The findings indicate that leadership in this setting can be experienced as embedded in nursing work rather than recognized as a separate activity. The research examined municipal home healthcare, a publicly funded Norwegian service for people of all ages, although most of those receiving it are aged 65 or older. Care is assigned according to assessed needs and may include assistance with personal hygiene, wound care, nutrition and medication.

Registered nurses are key figures in this service, with responsibility for quality and continuity of care. The study focused on leadership close to older adults, a multi-actor endeavour involving older adults, their next of kin and care staff, and enacted at the microlevel of municipal home healthcare organizations. The authors describe this form of leadership as complex and underexplored, and sought to examine how registered nurses themselves experienced it.

Researchers used an exploratory, inductive qualitative design based on individual interviews, with the interview material analyzed through qualitative content analysis. This design was intended to illuminate the meaning of leadership from the perspective of the registered nurses carrying out the work, rather than quantify its prevalence or test its effects. The analysis produced the central theme of invisible leadership and organized it into four categories.

Person-orientation concerned focusing on the older adult and their needs. Responsibility involved acting when appropriate and maintaining coherence. Support included supporting fellow workers and other registered nurses, while variety captured the different ways nurses led.

The study therefore presents leadership close to older adults as a practical dimension of home healthcare that can remain difficult to see because it is woven into the surrounding care activity. Because the evidence comes from a qualitative account of registered nurses’ experiences, the findings describe how leadership was understood and enacted in this municipal setting; they do not establish a measured effect on clinical outcomes, patient safety or service performance. The authors interpret the results as aligning with value-based leadership practices, placing person-orientation, responsibility and support at the center of the nurses’ experiences.

The study does not determine how such visibility should be achieved or whether changing it would alter outcomes, workloads or municipal service organization.

Subject of Research: Registered nurses’ experiences of leadership close to older adults in Norwegian municipal home healthcare.

Article Title: “To lead close to is invisible work”: registered nurses’ experiences of leadership close to older adults in municipal home healthcare

Article References: Stien, T., Jonasson, L.-L., & Josefsson, K. (2026). “To lead close to is invisible work”: registered nurses’ experiences of leadership close to older adults in municipal home healthcare. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15849-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15849-5

Keywords: nursing leadership, municipal home healthcare, older adults, registered nurses, qualitative research, Norway, person-oriented care, care quality, continuity of care, lead, close, invisible

Bd is a generalist fungal pathogen that lives in the keratinized skin of amphibians and spreads through aquatic zoospores. It has spread from its natural range in Asia to every continent inhabited by amphibians and is considered one of the pathogens contributing to global amphibian declines. Its effects differ among species and populations, and not every infected population undergoes an obvious decline.

Accurate detection is therefore important for establishing where Bd occurs and for comparing infected and apparently uninfected sites. A negative result from an insensitive method can classify a genuinely infected pond as uninfected and weaken subsequent analyses of population trends. The newt component of the study covered eight ponds south of Oslo that had been sampled for population monitoring since 2013.

Environmental DNA testing for Bd began in 2017, but results from the same ponds sometimes varied with the sample type used. Meaningful within-year comparisons were possible in 2018, 2023 and 2024, when researchers collected compatible samples during the same field seasons. Great crested newts and smooth newts were trapped along pond shorelines, and all captured animals were released after sampling.

A separate toad comparison used six fresh roadkill carcasses collected in April 2022 at a crossing in Nittedal, where the local population had previously been reported to have an 80% Bd prevalence. For pond-water sampling, researchers collected 15 subsamples of 0.2 litres at locations one to four metres apart and combined them into one mixed sample. This approach was intended to represent a pond more closely because environmental DNA can be unevenly distributed.

In 2018, 0.5 litres of mixed water was filtered through a 0.45-micrometre cellulose nitrate membrane. In later years, mixed water was filtered through 2.0-micrometre glass-fibre filters, which could process approximately 1 to 1.5 litres. During three May sampling periods in 2024, duplicate sets of both filter types were tested.

Field negative controls and technical controls did not amplify Bd DNA, providing no evidence of contamination in those samples. The 2024 filter comparison produced 94% positive qPCR results for the 0.45-micrometre filters and 77% for the 2.0-micrometre filters, although the difference was not statistically significant (t = 0.49, p = 0.62). The amount of DNA placed into the reaction nevertheless affected results for the finer filters: 5 nanograms of input produced a signal 1.3 cycles earlier than 1 nanogram (t = 2.52, p = 0.013).

Pond 8 provided a different pattern. There, the 2.0-micrometre filter yielded signals 2.04 cycles earlier at 1 nanogram of input (t = 3.53, p < 0.01) and 1.80 cycles earlier at 5 nanograms (t = 2.46, p = 0.017). Those values indicated higher Bd DNA concentrations in the larger-pore filter when detection succeeded, even though the finer filter had produced more positive reactions overall.

Detection in open water also varied among the three spring sampling dates in 2024. Ponds 7 and 8 had their highest Bd concentrations at the first visit, but each subsequent visit detected Bd in one additional pond, and the concentration in pond 6 increased over the two-week period. Ponds 1 and 2 produced an occasional positive water result at one sampling time.

These observations do not establish why detection changed: the three dates provided insufficient temporal resolution for statistical separation of seasonal patterns from other variation, and the study lacked continuous pond-specific temperature data. Longer seasonal sampling would be needed to determine how temperature and other temporal factors relate to Bd DNA in pond water. Amphibian-based samples often proved more informative than mixed pond water.

Among great crested newts, the proportion of positive swabs ranged from 50% under a strict threshold of at least three positive droplets to 90% when samples with one or two droplets were included. For smooth newts, all five ponds yielded at least one or two positive droplets, but only one pond met the stricter threshold. By comparison, the 0.45-micrometre mixed-water filters produced two unequivocally positive ponds, ponds 7 and 8, while pond 4 was weakly positive.

