This pilot study examined the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary outcomes of a linguistically- and culturally-adapted intervention for immigrant Latina mothers with depression and their families. Fortalezas Familiares (Family Strengths) is a community-based, 12-week, multi-family group intervention that aims to increase communication about family processes leading up to and affected by the mother’s depression, build child coping and efficacy, enhance parenting competence and skills, and promote cultural and social assets within the family. In terms of feasibility, of 16 families who enrolled and participated in the intervention, 13 families attended more than 90% of meetings and completed the intervention. Post-tests reported positive changes following the intervention, including improved psychological functioning, increased family and marital support, and enhanced family functioning, as reported by mothers and other caregivers. Mothers also reported decreased conduct and hyperactivity problems among their children. Children reported positive changes in their psychological functioning and coping, peer relations, parenting warmth and acceptance, and overall family functioning. Post-intervention focus groups and surveys measuring acceptability revealed families’ satisfaction with the intervention and suggested areas of improvement. We discuss similarities and differences in outcomes between the adapted intervention, Fortalezas Familiares, and the original intervention, Keeping Families Strong, and propose future areas of intervention adaptation and development.

Background Psychological stress has long been recognized as a contributing factor to asthma symptom expression and disease progression. Yet, the neural mechanisms that underlie this relationship have been largely unexplored in research addressing the pathophysiology and management of asthma. Studies that have examined the mechanisms of this relationship in the periphery suggest that it is the superimposition of acute stress on top of chronic stress that is of greatest concern for airway inflammation. Methods We compared asthmatic individuals with high and low levels of chronic life stress in their neural and peripheral physiological responses to the Trier Social Stress Test and a matched control task. We used FDG-PET to measure neural activity during performance of the two tasks. We used both circulating and airway-specific markers of asthma-related inflammation to assess the impact of acute stress in these two groups. Results Asthmatics under chronic stress had a larger HPA-axis response to an acute stressor, which failed to show the suppressive effects on inflammatory markers observed in those with low chronic stress. Moreover, our PET data suggest that greater activity in the anterior insula during acute stress may reflect regulation of the effect of stress on inflammation. In contrast, greater activity in the mid-insula and perigenual anterior cingulate seems to reflect greater reactivity and was associated with greater airway inflammation, a more robust alpha amylase response, and a greater stress-induced increase in proinflammatory cytokine mRNA expression in airway cells. Conclusions Acute stress is associated with increases in markers of airway inflammation in asthmatics under chronic stress. This relationship may be mediated by interactions between the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, that determine the salience of environmental cues, as well as descending regulatory influence of inflammatory pathways in the periphery.

The authors regret that in this article, there was an error in the processing of the PET data for four participants, such that the order of the challenge conditions (stress or control) was incorrectly specified. As a consequence, the PET data were reprocessed. In reprocessing the data the general pipeline remained the same but FSL-and ANTS-based tools were used rather than SPM12. Only results pertaining to the PET data are affected by this error. The results from the corrected analysis are more straightforward and in better alignment with relationships between emotion and inflammation previously reported by our group and others. Some results from the original manuscript, however, were not present in the corrected analysis. In particular, results involving glucose metabolism in the anterior insula and its correlates, together with the conclusions drawn from these results, are invalid as a result of the challenge condition coding error. On the other hand, involvement of the anterior insula in the relationship between psychological stress and airway inflammation in asthma is still indicated by the corrected analyses. Several of the correlations between glucose metabolism in the insula and peripheral or behavioral measures change direction after the * Corresponding author. marosenk@wisc.edu (M.A. Rosenkranz).

Due to the hydrophobicity and localization of integral membrane proteins, they are difficult to study using conventional biochemical methods that are compatible with proteomic analyses. This chapter describes the coupling of multiple crucial steps that lead to the optimized shotgun proteomic analysis of integral membrane proteins while maintaining empirical topology information. Namely, a membrane shaving method is utilized to separate protease accessible peptides from membrane embedded peptides and elevated temperatures during chromatographic separation is utilized to augment the recovery of hydrophobic peptides for in-line analysis using tandem mass spectrometry. This combination of steps facilitates increased identification of membrane proteins while also maintaining information regarding protein topology.