Protective factors and college student drinking patterns in pre and post Katrina New Orleans

Rates of heavy drinking, tobacco use and illicit substance use peak among college students between 18 and 25 years of age. Attitudes, personal characteristics, and behaviors that are called protective factors could play a role in reducing college students’ use of alcohol and drugs. We studied the relationships between selected protective factors and alcohol consumption in college students from a public commuter university in New Orleans, Louisiana pre-and post-Hurricane Katrina utilizing the Core Alcohol and Drug Survey (CADS) Long Form. We applied Hirschi’s social control theory to examine the relationships between drinking and the identified protective factors. Three research questions with null and alternative hypotheses were tested to explore the impact of Hurricane Katrina on protective factors and drinking utilizing linear/ logistic and multivariate regression models to test the hypotheses. We found that post-Katrina students were on average about 1.5 years older and drank approximately 1.5 more drinks per week than pre-Katrina students. Both pre and post Katrina age, gender, and race/ethnicity were significantly related to drinking among these groups of college students such that older students, women, and non-Whites tended to have reduced odds of drinking. There were no statistically significant relationships between individual protective factors or any group of protective factors and drinking after controlling for age, gender, and race/ethnicity indicating that these 3 individual characteristics that cannot be altered were stronger predictors of drinking than any other factors we tested.

Joint Contact Forces with Changes in Running Stride Length and Midsole Stiffness

The purpose of this study was to determine if lower extremity joint loading was influenced by stride length or shoe midsole cushioning.Ten subjects completed 10 trials of overground running at an average speed of 4.43 m/s in each of three condi-tions:normal running,running with a stride length(SL)reduced by 10%of normal,and running with a cushioned midsole stiffness(i.e.,mechanical impact reduction of 13.7-10.9 g).Reaction forces calculated from inverse dynamics were summed with muscle forces estimated from a musculoskeletal model using static optimization to obtain joint contact forces at the hip,knee and ankle joints.Peak components of the contact forces[axial,anterior-posterior,and medial-lateral(ML)]were examined using parametric statistics(α=0.05).Reducing stride length resulted in significant decreases in absolute peak ankle contact forces in the axial direction(normal:-14.5±1.5 BW;reduced SL:-14.0±1.6 BW)and the ML direction(normal:0.67±0.23 BW;reduced SL:0.61±0.21 BW).Reducing stride length also reduced the peak absolute axial forces at the knee(normal:-10.6±1.3 BW;reduced SL:-9.8±1.2 BW)and the hip(normal:-7.26±2.24 BW;reduced SL:-6.75±2.10 BW).The cushioned shoe did not statistically reduce the peak absolute contact forces from the normal stride condition at any of the joints.Post hoc stress analysis suggested that the observed changes in anterior hip force would increase stress more than any of the other statistically significant results.Reductions in stride length appear to decrease some joint contact variables but cushioning in the heel region of the shoe does not.