Purpose: The purpose of this study was to describe the prevalence of and relationships among disordered eating, food insecurity, and weight status among transgender and gender nonbinary youth and young adults. Methods: This cross-sectional study involved a screening protocol to assess disordered eating and food insecurity risk from September to December of 2019 at a gender clinic using five validated measures: (1) previous eating disorder diagnosis (yes/no); (2) Sick, Control, One Stone, Fat, Food Questionnaire (SCOFF); (3) Adolescent Binge Eating Disorder Questionnaire (ADO-BED); (4) Nine-Item Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder Screen (NIAS); and (5) Hunger Vital Sign. Age, assigned sex at birth, gender identity, stage of medical transition, and body mass index were collected. Pearson's r correlation coefficients, between-groups t-tests, one-way analysis of variance tests, and Tukey's honest significant difference test were used to characterize the relationships between variables. Results: A total of 164 participants ages 12-23 years completed the screener. Using assigned sex at birth, 1.8% were underweight, 53% were a healthy weight, 17.1% were overweight, and 28.0% were obese. An estimated 8.7% reported a previous eating disorder diagnosis, 28.0% screened positive on the SCOFF, 9.1% on the ADO-BED, 75.0% on the NIAS, and 21.2% on the Hunger Vital Sign. Transgender males scored higher on the NIAS than transgender females ( p = 0.03). Those with a previous eating disorder diagnosis scored significantly higher on the Hunger Vital Sign ( p < 0.05). Conclusion: Gender clinics should routinely screen for disordered eating, food insecurity, overweight, and obesity to identify patients in need of further evaluation and referral.

Current techniques used to monitor glucose concentration of cell culture media (CCM) require invasive and tedious handling of the sample for sterile media removal and nutrient replacement. In order to optimize cell culture growth in bioreactors, biosensors must be developed that are capable of monitoring the cell culture processes noninvasively and continuously. In this study, on-line, noninvasive determinations of glucose in cell culture media were investigated via near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR) across the 2.0–2.5 μm combination region. A system was developed, using a unique fiberoptic coupling method and a commercial Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectrometer, to characterize glucose single-beam spectra collected from cell culture media. This novel system is the first of its kind and integrates a completely noninvasive optical probe to measure glucose concentrations within cell culture media, in situ. Spectra recorded from a four-day fibroblast culture with this fiber coupled system and an FT-IR spectrometer have been analyzed and compared with standard clinical chemistry techniques. Partial least-squares (PLS) regression has been used to extract the analyte-dependent information and to build a successful multivariate calibration model. A combination of spectra from cell culture media and prepared media mixtures was used to eliminate unwanted correlations in the calibration data. The combined use of this unique fiberoptic system, PLS, and uncorrelated spectra resulted in a true glucose prediction error of 14.8 mg/dL in an independent validation set.

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