These comparisons were limited to the five ponds sampled with both methods in 2018, and the source material does not report a seasonal or host-dependent release mechanism for the observed differences. The 2023 comparisons included mixed pond water, bathwater from captured newts and collective swab samples from three ponds. Mixed water identified ponds 6, 7 and 8 as positive, although pond 7 produced only one positive reaction among six qPCRs using 1 nanogram of DNA input.

Pond 6 was detected for the first time, with five of six reactions positive. Across the five sample types examined from ponds 6, 7 and 8, extracted DNA concentrations ranged from 33.94 nanograms in a great crested newt swab sample to 2,456 nanograms in smooth newt bathwater. Concentrations of extracted DNA did not predict whether Bd was detected in the qPCR reactions, indicating that a larger total DNA yield did not by itself provide a detection advantage in these comparisons.

The toad experiment compared filtered bathwater, soft sandpaper, webbed skin and soft swabs. Each carcass was placed in 0.5 litres of pond water for 10 to 15 minutes, after which the bathwater was filtered. All six toads were positive for Bd, with at least 52% of their qPCR reactions positive.

Bathwater, soft sandpaper and webbed-skin samples all tested positive in every individual when 5 nanograms of DNA were used. At 1 nanogram of input, only one of 18 reactions from bathwater and soft sandpaper was negative, whereas seven of 18 webbed-skin reactions were negative. Soft swabs performed less consistently: dry swabs gave positive signals in 9.5% of reactions at 1 nanogram and 50% at 5 nanograms, while swabs stored in buffer were positive in 3.5% and 48.2% of reactions, respectively.

Bathwater produced the highest average Bd signal in the toad samples, with mean qPCR cycle values of 32.2 using 5 nanograms of DNA and 34.3 using 1 nanogram. At the higher input, bathwater differed significantly from soft sandpaper, webbed skin and combined soft swabs, with p values of 0.027, 0.022 and less than 0.01. Bathwater and soft sandpaper did not differ significantly at 1 nanogram (p = 0.3).

The results do not establish a precise mechanism for the poor performance of toad swabs. The animals had recently emerged from hibernation, and their swabs contained brownish debris, whereas the newt swabs came from wet animals captured directly from ponds. Soft sandpaper was tested only on the larger toads, not on the more delicate newts, so its performance in newt populations remains uncertain.

On the basis of these comparisons, the researchers identified filtering amphibian bathwater as the most economical method for determining the Bd status of a pond: capture local animals, hold them in water for about 10 to 15 minutes and filter the water. Where that procedure is not feasible, the toad results indicate that soft sandpaper can provide a straightforward alternative, although it was not tested on newts. Several swabs or sandpaper samples can also be pooled for a site-level screen, after which resources can be directed to more detailed prevalence work at confirmed positive ponds.

If only open water is sampled, the findings support using multiple filter pore sizes and testing replicated DNA inputs to reduce the risk of missing weak or inhibited signals. The monitoring data did not provide evidence of a clear short-term population decline that could confidently be attributed to Bd. Catch per unit effort from 2013 to 2024 showed smooth newt numbers increasing in most ponds during the final five years, while great crested newts were scarce and intermittently recorded.

Pond 8 maintained a relatively stable great crested newt population. The researchers did not statistically compare population sizes between infected and uninfected ponds because the study included only eight ponds, infection classifications were uncertain, and amphibian abundance varied naturally. The results therefore concern the reliability of detecting Bd in wild amphibians, not proof of population-level effects, and they reinforce the need for accurate infection surveys before infected and apparently uninfected sites are compared in ecological models.

Subject of Research: Comparison of field sampling methods for detecting Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis DNA in wild amphibians

Article Title: Comparing sampling protocols and results to better detect the amphibian fungal parasite Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis in the wild

Article References: Taugbøl, A. (2025). Comparing sampling protocols and results to better detect the amphibian fungal parasite Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis in the wild. NeoBiota, 104, 73-93. https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.104.160230

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/neobiota.104.160230

Keywords: chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, amphibian disease, environmental DNA, field sampling, newts, common toads, wildlife surveillance, false negatives, Norway, Comparing, sampling

The study, published in the journal Supportive Care in Cancer, compared how radiation therapy technologists in Norway and Canada understand and deliver psychosocial and supportive care, a domain researchers abbreviate as PSSC. Led by Espen Aas of Sykehuset Innlandet in Norway and Safora Johansen of Oslo Metropolitan University, with collaborators from St. Francis Xavier University, Dalhousie University, and other Canadian institutions, the research team conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 practicing therapists, 13 in each country, between March and July 2025. The interviews explored how these professionals perceive their psychosocial role, what they actually do in clinical practice, what barriers stand in their way, and what changes they believe would improve care.

The methodological approach was deliberately interpretive. Using a constructivist framework, the researchers treated each interview as a window into how social and cultural context shapes clinical behavior, rather than assuming that therapists in different countries experience the same job. Transcripts were analyzed with inductive thematic analysis, coded independently by two researchers using NVivo software, with discrepancies resolved through team discussion. Norwegian interviews were conducted over Zoom and professionally translated into English, while Canadian sessions ran on Microsoft Teams. The design built directly on an earlier cross-national survey by Bezanson and colleagues, which had already revealed a striking pattern: therapists in both countries valued psychosocial care, but Norwegians reported spending more time on it and feeling more satisfied with their capacity, while Canadians expressed stronger appetite for training and institutional backing.

