Data Analysis and Causal Loops

BACKGROUND: Systems thinking can be used as a participatory data collection and analysis tool to understand complex implementation contexts and their dynamics with interventions, and it can support the selection of tailored and effective implementation actions. A few previous studies have applied systems thinking methods, mainly causal loop diagrams, to prioritize interventions and to illustrate the respective implementation context. The present study aimed to explore how systems thinking methods can help decision-makers (1) understand locally specific causes and effects of a key issue and how they are interlinked, (2) identify the most relevant interventions and best fit in the system, and (3) prioritize potential interventions and contextually analyse the system and potential interventions...

Current water footprint assessment methods make a meaningful assessment of livestock water consumption difficult as they are mainly static, thus poorly adaptable to understanding future water consumption and requirements. They lack the integration of fundamental ruminant nutrition and growth equations within a dynamic context that accounts for short- and long-term behaviour and time delays associated with economically significant beef-producing areas. The current study utilised the System Dynamics methodology to conceptualise a water footprint for beef cattle within a dynamic and mechanistic modelling framework...

Driving behavior intervention is a dominant traffic safety countermeasure being implemented that has substantially reduced crash occurrence. However, during implementation, the intervention strategy faces the curse of dimensionality as there are multiple candidate intervention locations with various intervention measures and options. Quantifying the interventions' safety benefits and further implementing the most effective ones could avoid too frequent interventions which may lead to counterproductive safety impacts...

OBJECTIVE: Genome-wide association studies have identified 1q22 as a susceptibility locus for cerebral small vessel diseases (CSVDs), including non-lobar intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) and lacunar stroke. In the present study we performed targeted high-depth sequencing of 1q22 in ICH cases and controls to further characterize this locus and prioritize potential causal mechanisms, which remain unknown. METHODS: 95,000 base pairs spanning 1q22 , including SEMA4A, SLC25A44 and PMF1 / PMF1-BGLAP were sequenced in 1,055 spontaneous ICH cases (534 lobar and 521 non-lobar) and 1,078 controls...

Group model building is a participatory workshop technique used in system dynamics for developing community consensus to address complex problems by consensus building on individual assumptions. This study examines changes in individual mental models of the complex problem of childhood obesity following participation in group model building (GMB), as part of a larger community-based system dynamics project. Data are drawn from GMB participants across six community sites in the Whole of Systems Trial of Prevention Strategies for Childhood Obesity (WHO STOPS) in rural and regional Victoria, Australia...

Endogenous microRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that perform post-transcriptional regulatory roles across diverse cellular processes, including defence responses to biotic stresses. Pseudocercospora musae , the causal agent of Sigatoka leaf spot disease in banana ( Musa spp.), is an important fungal pathogen of the plant. Illumina HiSeq 2500 sequencing of small RNA libraries derived from leaf material in Musa acuminata subsp. burmannicoides , var. Calcutta 4 (resistant) after inoculation with fungal conidiospores and equivalent non-inoculated controls revealed 202 conserved miRNAs from 30 miR-families together with 24 predicted novel miRNAs...

INTRODUCTION: Van der Woude Syndrome (VWS) is an autosomal dominant disorder responsible for 2% of all syndromic orofacial clefts (OFCs) with IRF6 being the primary causal gene (70%). Cases may present with lip pits and either cleft lip, cleft lip with cleft palate, or cleft palate, with marked phenotypic discordance even among individuals carrying the same mutation. This suggests that genetic or epigenetic modifiers may play additional roles in the syndrome's etiology and variability in expression...

Access to inclusive sanitation for people with disabilities (PWDs) remains a global challenge, including in Indonesia, where 10-15% of its population is disabled. Inclusive sanitation facilities can be achieved when PWDs are involved in the sanitation-related decision-making process, e.g., designing toilet that meets their needs. This study aims to investigate the situation of the sanitation facility in houses of PWDs and understand knowledge, attitude, and practices related to PWD participation in sanitation programs using a case study in two provinces in Indonesia: Nusa Tenggara Barat and Nusa Tenggara Timur...

The relationship between mean speed and crash likelihood is unclear in the literature. The contradictory findings can be attributed to the masking effects of the confounding variables in this association. Moreover, the unobserved heterogeneity has almost been criticized as a reason behind the current inconclusive results. This research provides an effort to develop a model that analyzes the mean speed-crash frequency relationship by crash severity and type. Also, the confounding and mediation effects of the environment, driver, and traffic-related attributes have been considered...

Unhealthy dietary habits and physical inactivity are major risk factors of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) globally. The objective of this paper was to describe the role of dietary practices and physical activity in the interaction of the social determinants of NCDs in Nepal, a developing economy. The study was a qualitative study design involving two districts in Nepal, whereby data was collected via key informant interviews (n = 63) and focus group discussions (n = 12). Thematic analysis of the qualitative data was performed, and a causal loop diagram was built to illustrate the dynamic interactions of the social determinants of NCDs based on the themes...

