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The Australian disability workforce has grown, and there is compelling evidence that peer work has a number of valuable impacts. Despite these apparent opportunities, there continue to be high levels of unemployment among people with disability and failure to draw on the assets of people with disability in Australian workplaces. To understand these ostensible missed opportunities, this study examined the ways in which lived experience was described as an asset in disability workforce recruitment. Advertisements for positions in New South Wales, Australia, that referred to lived experience or peer work and disability were collected over a 3‐month period. Through a process of content analysis, we found that there were more employment opportunities for people with lived experience of mental illness than for other types of disability. Community engagement was a key function, and peer workers were described as complementary to professionals. Recruitment processes for lived experience jobs were not necessarily accessible. We recommend systemic reforms to facilitate recognition of lived experience as a valuable criterion for disability sector employment and to harness the benefits of a disability peer workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on why people use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) shows clients value the CAM consultation, where they feel listened to and empowered to control their own health. Such 'empowerment' through CAM use is often theorised as reflecting wider neoliberal imperatives of self‐responsibility. CAM users' perspectives are well studied, but there has been little sociological analysis of interactions within the CAM consultation. Specifically, it is unclear how user empowerment/self‐knowledge relates to the CAM practitioner's power and expert knowledge. We address this using audio‐recorded consultations and interviews with CAM practitioners to explore knowledge use in client‐practitioner interactions and its meaning for practitioners. Based on our analysis and drawing on Foucault (1973), The Birth of the Clinic: an archaeology of medical perception and Antonovsky (1979), Health, Stress and Coping, we theorise the operation of power/knowledge in the CAM practitioner‐client dyad by introducing the concept of the 'salutogenic gaze'. This gaze operates in the CAM consultation with disciplining and productive effects that are oriented towards health promotion. Practitioners listen to and value clients' stories, but their gaze also incorporates surveillance and normalisation, aided by technologies that may or may not be shared with clients. Because the salutogenic gaze is ultimately transferred from practitioner to client, it empowers CAM users while simultaneously reinforcing the practitioner's power as a health expert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Down syndrome (DS) is associated with immune dysregulation and a high risk of early onset Alzheimer's disease (AD). Complement is a key part of innate immunity and driver of pathological inflammation, including neuroinflammation in AD. Complement dysregulation has been reported in DS; however, the pattern of dysregulation and its relationship to AD risk is unclear. Methods: Plasma levels of 14 complement biomarkers were measured in 71 adults with DS and 46 controls to identify DS‐associated dysregulation; impact of apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 genotype, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in CLU and CR1, and dementia on complement biomarkers was assessed. Results: Plasma levels of complement activation products (TCC, iC3b), proteins (C1q, C3, C9), and regulators (C1 inhibitor, factor H, FHR4, clusterin) were significantly elevated in DS versus controls while FI and sCR1 were significantly lower. In DS with AD (n = 13), C3 and FI were significantly decreased compared to non‐AD DS (n = 58). Neither APOE genotype nor CLU SNPs impacted complement levels, while rs6656401 in CR1 significantly impacted plasma sCR1 levels. Conclusions: Complement is dysregulated in DS, likely reflecting the generalized immune dysregulation state; measurement may help identify inflammatory events in individuals with DS. Complement biomarkers differed in DS with and without AD and may aid diagnosis and/or prediction. Highlights: Complement is significantly dysregulated in plasma of people with DS who show changes in levels of multiple complement proteins compared to controls.People with DS and dementia show evidence of additional complement dysregulation with significantly lower levels of C3 and factor I compared to those without dementia.rs6656401 in CR1 was associated with significantly elevated sCR1 plasma levels in DS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complement, a critical defence against pathogens, has been implicated as a driver of pathology in COVID‐19. Complement activation products are detected in plasma and tissues and complement blockade is considered for therapy. To delineate roles of complement in immunopathogenesis, we undertook the largest comprehensive study of complement in COVID‐19 to date, comprehensive profiling of 16 complement biomarkers, including key components, regulators and activation products, in 966 plasma samples from 682 hospitalized COVID‐19 patients collected across the hospitalization period as part of the UK ISARIC4C (International Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium) study. Unsupervised clustering of complement biomarkers mapped to disease severity and supervised machine learning identified marker sets in early samples that predicted peak severity. Compared to healthy controls, complement proteins and activation products (Ba, iC3b, terminal complement complex) were significantly altered in COVID‐19 