The interviews put flesh on those statistical bones. Therapists in both countries described psychosocial care as fundamental rather than optional. One Canadian participant called it the bread and butter of the job, while a Norwegian therapist explained the clinical logic in strikingly practical terms: patients who are tense and stressed struggle to lie completely still on the treatment table, and that movement directly affects the accuracy of radiation delivery. Emotional state, in other words, is not a soft concern appended to the hard physics of treatment. It is woven into whether the treatment works as planned.

Yet the two national groups described reaching for this shared goal through visibly different mechanisms. Norwegian therapists emphasized a relational, patient-centered model protected by scheduling flexibility and collegial teamwork. When a patient needed extra time, coworkers could step in to keep the treatment list moving, allowing the therapist to stay with the person in distress. Canadian therapists, by contrast, described working within rigidly time- and staffing-constrained environments, where psychosocial care is delivered through structured assessments, standardized checklists, and formalized weekly check-ins documented in electronic clinical systems. One Canadian therapist described recording each patient’s psychosocial response on a checklist during the first encounter, turning emotional assessment into a trackable, repeatable procedure. Neither approach is inherently superior, the authors suggest, but each reflects what its respective system makes possible.

Both groups traced the limits of their psychosocial practice back to their education. Participants reported that training programs covered symptom and side-effect management thoroughly, but left emotional, spiritual, and psychological support largely underdeveloped. One Norwegian therapist noted that the subject was never really emphasized in school, and that personal interest in psychology filled the gap. A Canadian participant said they felt well prepared to manage side effects but uncertain about spiritual or emotional care. Confidence, the interviews revealed, is not primarily a product of the classroom. It grows through accumulated workplace experience, repeated exposure to distressed patients, and institutional environments that either permit or prevent therapists from practicing those conversations.

The barriers therapists described were strikingly consistent across borders, even as their intensity differed. Time pressure dominated. Norwegian therapists described efficiency demands eroding the space available for good care, with one lamenting that the time to support patients feels like it is disappearing. Canadian therapists faced a starker arithmetic: demand for radiation therapy is outstripping the supply of qualified therapists so severely that some centers have considered shortening appointment slots, leaving no room to assess patients properly. Understaffing, limited interdisciplinary collaboration, and inconsistent awareness of available support services compounded the problem in both countries. One Canadian therapist captured a tension many clinicians will recognize, observing that the field has become extraordinarily technical and precise, but that the profession needs to shift focus back to asking how the person in front of us is actually doing.

The prior survey data help explain why similar pressures land differently in the two systems. Forty-eight percent of Canadian therapists had reported limited organizational support, compared with only six percent of their Norwegian counterparts. In Canada, resource constraints are persistent and structural; in Norway, therapists navigate cultural expectations for efficiency within comparatively well-resourced departments. The new interviews add a psychological dimension to this disparity. Previous research by Elsner and colleagues and by Gunn and colleagues suggests that when referral pathways are unclear, therapists hesitate to probe psychosocial needs at all, fearing they will uncover problems they cannot manage. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: systemic constraints limit care, which limits therapists’ opportunities to build psychosocial skills, which further limits care.

When asked what would improve the situation, therapists in both countries converged on a remarkably similar wishlist. More time was the most cited need, followed closely by better education and training, with participants asking for skill refreshers and stronger grounding in psychology. They also wanted clear, responsive referral pathways and routine collaboration with nurses, psychologists, and social workers. Some noted practical obstacles that receive little attention, including language barriers that complicate needs assessment even when digital translation tools are available. Canadian participants additionally called for institutional supports such as staff in-services and attention to therapist self-care to prevent burnout, with one noting that with a national shortage of radiation therapists, dedicating time to psychosocial work can feel like a luxury. Notably, Canada has clinical guidelines for psychosocial health services in cancer care, but participants appeared unaware of them, while Norway has no such guidelines at all, a knowledge-translation gap the authors flag as significant.

The study’s conclusion is quietly radical in its implication: the quality of emotional support a cancer patient receives during radiation therapy may depend less on the individual therapist’s empathy than on organizational design. Both national groups showed deep commitment to psychosocial care, but commitment alone could not overcome the shape of the systems they worked in. The authors argue that effective delivery requires alignment between therapists’ roles, targeted education, and institutional structures that protect time and clarify referral routes. They also acknowledge the study’s limitations, including convenience and snowball sampling that may have overrepresented therapists already dedicated to psychosocial work, and they call for future research that interviews patients directly to determine whether therapists’ worries about providing insufficient care reflect reality. For now, the message to cancer centers is clear: if you want therapists to care for the whole person, you have to build a system that lets them.

Subject of Research: Psychosocial and supportive care delivered by radiation therapy technologists in Norway and Canada

Article Title: Psychosocial and supportive care in radiation therapy: a qualitative comparison of Norway and Canada

Article References: Aas, E., Bezanson, S., Tørris, C., Penney, J., Ruco, A., & Johansen, S. (2026). Psychosocial and supportive care in radiation therapy: a qualitative comparison of Norway and Canada. Supportive Care in Cancer, 34(10), Article 938. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-026-11181-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00520-026-11181-0

Keywords: radiation therapy, psychosocial care, supportive care, radiation therapists, cancer care, qualitative research, cross-national comparison, Norway, Canada, patient-centered care, oncology nursing, healthcare systems

Avoidant personality disorder is characterized by pervasive feelings of inadequacy, extreme sensitivity to criticism, and habitual social inhibition. Clinicians have long observed that people with the condition often struggle to engage with psychotherapy itself, dropping out or holding back even when they desperately want help. What has been missing, the Norwegian team argues, is a first-person understanding of agency, defined in the study as the capacity to act intentionally and pursue goals, as it is experienced from the inside. Without that understanding, therapists risk misreading withdrawal as resistance, and treatment planning may miss the very mechanisms that keep patients frozen.

