News

Duke demographers remember the life and work of James Vaupel, one of DUPRI's founders.

DUPRI’s Allison Stolte and Giovanna Merli, in collaboration with Ben Goldstein and other Duke School of Medicine colleagues, have published new research in Social Science & Medicine demonstrating the efficacy of using electronic health records (EHRs) to assess children's population health.

Their new paper, "Deep-seated psychological histories of COVID-19 vaccine hesitance and resistance," finds that vaccine resistance comes from a childhood legacy of mistrust. Using data from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, they show that vaccine-resistant and vaccine-hesitant participants had histories of adverse childhood experiences that foster mistrust, longstanding mental-health problems that foster misinterpretation of messaging, and early-emerging personality traits including tendencies toward extreme negative emotions, shutting down mentally under stress, nonconformism, and fatalism about health. As a result, encouraging the vaccine-resistant will take more than advertising.

Smoking during adolescence is one of a few health concerns a new study has linked with accelerated aging in adulthood. If you were obese, smoked or had a psychological disorder in adolescence, you might age faster than your peers as an adult, new research has found. Adolescents ages 11 to 15 who were obese, smoked cigarettes daily, or had a psychological disorder, such as anxiety, depression or ADHD, biologically aged nearly three months faster every year than their peers, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. The research used data from 910 people who were part of the Dunedin Study, a long-term investigation that tracked the health and behavior of participants born between April 1972 and March 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand, following them from age 3 until they were 45 years old. By age 45, the new study found that participants who had two or more of those three general health concerns -- smoking, obesity or psychological disorders -- as adolescents walked 11.2 centimeters per second slower, had an older brain age by two and a half years, and had an older facial age by nearly four years than those who didn't. The factors researchers used to measure aging included body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, blood tests, hormones for appetite regulation and fat storage, blood pressure, cholesterol, tooth decay, periodontal disease, cardiorespiratory fitness, and brain MRIs. The study also examined a fourth health concern, with very different results. Participants who had asthma during adolescence -- most of whom were treated -- weren't biologically older at age 45, compared with those without asthma. These findings remained constant even when the authors considered possible confounders such as socioeconomic disadvantages or adverse childhood experiences.

At 44, Pontzer’s life’s work as a biological anthropologist is counting calories. It’s not to lose weight—at 1.85 meters tall and about 75 kilograms (6 feet 1 inch and 165 pounds), with a passion for running and rock climbing, he is “a skinny to normal size dude,” in the words of an online reviewer of Pontzer’s 2021 book Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy. Pontzer is happy to expound on weight loss on The Dr. Oz Show and NPR, but his real mission is to understand how, alone among great apes, humans manage to have it all, energetically speaking: We have big brains, lengthy childhoods, many children, and long lives. The energy budget needed to support those traits involves trade-offs he’s trying to unravel, between energy spent on exercise, reproduction, stress, illness, and vital functions. By borrowing a method developed by physiologists studying obesity, Pontzer and colleagues systematically measure the total energy used per day by animals and people in various walks of life. The answers coming from their data are often surprising: Exercise doesn’t help you burn more energy on average; active hunter-gatherers in Africa don’t expend more energy daily than sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don’t burn more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body mass.

Effects of School Closures on Children: The pandemic profoundly affected American children with disruptions to their schooling and daily care. A new study by Anna Gassman-Pines, Elizabeth Ananat, John Fitz-Henley II, and Jane Leer found that service sector workers who had a young child reported disruption on 24 percent of days in fall 2020. The disruptions were more common in remote learning and had a negative impact on children’s behavior and on parenting mood and behavior.

A team of researchers found that a poverty reduction intervention had a direct impact on children’s brain development. Co-author of the study, Lisa Gennetian, is co-PI of the Baby’s First Years, a randomized control trial of a direct cash intervention and the source of the data for this new study. Findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), show that after one year of predictable, monthly unconditional cash transfer given to low-income families, 1-year-olds exhibited brain activity patterns associated with the development of thinking and learning.

A new study published in Science on Dec. 24 shows that early human foragers and farmers adopted an inefficient high-risk, high-reward strategy to find food. They spent more energy in pursuit of food than their great ape cousins, but brought home much more calorie-rich meals that could be shared with the rest of their group. This strategy allowed some to rest or tackle other tasks while food was being acquired.

DUPRI’s Giovanna Merli, UNC’s Ted Mouw and co-authors have a new paper in Demography which evaluates a novel network sampling approach for hidden and rare populations ("Network Sampling with Memory" [NSM]). They show the feasibility of using this approach to efficiently and cost-effectively recruit a sample of Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh-Durham area, the accuracy with which the sample represents this population of immigrants and the benefits of multiple forms of network ties collected as part of the survey for the study of immigrant social incorporation.

Kenneth Dodge, William McDougall distinguished professor of public policy studies, has received a 2021 Outstanding Achievement Prize in Mental Health from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF). Dodge is the BBRF Ruane Prizewinner for Outstanding Achievement in Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Research. He is the founding and past director of the Center for Child and Family Policy, the founder of Family Connects International and a leading scholar in the development and prevention of aggressive and violent behaviors.