Do physical activity and sedentary behavior relate to cardio-metabolic risk factor clustering in indigenous Siberian adults?

Bringing the lab bench to the field: Point-of-care testing for enhancing health research and stakeholder engagement in rural/remote, indigenous, and resource-limited contexts

Point-of-care testing (POCT) allows researchers and health-care providers to bring the lab bench to the field, providing essential health information that can be leveraged to improve health care, accessibility, and understanding across clinical and research settings. Gaps in health service access are most pronounced in what we term RIR settings-rural/remote regions, involving Indigenous peoples, and/or within resource-limited settings. In these contexts, morbidity and mortality from infectious and non-communicable diseases are disproportionately higher due to numerous geographic, economic, political, and sociohistorical factors. Human biologists and global health scholars are well-positioned to contribute on-the-ground-level insights that can serve to minimize global health inequities and POCT has the potential to augment such approaches. While the clinical benefits of POCT include increasing health service access by bringing testing, rapid diagnosis, and treatment to underserved communities with limited pathways to centralized laboratory testing, POCT also provides added benefits to both health-focused researchers and their participants. Through portable, minimally invasive devices, researchers can provide actionable health data to participants by coupling POCT with population-specific health education, discussing results and their implications, creating space for participants to voice concerns, and facilitating linkages to treatment. POCT can also strengthen human biology research by shedding light on questions of evolutionary and biocultural importance. Here, we expand on the epidemiological and research value, as well as practical and ethical challenges of POCT across stakeholders (i.e., participant, community, health researcher, and trainee). Finally, we emphasize the immense opportunities of POCT for fostering collaborative research and enhancing access to health delivery and information and, by extension, helping to mitigate persistent global health inequities.

The cross-sectional associations between objectively measured sedentary time and cardiometabolic health markers in adults - a systematic review with meta-analysis component

Sedentary time is viewed as an independent risk factor for adverse cardiometabolic health (CMH). No systematic review and meta-analysis on the cross-sectional associations between objectively measured sedentary time and CMH markers has been conducted. PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection were searched for papers that examined the cross-sectional association between objectively measured sedentary time and CMH markers in adults. Forty-six papers met the inclusion criteria. The included papers had a combined sample size of 70,576 and an age range of 18-87 years. To examine the effect of increased levels of sedentary time on CMH markers, data on effect sizes and moderators were extracted, where possible. By pooling the unadjusted data from the included papers, increased sedentary time was shown to have a significant detrimental association with fasting glucose (Δ = 0.12, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.02, 0.23), fasting insulin (Δ = 0.19, 95% CI: 0.06, 0.32), triglycerides (Δ = 0.25, 95% CI: 0.14, 0.37), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (Δ = -0.20, 95% CI: -0.28, -0.13) and waist circumference (Δ = 0.25, 95% CI: 0.15, 0.35). How sedentary time was quantified and the device used to measure sedentary time significantly influence the size of the effect reported. Future interventions focused on both decreasing sedentary time and increasing physical activity may be the most effective strategy to improve CMH.