To capture that inner terrain, the researchers designed an internet survey with 14 open-ended questions and recruited 56 adults who identified as having current or past avoidant personality difficulties. The choice of format was deliberate. Written, anonymous responses allow people who find face-to-face disclosure threatening to describe their experiences in their own words, at their own pace, without the immediate pressure of another person’s gaze. The team adopted a hermeneutic-phenomenological epistemological stance, meaning they aimed to interpret the meaning of lived experience rather than merely count symptoms, and analysed the dataset using reflexive thematic analysis, an approach in which researchers systematically code the material and iteratively develop themes while remaining aware of their own influence on the interpretation.

Five themes emerged from the analysis, and together they read like chapters in a psychological biography of avoidance. The first, titled A Threatening World: Escaping Judgment, describes a daily existence organized around withdrawal and self-constraint. Participants described scanning social situations for signs of criticism and preemptively limiting their actions to avoid it. Agency here is not absent but constantly curtailed: the person may want to speak, apply, join, or create, yet the anticipated judgment of others acts as a brake applied before the engine even starts. The world itself is experienced as dangerous, and shrinking one’s footprint in it feels less like a choice than a survival strategy.

The second theme, When Boundaries Collapse: Over-Adaptation to Others, reveals a different and paradoxical form of lost agency. Rather than withdrawing, some participants described subordinating themselves to the wishes of others in order to keep relationships intact. Saying no felt catastrophic, so they said yes, again and again, until their own preferences became indistinguishable from the demands of the people around them. This submissiveness is a protective maneuver, but it comes at the cost of authenticity. The person remains in relationships, yet the self that shows up in them is an edited version, shaped by fear rather than desire.

The third theme, Disconnected from Within: Unclear Sense of Self, moves the problem inward. Participants reported losing touch with their own emotions and motivations, describing a fog in which it was hard to know what they actually wanted. This is a technically important finding for theories of agency, because intentional action depends on affective and motivational signals. If you cannot feel what matters to you, the question of what to do has no anchor. The study suggests that chronic avoidance does not only suppress outward behavior; over time it can erode the internal compass that guides it, leaving people estranged from their own preferences and values.

The fourth theme, Longing from a Fortress of Self-Protection: Frozen Dreams, captures perhaps the most poignant dimension of the condition. Participants described aspirations that had been shelved, postponed, or quietly abandoned, not because they lacked ambition but because every step toward a goal passed through territory patrolled by imagined critics. Dreams did not disappear; they froze. The fortress of self-protection keeps out judgment, but it also keeps in the person, who watches life plans gather dust from behind walls built for safety. The researchers emphasize that this foreclosing of aspiration is an active process, a series of small surrenders, rather than a single dramatic decision.

Yet the study is not a portrait of despair. The fifth theme, Finding Space: Conditions for Moving Beyond Constraints, documents how participants gradually reclaimed agency when the relational climate changed. Experiences of being met with understanding rather than evaluation, in friendships, families, or therapy, created what the authors call relational safety, and within that safety participants experimented with small acts of self-expression. The process was gradual and fragile, but it was real: a comment ventured in a group, a boundary asserted with a partner, a wish admitted aloud. The analysis suggests that agency in this population is not a fixed trait that is either present or absent, but a capacity that responds to the interpersonal environment.

The conclusions the authors draw have direct implications for psychotherapy. First, they note that individuals with avoidant personality difficulties actively navigate conflicting motives; they are not passive victims of their symptoms but people constantly weighing the urge to connect against the urge to hide. Second, protective strategies paradoxically constrain authentic self-expression, meaning that the very behaviors that reduce short-term anxiety deepen long-term isolation and self-alienation. Third, and most practically, relational safety appears to foster therapeutic progress by supporting gradual self-expression. For therapists, this implies that establishing a nonjudgmental, understanding relationship is not merely a precondition for technique but is itself the primary mechanism of change, and that treatment should be paced to allow small, tolerable experiments in agency rather than demanding rapid exposure or assertiveness.

The study also carries a broader message about how mental health research is conducted. By using an anonymous internet survey and involving participatory researchers from the Expert Council of the National Competence Service for Personality Psychiatry, the team built a methodology that respects the core difficulty of the condition it studies: the fear of being seen and judged. The work was approved by the Regional Committee for Medical and Health Research Ethics in Western Norway and funded by the Research Council of Norway. For the millions of people who recognize themselves in these five themes, the findings offer validation that their paralysis is not weakness of character but an intelligible response to a world experienced as threatening, and a reminder that the path out is not a leap but a series of small, safe steps toward being an agent in one’s own life again.

Subject of Research: Lived experiences of agency in daily life and psychotherapy among adults with avoidant personality difficulties

Article Title: Being an agent in daily life and therapy with avoidant personality difficulties: a qualitative internet survey

Article References: Weme, A. V., Dahl, K., & Binder, P. E. (2026). Being an agent in daily life and therapy with avoidant personality difficulties: a qualitative internet survey. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05609-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05609-9

Keywords: avoidant personality disorder, agency, qualitative research, reflexive thematic analysis, psychotherapy, relational safety, self-expression, mental health, phenomenology, internet survey, personality difficulties, Norway

The research, led by Dixie Brea Larios of the Oral Health Centre of Expertise in Western Norway, together with Anne N. Åstrøm of the University of Bergen and Manal Mustafa of the University of Bergen and the Oral Health Centre of Expertise, set out to examine the oral health practices of parents with and without a migrant background. The motivation is grounded in a well-documented problem: the migration process itself often pushes oral health down the list of priorities, and the consequences can persist for years after resettlement. Dental problems accumulate quietly, and by the time they surface, they can affect nutrition, speech, employment, and self-confidence.

