COVID-19's impact on a community-based physical activity program for adults with moderate-to-severe TBI

PURPOSE

Physical activity (PA) is proposed for long-term problems after traumatic brain injury (TBI) with mood, quality of life, and participation. However, COVID-19 mitigation strategies resulted in widespread closures of community-based fitness centres, including one housing a peer-assisted PA program (TBI-Health). The purpose of this study was to provide an in-depth exploration of COVID-19's impact on the TBI-Health program for adults with moderate-to-severe TBI and determine how their PA behaviours could be supported in the pandemic.

METHODS

Interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed to collect and analyze data from semi-structured Zoom-facilitated interviews with seven female and nine male adults with moderate-to-severe TBI (including program participants and mentors).

RESULTS

Three major themes were identified. Need for PA after TBI included specific benefits of PA after TBI and desire for an adapted PA program. Lasting Impacts of the TBI-Health Program identified belonging to the TBI-Health community, benefits, and knowledge transfer from the program. Resilience and Loss through the Pandemic comprised the repercussions of COVID-19, loss of the PA program, adapting PA to the pandemic, and resilience after TBI.

CONCLUSION

This study provides insights about impacts of participating in community-based peer-assisted PA programs after moderate-to-severe TBI and ways to support PA in unforeseen circumstances.

Healthy Eating for Life English as a second language curriculum: applying the RE-AIM framework to evaluate a nutrition education intervention targeting cancer risk reduction

Medically underserved US immigrants are at an increased risk for death from preventable or curable cancers due to economic, cultural, and/or linguistic barriers to medical care. The purpose of this study was to describe the evaluation of the pilot study of the Healthy Eating for Life (HE4L) English as a second language curriculum. The Reach, Effectiveness Adoption, Implementation, Maintenance (RE-AIM) model was used to design a mixed-methods approach to the evaluation of the HE4L curriculum. Successful implementation was dependent upon enthusiastic teacher and manager support of the curriculum, teachers' ability to flexibly apply the curriculum to meet student needs, and researcher provision of curriculum workbooks. HE4L can be implemented successfully in various adult education settings to teach healthy eating behaviors and English language principles. Scale-up of HE4L may depend on the development of an online version of the curriculum to avoid the costs associated with printing and distributing curriculum materials.

African trypanosomes express an immunogenic protein with a repeating epitope of 24 amino acids

Infection with intracellular protozoan parasites such as Plasmodium, Leishmania and Trypanosoma cruzi induces a strong antibody response against proteins containing tandem repeats, suggesting that these repetitive epitopes may camouflage vulnerable parasite antigens from a 'protective' immune response. We tested this theory by immunoscreening a cDNA expression library of African trypanosomes, extracellular parasites that evade their hosts' immune response by antigenic variation, and found that the most frequently detected trypanosome protein contains more than 40 tandem copies of a 24-amino acid repeat with a consensus sequence of A-M-E-D-E-L-D-S-L-R-A-L-N-E-Q-Y-E-A-L-Q-R-T-N-A (net charge = -4). This protein is encoded on an mRNA of more than 20 kb and has slight sequence similarities with cytoskeletal, intermediate filament proteins in other organisms. Thus, protozoan proteins with tandemly repeating epitopes do not exist solely to divert the humoral immune response; they have other specific physiological functions for the parasites and affect the overall parasite-host interaction in unknown and perhaps different ways.