admission samples in all severity groups. Elevated alternative pathway activation markers (Ba and iC3b) and decreased alternative pathway regulator (properdin) in admission samples were associated with more severe disease and risk of death. Levels of most complement biomarkers were reduced in severe disease, consistent with consumption and tissue deposition. Latent class mixed modelling and cumulative incidence analysis identified the trajectory of increase of Ba to be a strong predictor of peak COVID‐19 disease severity and death. The data demonstrate that early‐onset, uncontrolled activation of complement, driven by sustained and progressive amplification through the alternative pathway amplification loop is a ubiquitous feature of COVID‐19, further exacerbated in severe disease. These findings provide novel insights into COVID‐19 immunopathogenesis and inform strategies for therapeutic intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate assessment of SARS‐CoV‐2 immunity is critical in evaluating vaccine efficacy and devising public health policies. Whilst the exact nature of effective immunity remains incompletely defined, SARS‐CoV‐2‐specific T‐cell responses are a critical feature that will likely form a key correlate of protection against COVID‐19. Here, we developed and optimized a high‐throughput whole blood‐based assay to determine the T‐cell response associated with prior SARS‐CoV‐2 infection and/or vaccination amongst 231 healthy donors and 68 cancer patients. Following overnight in vitro stimulation with SARS‐CoV‐2‐specific peptides, blood plasma samples were analysed for TH1‐type cytokines. Highly significant differential IFN‐γ+/IL‐2+ SARS‐CoV‐2‐specific T‐cell responses were seen amongst previously infected COVID‐19‐positive healthy donors in comparison with unknown / naïve individuals (p < 0·0001). IFN‐γ production was more effective at identifying asymptomatic donors, demonstrating higher sensitivity (96·0% vs. 83·3%) but lower specificity (84·4% vs. 92·5%) than measurement of IL‐2. A single COVID‐19 vaccine dose induced IFN‐γ and/or IL‐2 SARS‐CoV‐2‐specific T‐cell responses in 116 of 128 (90·6%) healthy donors, reducing significantly to 27 of 56 (48·2%) when measured in cancer patients (p < 0·0001). A second dose was sufficient to boost T‐cell responses in the majority (90·6%) of cancer patients, albeit IFN‐γ+ responses were still significantly lower overall than those induced in healthy donors (p = 0·034). Three‐month post‐vaccination T‐cell responses also declined at a faster rate in cancer patients. Overall, this cost‐effective standardizable test ensures accurate and comparable assessments of SARS‐CoV‐2‐specific T‐cell responses amenable to widespread population immunity testing, and identifies individuals at greater need of booster vaccinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: Suicide prevention remains a priority in rural and remote Australia, where suicide rates continue to be higher than those in urban communities. This commentary describes the Good SPACE suicide prevention program, and the lessons learned from delivering this program over a 14‐year period. Context: The Good SPACE program has been operating in rural New South Wales since 2007. The program focuses on educating rural community members to recognise the signs of suicide vulnerability, and how to take appropriate action if they encounter someone considering suicide. Approach: Communities are selected to receive Good SPACE training in consultation with key stakeholder organisations, or by request from communities. Across the life of the program, key challenges in its administration have included short‐term funding arrangements and staff turnover. Strengths have included the ability to adapt content to meet the needs of rural communities (eg from an initial focus on helping farmers during periods of drought, to a broader focus on all rural residents and a wider range of adversities). As the program moves forward, emphasis will be placed on harder‐to‐reach populations, including males and those with lower mental health literacy. Conclusion: The Good SPACE program has ongoing funding to adapt its content and continue administration through the Rural Adversity Mental Health Program (https://www.ramhp.com.au/). The lessons learned throughout the life of the program might be of use to other organisations aiming to provide community‐based education programs in rural and remote communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reminding us of the importance of the narratives and stories we tell each other and their numerous effects on us, Kate Davies, co‐founder of the Unknown Fields travelling design studio, and art and architecture collective Liquid Factory, introduces us to architecture that is a synthesis of the real and virtual worlds that are starting to seamlessly permeate our environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This evaluation considered the potential of We‐Yarn, a suicide prevention gatekeeper training workshop, to contribute to Aboriginal suicide prevention in rural New South Wales. Design: A mixed methods approach included surveys, in‐depth interviews and workshop observations. Setting: Aboriginal suicide prevention training in rural New South Wales, Australia. Participants: Attendees at We‐Yarn training. Intervention: We‐Yarn provided culturally safe suicide prevention skills training for Aboriginal people and for those who work with Aboriginal communities and persons in rural New South Wales. Training workshops were delivered across multiple locations for 6 hours in one day. Workshops were facilitated by two facilitators with lived and professional experience; one Aboriginal and one non‐Aboriginal facilitator. We‐Yarn content was developed by staff from the Centre for Rural and Remote Mental Health, and in consultation