To capture a representative picture, the team used a cross-sectional survey of parents with children in either kindergarten or elementary school. The sample comprised 600 participants, evenly split between 300 migrants and 300 Norwegian-born parents. Respondents answered questions about how they perceived their own oral health, their sociodemographic circumstances, their history of dental visits, and their dietary habits. The mean age of participants was 39.11 years, with a standard deviation of 6.45 years, and women made up 62 percent of the study population. Self-rated oral health, the study’s central outcome measure, is a deceptively simple question with considerable scientific weight: decades of epidemiological work have shown that how people rate their own mouths correlates with clinically measured disease, dental attendance patterns, and even broader quality of life.

The statistical analysis yielded a result that cuts against common assumptions. Migrant status was not a significant predictor of self-reported oral health, with an odds ratio of 0.93 and a p-value of 0.667, meaning the difference between migrants and non-migrants could easily have arisen by chance. In plain terms, knowing whether a parent was a migrant told the researchers almost nothing about how that parent rated their teeth and gums. What did matter were two variables that applied to everyone in the sample. Participants who attended dental check-ups had dramatically lower odds of reporting poor oral health, with an odds ratio of 0.25 and a p-value below 0.001, translating to a 75 percent reduction in the odds of worse self-rated oral health compared with those who did not attend. Educational attainment also played a significant role, with an odds ratio of 1.64 and a p-value of 0.001, indicating that more educated parents were substantially more likely to report better oral health.

One subgroup finding added nuance to the picture. Participants originating from Asian regions had 57 percent lower odds of reporting worse oral health than the reference group. This kind of regional variation within the migrant population is itself instructive, because it demonstrates that migrants are not a homogeneous block. Aggregating all migrant groups into a single category can obscure real differences in oral health profiles, dietary patterns, and experiences with dental services. The Norwegian study’s ability to detect such variation reflects both its sample size and its analytical approach, which modeled multiple sociodemographic and behavioral factors simultaneously rather than examining migrant status in isolation.

The strength of the dental attendance association deserves particular attention. An odds ratio of 0.25 is a large effect by the standards of public health epidemiology, where behavioral predictors often hover near 1.0 and are celebrated when they reach 1.2 or 1.5. Regular dental visits are associated with early detection of caries, professional cleaning, fluoride application, and preventive counseling, all of which interrupt the trajectory of oral disease before it becomes painful or irreversible. Conversely, people who avoid dental care tend to present only when problems are acute, reinforcing negative experiences and deepening avoidance. The study’s cross-sectional design means the direction of this relationship cannot be definitively established, since people with healthy mouths may simply have less reason to visit the dentist, but the association aligns with a large body of clinical evidence on the benefits of consistent preventive care.

Education, the other strong predictor, operates through several plausible mechanisms. Higher educational attainment is consistently linked with greater oral health literacy, better understanding of preventive recommendations, more stable incomes that make dental fees manageable, and workplaces that accommodate time off for appointments. In Norway, where the public dental health service provides free care to children but adults generally pay out of pocket for treatment, the educational gradient in adult oral health reflects both knowledge and economic access. The finding that education mattered equally across migrant and Norwegian parents suggests that these mechanisms are not specific to any cultural group but are structural features of how societies distribute health resources.

The authors are careful about what their results do and do not imply. They do not claim that migration is irrelevant to oral health; rather, they conclude that being a migrant is not the primary factor affecting oral health outcomes in this population. Instead, it is the interplay of sociodemographic factors, health behaviors, and access to dental care that plays the significant role. This distinction matters for policy. Interventions designed around migrant status as the central risk factor may miss the levers that actually move outcomes, such as reducing barriers to dental attendance and addressing educational inequalities. At the same time, the researchers acknowledge that various barriers can influence parental oral health behaviors during the migration process, and that prioritizing oral health and access to dental services remains essential for everyone.

The study forms part of a broader research effort in Norway to build an evidence base for improving oral health services, oral health literacy, and responsiveness to migrant needs. It was conducted within the COP study, Caries and Obesity Prevention in Children with a Migrant Background, financed by the Norwegian Research Council under grant number 331782. The survey data came from the Folkehelseundersøkelse i Vestland 2022, the national public health survey in Vestland county, accessed through the Norwegian health data infrastructure. Ethical approval for data access and handling was obtained from the Regional Committee for Medical and Health Research Ethics and the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. The work also received support from the Research Department at the Oral Health Centre of Expertise in Western Norway.

The practical implications reach beyond Norway’s fjords. Migrant populations across Europe and North America are growing, and health systems everywhere are grappling with how to serve them equitably. This study offers a deceptively simple lesson: the path to better oral health may run through the same channels for everyone, namely affordable and consistent dental care and the education that helps people value and navigate it. The authors recommend that health authorities strengthen family- and community-based strategies embedded within broader health promotion and preventive programs, and they call for further research measuring oral health behaviors and oral health literacy to illuminate the mechanisms at play. If the goal is to reduce disparities, the evidence from Western Norway suggests that the starting point is not where people come from, but whether they can and do get to a dental chair.

Subject of Research: Associations between sociodemographic factors, dental care utilization, dietary habits and self-rated oral health among parents with and without a migrant background in Western Norway

Article Title: Self-rated oral health among parents with and without a migrant background in Western Norway: associations with sociodemographic factors, dental care utilization, and dietary habits

Article References: Brea Larios, D., Åstrøm, A. N., & Mustafa, M. (2026). Self-rated oral health among parents with and without a migrant background in Western Norway: associations with sociodemographic factors, dental care utilization, and dietary habits. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29789-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29789-6

Keywords: oral health, self-rated health, migrant health, dental attendance, dental care utilization, health inequalities, public health, Norway, parents, sociodemographic factors, dietary habits, dental epidemiology

The study’s strength lies in its design. Rather than relying on questionnaires, which are notoriously prone to recall bias and overestimation of exercise, the researchers used objective device-based measurements of physical activity. Participants wore accelerometers for seven consecutive days, allowing the team to capture not just formal exercise but the full spectrum of daily movement, from walking to work to fidgeting at a desk. This objective approach matters because self-reported activity data can obscure exactly the kind of modest differences the study was designed to detect.

