I'm happy to announce that I will be joining
@Stanford
's Biomedical Data Science PhD program
@StanfordDBDS
as a
@KnightHennessy
scholar! It's great to be back in the bay area, and looking forward to the journey ahead!
We have a new study on the mental health of adolescents exposed to the ongoing war in Ukraine, out now on
@JAMAPediatrics
! We surveyed ~10,000 adolescents living in regions across Ukraine or displaced abroad.
1/ New research published in
@JAMAPediatrics
with Drs Roch Nianogo,
@Dr_KID_
, and
@ki_endoepi
! We evaluated the trends in adolescents' obesity prevalence by socioeconomic status in the US.
Received a beautiful gift from the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association today. I’m honored to be part of the effort to help the people of Ukraine. More work to be done!
We published an article on
@TheLancet
on the public health consequences of war. We argue that war may affect children from the very beginning from life and can cripple societies for years to come. This applies not only the war in
#Ukraine
but to any war.
🧵 New Special Communication examines drawing causal inferences about the effects of interventions from observational studies in medical journals and suggests a framework that might be used.
Great paper. The authors find that making child health care completely free discontinuously boosts demand. As a pediatrician, although I feel that essential child health services like immunizations should be free, sometimes low-value pediatric care is overutilized.
Our paper (with Toshi Iizuka
@toshi_iizuka
) on the zero-price effect is out at AEJ applied
@AEAjournals
!
Q. Do consumers demand disproportionally more if the price is zero instead of a very low price?
A. Yes, zero price is special. 1/n
The application to join the 2025 cohort of Knight-Hennessy scholars is now open 🎉 Begin your journey to greater leadership as part of the largest, university-wide, fully-endowed graduate fellowship program.
Volume 27 is now live! Medical education,
#COVID19
vaccination choices and mental-health in vulnerable populations are some of the topics examined. Read the full issue here:
Our new paper was published on Pediatrics, the official journal of
@AmerAcadPeds
. We show that armed conflicts may impair healthy early childhood development, especially when children are chronically exposed.
1/ New research published in European Psychiatry
@EP_Editors
! We evaluated the mental health of staff of a prominent Ukrainian helpline during the 2022 war. We found signs of compromised mental health in a majority of the participants. A thread:
I went to a preschool for a well-child check-up and was amazed to see a dozen 4-year-olds seated in a straight line with partitions during lunch, eating silently. And all of them were masked when they weren’t eating. Wow.
We interviewed 37 out of all 61 psychiatric hospitals in Ukraine. We found that hospital admissions were reduced by an average of 23.5% during the war (in April 2022) compared to before the war. 3/n
"At stake is not only the lives of adults involved in war, but the lives of children and the next generation too."
Correspondence from Norbert Skokauskas and colleagues.
BREAKING: Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — one of the most consequential leaders in Japan’s postwar history — died Friday after being shot while he was giving a stump speech in the city of Nara.
In sum, we found that the mental health service structure in Ukraine has been severely damaged early in the 2022 invasion, and it's safe to say that Ukraine is in a public mental health emergency. 6/n
Important work by a friend
@Osawa_Itsuki
, who investigated changes in health care utilization for chronic diseases amidst the pandemic. In children, this could translate to well-child visits and routine vaccinations.
6/ Although the increase in suicides cannot be attributed to the pandemic alone, we think our findings underscore the importance of providing continual mental health support for youth in the pandemic setting.
War is never the answer, even from a public health POV: it could affect every aspect of a person’s health from early childhood development and orphanhood to mortality.
@DanWuori
Thank you for reading our work, Dan. The question now is how can we provide early childhood education to these children, which we think is an important mediator of the delay in ECD from exposure to conflicts.