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1. Public Health Roles in Addressing Commercial Determinants of Health

   https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-052220-020447  

   Lee, Kelley; Freudenberg, Nicholas (April 2022, Annual Review of Public Health)

   The shared challenges posed by the production and distribution of health-harming products have led to growing recognition of the need for policy learning and transfer across problems, populations, and social contexts. The commercial determinants of health (CDoH) can serve as a unifying concept to describe the population health consequences arising from for-profit actors and activities, along with the social structures that sustain them. Strategies to mitigate harms from CDoH have focused on behavioral change, regulation, fiscal policies, consumer and citizen activism, and litigation. While there is evidence of effective measures for each strategy, approaches that combine strategies are generally more impactful. Filling gaps in evidence can inform ways of adapting these strategies to specific populations and social contexts. Overall, CDoH are addressed most effectively not through siloed efforts to reduce consumption of health-harming products, but instead as a set of integrated strategies to reduce exposures to health-harming commercial actors and activities. 

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2. Sounds of Health: Using Personalized Sonification Models to Communicate Health Information

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3570346  

   Clark, Matthew; Doryab, Afsaneh (December 2022, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies)

   This paper explores the feasibility of using sonification in delivering and communicating health and wellness status on personal devices. Ambient displays have proven to inform users of their health and wellness and help them to make healthier decisions, yet, little technology provides health assessments through sounds, which can be even more pervasive than visual displays. We developed a method to generate music from user preferences and evaluated it in a two-step user study. In the first step, we acquired general healthiness impressions from each user. In the second step, we generated customized melodies from music preferences in the first step to capture participants' perceived healthiness of those melodies. We deployed our surveys for 55 participants to complete on their own over 31 days. We analyzed the data to understand commonalities and differences in users' perceptions of music as an expression of health. Our findings show the existence of clear associations between perceived healthiness and different music features. We provide useful insights into how different musical features impact the perceived healthiness of music, how perceptions of healthiness vary between users, what trends exist between users' impressions, and what influences (or does not influence) a user's perception of healthiness in a melody. Overall, our results indicate validity in presenting health data through personalized music models. The findings can inform the design of behavior management applications on personal and ubiquitous devices. 

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3. The Right to Health: Institutional Effects of Constitutional Provisions on Health Outcomes

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-015-9189-z  

   Kavanagh, Matthew M. (September 2016, Studies in Comparative International Development)
4. Health and Mental Health Impact of Tornadoes: Are Older Adults More Resilient?

   Cong, Z.; Liang, D. (September 2022, International journal of mass emergencies and disasters)

   Guided by influential theories of disaster research and gerontology, this study examines health resilience associated with tornadoes, particularly focusing on how individuals’ tornado-associated stress, financial losses, and family members’ well-being affected posttraumatic distress (PTD), posttraumatic growth (PTG), and self-reported changes in health among adults. To reach this goal, this study collected data from residents affected by two violent tornadoes in 2013, with the assistance of a professional survey lab which implemented a random-digit-dialling telephone survey. The working sample included 517 respondents with oversampled older adults. Multinomial logistic regression, Poisson regression, and Ordinary Least Square Regression were conducted separately for younger and older adults. The results indicated a significant effect of stress levels on PTG among older adults only. Nonetheless, the differences in effect sizes between the two groups were not significant. Meanwhile, respondents’ financial losses and their family members’ declined health were significant predictors of improved health among older adults. Similarly, family members’ declined mental health was a significant predictor of PTD among older adults, but not younger adults. Compared to young adults, older adults were more vulnerable to their family members’ declined mental health, but also more resilient to stressful situations, financial losses, and family members’ declined physical health. Lastly, although risk and resilience factors could be constructed with the same set of items, they function differently among different groups of people. Hence, more studies on heterogeneity are needed to further refine resilience frameworks. 

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5. Health and Mental Health Impact of Tornadoes: Are Older Adults More Resilient?

   Cong, Z.; Liang, D. (September 2022, International journal of mass emergencies and disasters)

   Guided by influential theories of disaster research and gerontology, this study examines health resilience associated with tornadoes, particularly focusing on how individuals' tornado-associated stress, financial losses, and family members' well-being affected posttraumatic distress (PTD), posttraumatic growth (PTG), and self-reported changes in health among adults. To reach this goal, this study collected data from residents affected by two violent tornadoes in 2013, with the assistance of a professional survey lab which implemented a random-digit-dialling telephone survey. The working sample included 517 respondents with oversampled older adults. Multinomial logistic regression, Poisson regression, and Ordinary Least Square Regression were conducted separately for younger and older adults. The results indicated a significant effect of stress levels on PTG among older adults only. Nonetheless, the differences in effect sizes between the two groups were not significant. Meanwhile, respondents' financial losses and their family members' declined health were significant predictors of improved health among older adults. Similarly, family members' declined mental health was a significant predictor of PTD among older adults, but not younger adults. Compared to young adults, older adults were more vulnerable to their family members' declined mental health, but also more resilient to stressful situations, financial losses, and family members' declined physical health. Lastly, although risk and resilience factors could be constructed with the same set of items, they function differently among different groups of people. Hence, more studies on heterogeneity are needed to further refine resilience frameworks. 

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