By linking individual birth records with later health survey data, the researchers could compare activity levels across the full range of gestational ages, from very preterm births to full-term deliveries. The analysis accounted for a range of potential confounding factors, aiming to isolate the effect of being born early from other circumstances that might influence a person’s activity habits, such as family background, socioeconomic conditions, and health status in adulthood.

The central finding was consistent: the earlier the gestational age at birth, the lower the device-measured physical activity in adolescence and adulthood. People born very preterm moved less overall than those born at term, and the pattern held across age groups studied. The differences were not dramatic on an individual level, but across entire populations they could translate into meaningful public health consequences, given how strongly physical inactivity is linked to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and premature mortality.

Why would preterm birth leave such a long shadow on movement behavior? The researchers point to several plausible mechanisms. Preterm infants are at elevated risk of complications that can affect motor development, including bronchopulmonary dysplasia, a chronic lung condition common among babies born extremely early, as well as cerebral palsy and other neurodevelopmental disorders in the most severe cases. Even among preterm children without diagnosed disabilities, subtle differences in motor coordination, muscle strength, and cardiorespiratory fitness have been documented in follow-up studies, and any of these could make physical activity feel more effortful or less rewarding.

There may also be behavioral and social pathways at work. Children who struggle with sports and playground games early in life may gradually disengage from physical activity, a process that compounds over the years as exercise habits crystallize. Parents of children born preterm, meanwhile, may be more protective or cautious about physical exertion, shaping the child’s activity environment from the start. The Norwegian data cannot definitively separate these mechanisms, but the persistence of the association into adulthood suggests that whatever drives it is not simply a transient feature of childhood recovery.

The study draws its power from the HUNT Study, one of the largest population-based health surveys in the world, which has followed residents of Trøndelag county in central Norway across multiple generations since the 1980s. By combining HUNT’s accelerometer measurements with the Medical Birth Registry’s prospectively recorded gestational age data, the researchers avoided the recall problems that plague retrospective studies of birth outcomes. Gestational age in the registry is based on clinical assessment at the time of birth, not on participants’ memories decades later.

The findings arrive at a moment of growing international concern about the long-term health of preterm survivors. Thanks to advances in neonatal intensive care, the vast majority of babies born preterm now survive into adulthood, and cohorts of preterm-born individuals are larger than at any point in history. Research consortia such as RECAP Preterm, funded through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, which also supported this study, have been assembled specifically to pool data across countries and understand how preterm birth reshapes adult health risks, from cardiometabolic disease to mental health and, now, physical activity.

For clinicians and public health planners, the study suggests that physical activity promotion could be a valuable and underused tool in the long-term follow-up of preterm-born populations. If preterm survivors are systematically less active, they may accrue less of the protective benefit that exercise provides against the very diseases, such as hypertension and insulin resistance, to which they are already predisposed. Targeted interventions, whether through pediatric follow-up programs, school physical education, or adult primary care, could help close this gap before it compounds into elevated disease risk.

The authors note that the observed differences in activity were modest at the individual level, and that many people born preterm are highly active and healthy. The association describes a population-level trend, not a destiny for any individual. Still, in a field where early-life origins of adult disease have become a central research theme, the study adds a new dimension: the legacy of preterm birth may extend not only to disease risk but to the everyday behaviors that shape health across the entire life course. As wearable sensor technology becomes routine in population health research, studies like this one are likely to keep refining our understanding of how the earliest weeks of life echo through decades of movement, metabolism, and well-being.

Subject of Research: The long-term association between preterm birth and device-measured physical activity levels in adolescents and adults

Article Title: People born preterm are likely to be less physically active as teenagers and adults, according to large Norwegian study which measured a week of participants' activity using wearable sensors

Article References: People born preterm are likely to be less physically active as teenagers and adults, according to large Norwegian study which measured a week of participants' activity using wearable sensors. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: preterm birth, physical activity, wearable sensors, HUNT Study, Medical Birth Registry, gestational age, PLOS One, Norway, accelerometry, neonatal outcomes, lifelong health, exercise behavior

The story began on 11 February 2003, when the carcass was sighted west of Torbjørnskjær. Østfold County decided to bring the whale ashore, and it was transported to Fredrikstad for handling. Local authorities faced an unenviable disposal problem: options including sinking the carcass in the fjord, dispersing it with explosives, or burying it on land were all abandoned after the Norwegian Environment Agency raised concerns about groundwater contamination and uncontrolled dispersal of remains. A private initiative led by researcher Endre Hoeffeker offered a way out. With permits secured in coordination with the Environment Agency, Hoeffeker volunteered to take responsibility for the animal, sectioning it into manageable parts and incinerating the meat at a specialised facility for contaminated animal carcasses.

The initial cleaning took place at the Fredrikstad waste facility, where most of the flesh was removed. The bones, still bearing residual soft tissue, were then moved to Hoeffeker’s residence — a former school building four kilometres away with ample space for processing. To accelerate decomposition, he built a compost pile using horse manure as a bulking agent, a technique previously applied to cattle and whale remains. Manure introduces the microorganisms and nitrogen needed to speed breakdown, and while elephant dung is often considered the gold standard for such work, horse dung from a nearby riding school proved practical and effective. The method also carries a documented scientific bonus: microbial activity substantially reduces intraosseous lipids, effectively degreasing the bones from within. Untreated lipids are prone to oxidation and rancidification, which can cause odour, discolouration and dust attraction over time.