with Aboriginal Elders and representatives of Aboriginal Medical Services to ensure relevance and cultural appropriateness. Main outcome measures: Pre and post‐workshop surveys captured capacity and participants' confidence in identifying and responding to a person at risk of suicide. Interviews explored participants' experiences of workshops, implementation of learning, and attitudes regarding social and emotional wellbeing and suicide. Observations detailed the workshop environment, participants' engagement, and participants' responses to facilitators and content. Results: We‐Yarn was considered culturally appropriate. Participants responded to facilitators' lived experiences. Participants reported significant improvements in understanding the links between cultural strengths, social and emotional wellbeing and suicide prevention. However, health professionals with existing knowledge wanted a stronger focus on clinical training. Conclusion: We‐Yarn promoted discussion of suicide prevention within a holistic health framework, building on participants' pre‐existing knowledge about social and emotional wellbeing. Importantly, skilful facilitators with lived experience were vital to the success of the workshops. Consideration should be given to attracting people with low suicide prevention knowledge to the workshops, developing tailored workshops for health professionals and ensuring prolonged engagement with communities. Multifaceted and long term responses in addition to this type of training are important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Mental health peer support workers draw on lived experience to provide benefit to people experiencing mental distress. People living in rural areas are less likely than their urban counterparts to seek professional help for psychological distress. The aim of this study was to explore the perceived value of rural peer support workers as facilitators to rural mental health help-seeking. Design: Data were gathered through a cross-sectional survey distributed by a social media boosted post. Setting: A total of 349 "small" rural towns in New South Wales as defined by the Modified Monash Model classification system as MMM5. Participants: A total of 765 adult, rural residents completed the survey. Main outcome measure(s): Participants were asked to select, from a list of potential facilitators, those which they felt would make mental health help-seeking easier or harder. Results: Study participants felt that a help provider with lived experience of mental illness or distress would make mental health help-seeking easier. Similarly, rural life experience in a help provider was thought to facilitate help-seeking. Participants also believed that flexible and informal meeting settings would make it easier to seek help for mental distress. Conclusions: Engaging rural mental health peer support workers in a flexible/informal setting, as a complement to conventional health service provision, may increase rural help-seeking for mental distress. Increased mental health help-seeking is likely to have a positive impact on instances of serious mental illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional chondrosarcoma is the most common primary bone tumor in adults. Prognosis corresponds with tumor grade but remains variable, especially for individuals with grade (G) II disease. There are currently no biomarkers available for monitoring or prognostication of chondrosarcoma. Circulating tumor DNA (ct DNA) has recently emerged as a promising biomarker for a broad range of tumor types. To date, little has been done to study the presence of ct DNA and its potential utility in the management of sarcomas, including chondrosarcoma. In this study, we have assessed ctDNA levels in a cohort of 71 patients, 32 with sarcoma, including 29 individuals with central chondrosarcoma (CS) and 39 with locally aggressive and benign bone and soft tissue tumors, using digital PCR. In patients with CS, ctDNA was detected in pretreatment samples in 14/29 patients, which showed clear correlation with tumor grade as demonstrated by the detection of ctDNA in all patients with GIII and dedifferentiated disease ( n = 6) and in 8/17 patients with GII disease, but never associated with GI CS. Notably detection of ctDNA preoperatively in GII disease was associated with a poor outcome. A total of 14 patients with CS had ctDNA levels assessed at multiple time points and in most patients there was a clear reduction following surgical removal. This research lays the foundation for larger studies to assess the utility of ctDNA for chondrosarcoma diagnosis, prognostication, early detection of residual disease and monitoring disease progression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gray M., Davies K., Butcher L. Finding the right connections: Peer support within a community-based mental health service This article reports on a qualitative study that examined the organisational enablers and barriers to implementing peer support work in an Australian, rural, community-based mental health service. Interviews with 19 peer and non-peer staff were conducted to identify attitudes towards peer support and whether there were organisational values, practices and strategies that might support the implementation of peer support. The findings revealed that peer support workers were valued for their ability to build trusting connections with clients and to accept client choice in a non-judgemental way. However, peer support workers tended to 'fill service gaps' within intensive, administrative case-management environments. These findings highlight the importance of an organisational-wide approach to integrating peer support, where the responsibilities for adopting new ways of working fall to all staff, not just the peer support workers themselves. Key