mental disorder with a prevalence rate of between 3% and 35% for minor depression and approximately 2% for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). The most common treatment modalities for MDD are antidepressant medication and psychological interventions. Recently, Behavioral Activation (BA) has gained renewed attention as an effective treatment modality in MDD. Although BA is considered an easy accessible intervention for both patients and health care workers (such as nurses), there is no research on the effectiveness of the intervention in inpatient depressed elderly.The aim of study, described in the present proposal, is to examine the effects of BA when executed by nurses in an inpatient population of elderly persons with MDD. METHODS/DESIGN: The study is designed as a multi-center cluster randomized controlled trial. BA, described as The Systematic Activation Method (SAM) will be compared with Treatment as Usual (TAU). We aim to include ten mental health care units in the Netherlands that will each participate as a control unit or an experimental unit. The patients will meet the following criteria: (1) a primary diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) according to the DSM-IV criteria; (2) 60 years or older; (3) able to read and write in Dutch; (4) have consented to participate via the informed consent procedure. Based on an effect size d = 0.7, we intend to include 51 participants per condition (n = 102). The SAM will be implemented within the experimental units as an adjunctive therapy to Treatment As Usual (TAU). All patients will be assessed at baseline, after eight weeks, and after six months. The primary outcome will be the level of depression measured by means of the Beck Depression Inventory (Dutch version). Other assessments will be activity level, mastery, costs, anxiety and quality of life. DISCUSSION: To our knowledge this is the first study to test the effect of Behavioral Activation as a nursing intervention in an inpatient elderly population. This research has been approved by the medical research ethics committee for health-care settings in the Netherlands (No. NL26878.029.09) and is listed in the Dutch Trial Register (NTR No.1809).
DOCUMENT
Background: COPD self-management is a complex behavior influenced by many factors. Despite scientific evidence that better disease outcomes can be achieved by enhancing self-management, many COPD patients do not respond to self-management interventions. To move toward more effective self-management interventions, knowledge of characteristics associated with activation for self-management is needed. The purpose of this study was to identify key patient and disease characteristics of activation for self-management. Methods: An explorative cross-sectional study was conducted in primary and secondary care in patients with COPD. Data were collected through questionnaires and chart reviews. The main outcome was activation for self-management, measured with the 13-item Patient Activation Measure (PAM). Independent variables were sociodemographic variables, self-reported health status, depression, anxiety, illness perception, social support, disease severity, and comorbidities. Results: A total of 290 participants (age: 67.2±10.3; forced expiratory volume in 1 second predicted: 63.6±19.2) were eligible for analysis. While poor activation for self-management (PAM-1) was observed in 23% of the participants, only 15% was activated for self-management (PAM-4). Multiple linear regression analysis revealed six explanatory determinants of activation for self-management (P,0.2): anxiety (β: -0.35; -0.6 to -0.1), illness perception (β: -0.2; -0.3 to -0.1), body mass index (BMI) (β: -0.4; -0.7 to -0.2), age (β: -0.1; -0.3 to -0.01), Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease stage (2 vs 1 β: -3.2; -5.8 to -0.5; 3 vs 1 β: -3.4; -7.1 to 0.3), and comorbidities (β: 0.8; -0.2 to 1.8), explaining 17% of the variance. Conclusion: This study showed that only a minority of COPD patients is activated for self-management. Although only a limited part of the variance could be explained, anxiety, illness perception, BMI, age, disease severity, and comorbidities were identified as key determinants of activation for self-management. This knowledge enables health care professionals to identify patients at risk of inadequate self-management, which is essential to move toward targeting and tailoring of self-management interventions. Future studies are needed to understand the complex causal mechanisms toward change in self-management
DOCUMENT
The historically developed practice of learning to play a music instrument from notes instead of by imitation or improvisation makes it possible to contrast two types of skilled musicians characterized not only by dissimilar performance practices, but also disparate methods of audiomotor learning. In a recent fMRI study comparing these two groups of musicians while they either imagined playing along with a recording or covertly assessed the quality of the performance, we observed activation of a right-hemisphere network of posterior superior parietal and dorsal premotor cortices in improvising musicians, indicating more efficient audiomotor transformation. In the present study, we investigated the detailed performance characteristics underlying the ability of both groups of musicians to replicate music on the basis of aural perception alone. Twenty-two classically trained improvising and score-dependent musicians listened to short, unfamiliar two-part excerpts presented with headphones. They played along or replicated the excerpts by ear on a digital piano, either with or without aural feedback. In addition, they were asked to harmonize or transpose some of the excerpts either to a different key or to the relative minor. MIDI recordings of their performances were compared with recordings of the aural model. Concordance was expressed in an audiomotor alignment score computed with the help of music information retrieval algorithms. Significantly higher alignment scores were found when contrasting groups, voices, and tasks. The present study demonstrates the superior ability of improvising musicians to replicate both the pitch and rhythm of aurally perceived music at the keyboard, not only in the original key, but also in other tonalities. Taken together with the enhanced activation of the right dorsal frontoparietal network found in our previous fMRI study, these results underscore the conclusion that the practice of improvising music can be associated with enhanced audiomotor transformation in response to aurally perceived music.
LINK
SOCIO-BEE proposes that community engagement and social innovation combined with Citizen Science (CS) through emerging technologies and playful interaction can bridge the gap between the capacity of communities to adopt more sustainable behaviours aligned with environmental policy objectives and between the citizen intentions and the real behaviour to act in favour of the environment (in this project, to reduce air pollution). Furthermore, community engagement can raise other citizens’ awareness of climate change and their own responses to it, through experimentation, better monitoring, and observation of the environment. This idea is emphasised in this project through the metaphor of bees’ behaviour (with queens, working and drone bees as main CS actors), interested stakeholders that aim at learning from results of CS evidence-based research (honey bears) and the Citizen Science hives as incubators of CS ideas and projects that will be tested in three different pilot sites (Ancona, Marousi and Ancona) and with different population: elderly people, everyday commuters and young adults, respectively. The SOCIO-BEE project ambitions the scalable activation of changes in citizens’ behaviour in support of pro-environment action groups, local sponsors, voluntary sector and policies in cities. This process will be carried out through low-cost technological innovations (CS enablers within the SOCIO BEE platform), together with the creation of proper instruments for institutions (Whitebook and toolkits with recommendations) that will contribute to the replication, upscaling, massive adoption and to the duration of the SOCIO-BEE project. The solution sustainability and maximum outreach will be ensured by proposing a set of public-private partnerships.For more information see the EU-website.