The next stage was maceration in a purpose-built 20-cubic-metre tank filled with a solution of two ordinary household products: OMO Color laundry detergent and Zalo dish soap, both chosen for their high enzyme content. Approximately 300 kilograms of each detergent were used, with a large portion supplied as sponsorship by the DeNoFa factory in Fredrikstad. The entire skeletonisation process stretched across 15 years, largely because the tank had no heating facilities. In 2018, facing the prospect of selling the school building, Hoeffeker donated the fully prepared skeleton to the Natural History Museum in Oslo, ensuring its preservation and public future. Notably, no research samples were taken during the process — soft tissues and body fluids are now lost — but the authors point out that Norway lacks any systematic sampling of stranded whales, and that most whale specimens in Norwegian collections entered museums opportunistically, through finders rather than organised collecting.

The museum seized the opportunity. Its new permanent palaeontology exhibition in Brøggers Hus was designed to narrate 520 million years of evolutionary history, from the Lower Cambrian to the present, with a distinctive emphasis on transitions between oceanic and terrestrial life. Professor Jørn H. Hurum recognised the 15-metre skeleton as the ideal modern anchor for the story of whale evolution — the journey from land-dwelling artiodactyl ancestors through transitional forms to fully pelagic species like the sperm whale, a trajectory the study describes as the poster child of macroevolution. The exhibit pairs the skeleton with fossils and casts from every stage of that transition.

Before mounting could begin, conservation work was needed. The skeleton had been stored for two years in containers at the museum’s offsite facility at Økern, where examination revealed that degreasing had discoloured the bones and that mould had grown on the skull in several colours. Conservators removed the mould with an industrial vacuum, ethanol and sandpaper, then applied a thin layer of bone-coloured antifungal acrylic paint across the entire skeleton to unify its appearance and prevent recurrence. An inventory also revealed six missing vertebrae — three thoracic, two lumbar and one caudal. These were replaced with corresponding vertebrae from another sperm whale specimen in the collection, CN248, which had been reduced by 40 percent along the parasagittal plane for an earlier wall-mounted display. The missing halves were reconstructed with epoxy paste, styrofoam and iron rods, then coated in the same acrylic paint, making the restorations nearly indistinguishable from original bone. All chemicals were first tested on isolated ribs from the same donor specimen before full-scale application.

The greatest engineering challenge was architectural. Whale skeletons are conventionally suspended from ceilings, which allows dynamic, anatomically lifelike poses and efficient use of gallery space. But Brøggers Hus is a historic building whose ceiling could not bear the full weight of a whale. The solution was a hybrid: a custom steel podium carries most of the load from beneath, while ceiling cables take only part of the weight. The podium’s steel chassis incorporates three vertical pillars of varying diameters — the primary load-bearer a 12-centimetre steel tube supporting a horizontal beam beneath the skull’s paroccipital processes, with 8-centimetre and 4-centimetre pillars holding curved plates and bars that cradle the palatal region and both jaws. The support structure was designed, certified and fabricated by Ekland Service Mekaniske Verksted AS, with certification confirming compliance with ISO 3834-2:2005 for load-bearing steel structures, and the scheme was consulted with Riksantikvaren, Norway’s authority for the conservation of historic buildings.

Assembly itself was a meticulous exercise in anatomy and mechanics. The skeleton was divided into four sections for transport, since the museum’s doorways were too narrow for anything larger. Thoracic vertebrae were threaded onto a central steel tube via lightweight aluminium discs, each featuring a central hole for the tube and threaded holes for headless screws; spray foam filled the gaps between vertebrae before a layer of epoxy simulated connective tissue. Each rib was drilled to a depth of 15 centimetres and joined to the vertebral column with 30-centimetre steel rods glued using diisocyanate, an adhesive absorbed by bone within two minutes of mixing, gaining the sturdiness needed to lock the rods in place. The flippers — the most delicate elements — were drilled axially to match their original anatomical positions and threaded with iron rods of varying thickness, with epoxy paste mimicking natural cartilage at every joint. Because the teeth risked being removed by visitors, each was drilled, screwed and glued into its socket with isocyanate, and the hyoid apparatus was anchored to a steel bar fixed between the pterygoid bones.

Installation in the exhibition hall proceeded in two phases: first the skull and thorax, moved on wheeled scaffolding and a pulley system with a three-tonne capacity, then the lumbar and caudal vertebrae, threaded individually onto the support bar with aluminium discs and ceiling cables distributing the load. The final caudal vertebrae were threaded onto a two-centimetre aluminium tube, chevrons were attached with wood screws and epoxy, and the pelvis was mounted on a T-shaped iron bar glued into the last lumbar vertebra. The result, unveiled in 2022, was an immediate success: the museum received 197,000 visitors that year, set new attendance records each month, was named Norwegian Museum of the Year in 2023, and was subsequently nominated for the European Museum of the Year Award 2025.

The project’s legacy extends beyond the gallery floor. In 2025, the team created a photogrammetric 3D model of the mounted skeleton from 2,795 photographs, producing a high-detail mesh of roughly 162.7 million vertices that was simplified to under a million polygons for online release on Sketchfab and MorphoBank. Such models serve research, conservation planning and public outreach, and — crucially — provide an accurate reference should the specimen ever need to be dismounted, moved or relocated. The study also adds rare material to Norway’s sperm whale holdings: only a handful of partial specimens exist in Oslo and Bergen, and this nearly complete skeleton significantly enriches the national record. For museums facing similar constraints, the authors offer a clear message — mounting large cetaceans within existing infrastructure demands early coordination between conservators and structural engineers, careful attention to material compatibility and reversibility, and controlled redistribution of skeletal mass to prevent mechanical fatigue over the decades a specimen spends on display.

