Environmental factors in early life are clearly established risk factors for cardiovascular disease in later life. Most studies have focused on nutritional programming and analysed basal cardiovascular parameters rather than responses. In the present study we have investigated whether prenatal stress has long-term effects on cardiovascular responses in adult offspring. Female pregnant Sprague-Dawley rats were subjected to stress three times daily from day 15 to day 21 of gestation. Litters from stressed and control females were cross-fostered at birth to control for mothering effects. When the offspring were 6 months old, blood pressure was measured in the conscious rats through implanted catheters at rest, during restraint stress and during recovery. Basal haemodynamic parameters were similar in the different groups but the pattern of cardiovascular responses during stress and recovery differed markedly between prenatally stressed (PS) and control animals. PS rats had higher and longer-lasting systolic arterial pressure elevations to restraint stress than control animals. They also showed elevated systolic and diastolic blood pressure values during the recovery phase. PS rats demonstrated a greater increase in blood pressure variability compared with control animals during exposure to restraint stress, and showed more prolonged heart rate responses to acute stress and delayed recovery than controls. There was no effect of prenatal stress on baroreflex regulation of heart rate. PS females showed a greater increase in systolic arterial pressure and blood pressure variability and delayed heart rate recovery following return to the home cage then did PS males. These findings demonstrate for the first time that prenatal stress can induce long-term, sex-related changes in the sensitivity of the cardiovascular system to subsequent stress.

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Children with developmental disabilities (DD), such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), have complex health and developmental needs that require multiple service systems and interactions with various professionals across disciplines. The growing number of children and youth identified with ASD or DD, including anxiety and depression, has increased demand for services and need for highly qualified pediatric providers. Federally funded Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and related Disabilities (LEND) programs across the United States address today’s health care shortages by providing comprehensive, interdisciplinary training to providers from multiple pediatric disciplines who screen, diagnose, and treat those with ASD and DD. Each LEND program develops training methods independently, including quality improvement efforts. In 2014, LEND programs began designing and validating common measures to evaluate LEND training. The LEND Program Quality Improvement (LPQI) Network was established in 2016. Participating LEND programs in the LPQI Network administer validated trainee self-report and faculty-observation measures that address skills in key competency domains of Interdisciplinary or Interprofessional Team Building, Family-Professional Partnerships, and Policy. This study reports data from faculty and trainees from 22 LEND programs that participated in the LPQI Network across the 5-year data collection period. The main outcome of this study was the change in trainee knowledge, skills, and attitudes scores in key competency domains across programs. Overall, trainees made significant knowledge, skills, and attitude gains based on both self-report and faculty observation scores for all 3 competency domains. Data demonstrate the value of LEND programs and feasibility of a national quality improvement approach to evaluate interdisciplinary training and systems-level improvement.

The study and prediction of emergence and development of occupational deformations is one of the urgent tasks in psychology. However, existing methods are questionnaires, and their results can be distorted due to self-reports by respondents. In this regard, the aim of the study was to develop a methodology for studying and assessing the severity of occupational deformations using unbiased indicators of oculomotor activity and the burnout syndrome example. 34 athlete-skaters took part in the experiment. As stimuli, texts of negative, positive and neut­ral content were used. The results identified a link between the severity of burnout symptoms such as “reduction of personal achievements” and “depersonalization” with eye movement parameters. In particular, the members of the “reduction of personal achievements” group, while reading texts with negative content, tried to focus less on negative words thereby avoiding them. Thus, using the parameters of eye movements, the authors conducted an unbiased assessment of text areas, to which the subjects' attention was directed. This allowed reliably identifying the behavioural strategies for subjects who suffer from burnout syndrome.