In addition to the most pressing issues of the day, scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies focus their research on many regions of the world, from Beijing to Brazil.
Research Spotlight
The Ripple Effects of China’s College Expansion on American Universities
Researchers at SCCEI trace how China’s unprecedented expansion of higher education has impacted U.S. graduate education and local economies surrounding college towns.
While Nayib Bukele's style of authoritarianism may have some successes on paper, Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros argue that the regime is headed for a reckoning.
Time for Iran to Make a No-enrichment Nuclear Deal
The time has come for Iran’s leaders to reconsider their past intransigent, deceptive posture and instead pursue a nuclear power program that will benefit the Iranian people, write Abbas Milani and Siegfried Hecker.
Many U.S. states have legislated to allow nurse practitioners (NPs) to independently prescribe drugs. Critics contend that these moves will adversely affect quality of care.
Compartmental infectious disease (ID) models are often used to evaluate non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and vaccines. Such models rarely separate within-household and community transmission, potentially introducing biases in situations where multiple transmission routes exist. We formulated an approach that incorporates household structure into ID models, extending the work of House and Keeling.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),
September 18, 2023
Extreme air pollution events, like those from wildfires, negatively affect health through physiological responses but may also be salient enough to induce behavioral changes in individuals protecting their own health. The net impacts of these complex tradeoffs are poorly characterized. By joining the near-universe of emergency department visits in California from 2006 to 2017 with spatially and temporally resolved estimates of ambient wildfire smoke, we find total visits respond nonlinearly to increasing wildfire smoke concentrations, but that response differs by cause of visit. Total visits increase at lower concentrations but then decline at higher concentrations, suggesting that populations shift their behaviors following salient smoke periods. Whereas respiratory-related visits steadily increase, visits for accidental injuries and non-respiratory symptoms like stomach pains decline at high smoke concentrations.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, courts have limited the federal government’s ability to impose vaccination mandates; some judges have also questioned whether states must grant religious exemptions to vaccination mandates. The Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision in Groff v DeJoy2 concerning Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 raises new questions about the ability of private employers—including health care organizations—to enforce vaccination requirements for employees who have religious objections.
Objective To test the feasibility and effectiveness of a mindfulness-based intervention in rural-to-urban migrant Chinese children using trained community volunteers.
Method Migrant students ages 9 to 16 from 5 schools in Shanghai (N = 653) were randomly assigned to a mindfulness only group (n = 167), a mindfulness plus life skills group (n = 118), or a waitlist control group (n = 368). The first 2 groups received an 8-week mindfulness intervention delivered 1 hour weekly by trained community volunteers. The mindfulness plus life skills group received 8 additional hours of skills-based mentorship. Measurements on mindfulness, resilience, and anxiety and depression symptoms were collected before and after intervention. Multivariable regression analyses compared the intervention vs control groups.
Results Before intervention, there were no significant demographic or outcome measure differences between groups except that students in the intervention groups were slightly older. Students had relatively low levels of mindfulness and prosociality difficulties and similar degrees of depression and anxiety symptoms compared with prior studies. After intervention, no statistically significant differences were found in mean scores for mindfulness, resilience, anxiety, or depression in the intervention vs control groups.
Conclusion A volunteer-led mindfulness intervention did not significantly benefit migrant Chinese children after 8 weeks. More implementation research is needed for low-cost, scalable, and contextually effective mental health prevention programs.
Low- to moderate-intensity statins were associated with a greater reduction in LDL-C levels in older persons than younger persons and may be more appealing as initial treatment in older adults who are at increased risk for adverse events.
The authority of states and localities to require vaccination is a bedrock principle of public health law. Since 1905, when the US Supreme Court upheld compulsory smallpox inoculations, there has been sustained judicial consensus that the Constitution “does not import an absolute right to be…wholly freed from restraint.” Otherwise, “organized society could not exist with safety to its members.” Until recently, objections to mandatory vaccinations were confined to a small minority of US residents. However, civic values eroded during the COVID-19 pandemic, creating a groundswell of resistance. With state legislatures now sharply limiting public health authority and a bevy of legal challenges mounted vaccination mandates—an old and highly effective public health tool—face legal uncertainty that only a few years ago seemed inconceivable.
Society for Medical Decision Making,
July 18, 2023
Under the current US kidney allocation system, older candidates receive a disproportionately small share of deceased donor kidneys despite a reserve of potentially usable kidneys that could shorten their wait times. To consider potential health gains from increasing access to kidneys for these candidates, we developed and calibrated a microsimulation model of the transplantation process and long-term outcomes for older deceased donor kidney transplant candidates.
