Fourteen months after a hurricane, young children who had experienced the storm showed significantly higher anxiety and withdrawal and more behavior problems than did children who had not. Behavioral problems decreased steadily over the six months following the storm. Mothers' distress in the hurricane's aftermath was associated with the longevity of their children's emotional and behavioral difficulties.

Health literacy is critical for cancer patients as they must understand complex procedures or treatment options. Caregivers' health literacy also plays a crucial role in caring for cancer patients. Low health literacy is associated with low adherence to medications, poor health status, and increased health care costs. There is a growing interest in the use of mobile health applications (apps) to improve health literacy. Mobile health apps can empower underserved cancer patients and their caregivers by providing features or functionalities to enhance interactive patient-provider communication and to understand medical information more readily. Despite the potentiality of improving health literacy through mobile health apps, there exist several related concerns: no equal access to mobile technology, no familiarity or knowledge of using mobile health apps, and privacy and security concerns. These elements should be taken into account for health policy making and mobile apps design and development. Importantly, mobile apps should be developed with the goal of achieving a high range of user access by considering all health literacy level and various cultural and linguistic needs.

This study examined whether leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) was associated with health-care utilization in a racially diverse sample of rural and urban older adults. Community-dwelling adults (N= 1,000, 75.32 ± 6.72 years old) self-reported participating in LTPA and their use of the health-care system (physician visits, number and length of hospitalizations, and emergency-room visits). After controlling for variables associated with health and health-care utilization, older adults who reported lower levels of LTPA also reported a greater number of nights in the hospital in the preceding year. There was no support, however, for a relationship between LTPA and the other indicators of health-care utilization. Our findings suggest that being physically active might translate to a quicker recovery for older adults who are hospitalized. Being physically active might not only have health benefits for older persons but also lead to lower health-care costs.

Family caregivers play an important role to care cancer patients since they exchange medical information with health care providers. However, relatively little is known about how family caregivers seek medical information using mobile apps and the Internet. We examined factors associated with medical information seeking by using mobile apps and the Internet among family caregivers and the general public using data from the 2014 Health Information National Trends Survey 4 Cycle 1. The study sample consisted of 2425 family caregivers and 1252 non-family caregivers (the general public). Guided by Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking (CMIS), we examined related factors' impact on two outcome variables for medical information seeking: mobile apps use and Internet use with multivariate logistic regression analyses. We found that online medical information seeking is different between family caregivers and the general public. Overall, the use of the Internet for medical information seeking is more common among family caregivers, while the use of mobile apps is less common among family caregivers compared with the general public. Married family caregivers were less likely to use mobile apps, while family caregivers who would trust cancer information were more likely to use the Internet for medical information seeking as compared to the general public. Medical information seeking behavior among family caregivers can be an important predictor of both their health and the health of their cancer patients. Future research should explore the low usage of mobile health applications among family caregiver population.

No abstract