Practitioner Message: • Practitioners placed high value on the peer support workers on their teams due to their unique personalised engagement with clients; • The roles of peer support workers were poorly understood by team members; • Organisational integration of peer support principles could improve the way all staff engage with clients to reflect a recovery orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models of service-user participation have derived from citizenship or consumerist agendas, neither of which has achieved the structural reforms important for the most marginalised social work clients. This article proposes Fraser's model of 'parity of participation' as an appropriately multifaceted frame for capturing the social justice aspirations of service-user participation. A qualitative case study compared the experiences and expectations of people who had used Australian mental health services with a sample who had used Australian homelessness services to examine their expectations of participation at individual and representative levels. The findings reinforce concerns from Fraser's research about the tendency for identity-based consumerist notions of participation to reify group identity. This leads to tokenistic service-user involvement strategies that have little impact on participation at a structural level. Fraser's parity of participation is shown to have untested potential to reshape service-user participation to meet the social justice aspirations of social work clients. Key Practitioner Message: ● Innovative, service-user driven strategies for collaboration will be those which challenge existing power structures; ● Service users want their contributions to decision making to generate identifiable change in the system of social services; ● The success of service-user participation strategies might be the extent to which political, economic and cultural opportunities are enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on imitation in infancy has primarily focused on what and when infants imitate. More recently, however, the question why infants imitate has received renewed attention, partly motivated by the finding that infants sometimes selectively imitate the actions of others and sometimes faithfully imitate, or overimitate, the actions of others. The present study evaluates the hypothesis that this varying imitative behavior is related to infants' social traits. To do so, we assessed faithful and selective imitation longitudinally at 12 and 15 months, and extraversion at 15 months. At both ages, selective imitation was dependent on the causal structure of the act. From 12 to 15 months, selective imitation decreased while faithful imitation increased. Furthermore, infants high in extraversion were more faithful imitators than infants low in extraversion. These results demonstrate that the onset of faithful imitation is earlier than previously thought, but later than the onset of selective imitation. The observed relation between extraversion and faithful imitation supports the hypothesis that faithful imitation is driven by the social motivations of the infant. We call this relation the King Louie Effect: like the orangutan King Louie in The Jungle Book, infants imitate faithfully due to a growing interest in the interpersonal nature of interactions. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://youtu.be/qlnIof1k-u8. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As leaders of the Unknown Fields Division at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, Liam Young and Kate Davies take their students on trips to the end of the earth. Cataloguing extreme territories, they investigate the role of design in developing new cultural relationships. Fictional speculation is used as an instrument for understanding emerging environmental and technological futures, in a process of experiencing, chronicling and, ultimately, reimagining the urban and the remote, and charting global flows and trajectories. Here they describe a speculative supply chain that begins below the surface of the Western Desert in outback Australia, and continues to the Arctic 'Northwest Passage' and on to London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reaction of 5-nitroisophthalic acid (H2NIA) with Gd(NO3)3·6H2O in DMF afforded three new metal-organic frameworks: [Gd(NIA)1.5(DMF)2]·DMF (I), [Gd2(NIA)3(DMF)4]· xH2O (II) and [Gd4(NIA)6(DMF)5.5(H2O)3]·4DMF·H2O (III). These compounds can be prepared through a variety of methods. Compounds (I) and (II) are more reproducibly formed than compound (III). Network analysis revealed (I) to have a (412.63)- pcu topology, while (II) displays a (42.84)(42.84)- pts topology. Compound (III) was found to present the uncommon 4,5,6T11 topological net, which combines aspects of both the pcu and pts topologies. The short symbol of this net is (44.62)(46.64)2(48.66.8). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article gives an account of how Kate Davies' and Emmanuel Vercruysse's site specific performance piece sought out the psychological power of the forest of Kielder in Northumbria.

The reaction of 5-nitroisophthalic acid (H(2)NIA) with Gd(NO(3))(3)·6H(2)O in DMF afforded three new metal-organic frameworks: [Gd(NIA)(1.5)(DMF)(2)]·DMF (I), [Gd(2)(NIA)(3)(DMF)(4)]·xH(2)O (II) and [Gd(4)(NIA)(6)(DMF)(5.5)(H(2)O)(3)]·4DMF·H(2)O (III). These compounds can be prepared through a variety of methods. Compounds (I) and (II) are more reproducibly formed than compound (III). Network analysis revealed (I) to have a (4(12).6(3))-pcu topology, while (II) displays a (4(2).8(4))(4(2).8(4))-pts topology. Compound (III) was found to present the uncommon 4,5,6T11 topological net, which combines aspects of both the pcu and pts topologies. The short symbol of this net is (4(4).6(2))(4(6).6(4))(2)(4(8).6(6).8).