The idea of linking stressors, services providing units (SPUs), and ecosystem services (ES) is ubiquitous in the literature, although is currently not applied in areas contaminated with heavy metals (HMs), This integrative literature review introduces the general form of a deterministic conceptual model of the cross-scale effect of HMs on biogeochemical services by SPUs with a feedback loop, a cross-scale heuristic concept of resilience, and develops a method for applying the conceptual model. The objectives are 1) to identify the clusters of existing research about HMs effects on ES, biodiversity, and resilience to HMs stress, 2) to map the scientific fields needed for the conceptual model's implementation, identify institutional constraints for inter-disciplinary cooperation, and propose solutions to surpass them, 3) to describe how the complexity of the cause-effect chain is reflected in the research hypotheses and objectives and extract methodological consequences, and 4) to describe how the conceptual model can be implemented...

Objectives: Globally, the burden of disease caused by alcohol use has been steadily increasing, including in Thailand. In this study, we aim to test the effectiveness of Anderson et al.'s suggested three approaches to change the collective social norms, which comprise of: (1) providing information and an understanding about alcohol use behaviour, its causes and distribution; (2) focusing strategies on groups rather than individuals; and (3) strengthening supportive laws, regulations and approaches...

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified over 100 loci associated with osteoarthritis (OA) risk, but the majority of OA risk variants are non-coding, making it difficult to identify the impacted genes for further study and therapeutic development. To address this need, we used a multi-omic approach and genome editing to identify and functionally characterize potential OA risk genes. Computational analysis of GWAS and ChIP-seq data revealed that chondrocyte regulatory loci are enriched for OA risk variants...

The development of high-throughput omics technologies has enabled the quantification of vast amounts of genes and gene products in the whole genome. Pathway enrichment analysis (PEA) provides an intuitive solution for extracting biological insights from massive amounts of data. Topology-based pathway analysis (TPA) represents the latest generation of PEA methods, which exploit pathway topology in addition to lists of differentially expressed genes and their expression profiles. A subset of these TPA methods, such as BPA, BNrich, and PROPS, reconstruct pathway structures by training Bayesian networks (BNs) from canonical biological pathways, providing superior representations that explain causal relationships between genes...

Introduction: This paper explores the capabilities that contribute to community transformation and the common pathways followed by communities in the 100 Million Healthier Lives SCALE (Spreading Community Accelerators through Learning and Evaluation) initiative in their transformation journeys towards a "Culture of Health". Methods: Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), from 2016 to 2020, between 18 to 24 community coalitions nationwide participated in SCALE, the goal of which was to co-design, implement, test, and scale up a model called the Community of Solutions (COS) Framework, that built community capacity around a set of skills and behaviors to advance culture change and create sustainable improvement in health, well-being, and equity...

BACKGROUND: Alterations in the MYH7 gene can cause cardiac and skeletal myopathies. MYH7-related skeletal myopathies are extremely rare, and the vast majority of causal variants in the MYH7 gene are predicted to alter the rod domain of the of ß-cardiac myosin molecule, resulting in distal muscle weakness as the predominant manifestation. Here we describe two unrelated patients harboring an in-frame deletion in the MYH7 gene that is predicted to result in deletion of a single amino acid (p...

Changes in serum inflammatory factors occur throughout the onset and multiple myeloma (MM) progression, the feedback loops make it harder to distinguish between causes and effects. In the present study, we performed a bidirectional summary-level Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to elucidate the causal relationships of C-reactive protein (CRP) and inflammatory regulators with MM. Summary-level data of genetic variants associated with inflammation were extracted from two genome-wide association studies (GWASs) on CRP and human cytokines, while data on MM was from large meta-analyses of GWASs among 372 617 UK Biobank participants...

Despite extensive research, the functional architecture of the subregions of the dorsal posterior parietal cortex (PPC) involved in sensorimotor processing is far from clear. Here, we draw a thorough picture of the large-scale functional organization of the PPC to disentangle the fronto-parietal networks mediating visuomotor functions. To this aim, we reanalyzed available human functional magnetic resonance imaging data collected during the execution of saccades, hand, and foot pointing, and we combined individual surface-based activation, resting-state functional connectivity, and effective connectivity analyses...

Firearm violence is a major health problem in the United States that clusters asymmetrically across geographic and demographic lines, and the persistence and unequal distribution of firearm violence suggests that novel causal explanations and theoretical frameworks may be warranted to guide preventive strategies. Thus, this study explores the following three hypotheses that are grounded in complex systems theory: 1) trends in firearm homicides risks have shifted heterogeneously in Harris County across endemic degree of risk; 2) firearm homicides clusters have remained resilient in Harris County across the study time period; and 3), the associations between known contextual correlates of firearm homicides and the distribution of firearm homicides risks in Harris County have manifested as nonlinear...

Contextual influences on social behavior and affective dynamics are not well understood in schizophrenia. We examined the role of social context on emotions, and the motivation to interact in the future, using dynamic network analysis of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data. Participants included 105 outpatients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (SZ) and 76 healthy comparators (HC) who completed 7 days, 7 times a day of EMA. Dynamic networks were constructed using EMA data to visualize causal interactions between emotional states, motivation, and context (e...