Subject of Research: Preparation, skeletonisation and museum mounting of a sperm whale skeleton

Article Title: Preparation and mounting of a sperm whale ( Physeter macrocephalus Linnaeus, 1758) at the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway

Article References: Rojo, M. A., Delsett, L. L., Ruciński, M., Hoffeker, E. T. A., Lund, B., Bjerke, B. A., & Lønnve, J. E. (2026). Preparation and mounting of a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus Linnaeus, 1758) at the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway. Natural History Collections and Museomics, 3, Article e191751. https://doi.org/10.3897/nhcm.3.191751

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/nhcm.3.191751

Keywords: sperm whale, Physeter macrocephalus, Natural History Museum Oslo, skeleton mounting, museum conservation, composting, maceration, photogrammetry, whale evolution, osteology, structural engineering, Norway

A new cross-sectional validation study published in Frontiers in Global Women’s Health set out to translate and validate a Norwegian version of the Lipedema Quality of Life questionnaire, known as LIPQOL. The research team, led by Julianne Lundanes of Nord-Trøndelag Hospital Trust and including collaborators from Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Førde Hospital Trust, the University of Bergen, a German medical practice for vascular diseases, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, recruited 432 females with lipedema in Norway through the Norwegian Lymphedema and Lipedema Association’s email registry, which included approximately 2,400 individuals with either lipedema or lymphedema.

The LIPQOL questionnaire was originally developed in German, inspired by the Lymphedema Quality of Life (LYMQOL) questionnaire but adapted specifically for lipedema. The Norwegian research team initially intended to develop a new disease-specific quality-of-life questionnaire for people with lipedema in Norway. During preparatory discussions with clinicians and patient representatives about which aspects of living with lipedema should be represented in such an instrument, the team became aware of the recently developed German LIPQOL and critically examined its content against the aspects identified as important. Finding that the LIPQOL corresponded well with the content considered relevant, the researchers decided to translate it rather than develop a new and potentially overlapping instrument.

The translation from German into Norwegian was carried out by three Norwegian researchers with basic German skills, assisted by artificial intelligence-based translation tools including ChatGPT-5 and Microsoft Copilot. This pragmatic AI-assisted approach was informed by recent recommendations concerning the use of AI-assisted methods in questionnaire translation. The researchers worked collaboratively to ensure correspondence in wording, meaning, and conceptual content between the German and Norwegian versions. The translation was subsequently reviewed by a nutrition researcher who is a native German speaker with strong Norwegian language skills, and finally by two patient representatives who considered the wording, meaning, relevance, and comprehensibility of the items from a patient perspective.

One modification was made to the response structure of the original questionnaire. The German version includes a “Not applicable” option, allowing respondents to skip an item when it is not relevant to their situation. For the Norwegian validation study, this explicit response option was removed to encourage respondents to provide answers whenever an item was applicable and thereby maximize the amount of available data. The team identified two items for which a genuinely non-applicable situation could reasonably arise: the item concerning compression garments, for respondents who did not use them, and the item concerning the impact of lipedema on a romantic relationship, for respondents without a partner. Respondents were not required to answer all items, and unanswered items were treated as missing and excluded from the calculation of the domain score, corresponding to the scoring consequence of selecting “Not applicable” in the original German version.

The LIPQOL consists of three single items and four subscales: Function, Body image, Symptoms, and Feelings. Each subscale score is calculated as the mean of its completed items, with more than 50 percent of the items within a domain required for a domain score to be calculated. The Norwegian versions of the LIPQOL and the RAND-12 questionnaires were distributed via the online platform Questback. The RAND-12, a widely used and freely available measure of generic health-related quality of life that is strongly correlated with the longer RAND-36, was applied for convergent validity testing through its physical component score (PCS) and mental component score (MCS).

A total of 494 participants responded to the survey, a response rate of 21 percent, of whom 62 were excluded because they did not have lipedema, leaving 432 participants with lipedema. Most participants were aged 46 to 64 years (60 percent), and 92 percent reported receiving an official lipedema diagnosis from a health care professional. Notably, 71 percent reported that more than 10 years had elapsed from symptom debut to diagnosis, and 25 percent also had concomitant lymphedema. The mean body weight was 88.7 kilograms, mean height was 166.8 centimeters, and mean body mass index was 31.9 kilograms per square meter.

The psychometric properties of the questionnaire were assessed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for ordinal data with weighted least squares mean and variance estimation. The overall goodness of fit was evaluated using the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), the standardized root mean square residual (SRMR), the comparative fit index (CFI), and the Tucker-Lewis index (TLI). Model fit was indicated by RMSEA close to or below 0.06, SRMR close to or below 0.08, and by CFI as well as TLI close to or above 0.95. Internal consistency was assessed using composite reliability from the CFA, with scores of 0.70 or above considered acceptable.

The unmodified CFA showed CFI = 0.929, TLI = 0.922, SRMR = 0.073, and RMSEA = 0.079 (90 percent CI: 0.073 to 0.084). All composite reliability values were considered reasonable, ranging from 0.890 to 0.916. No subscales were affected by floor or ceiling effects, although some individual items showed such effects. Modification indices were evaluated, and two modifications were performed between items 5 and 8, and between items 17 and 18. With modification indices, the overall structure validity showed reasonable but not unequivocal support for the four-factor structure, with CFI = 0.944, TLI = 0.938, SRMR = 0.068, and RMSEA = 0.070 (90 percent CI: 0.064 to 0.075). The modified model yielded a chi-square statistic of χ²(342) = 929.1, compared with χ²(344) = 1091.4 for the unmodified model.

Item 5, which assesses whether participants perceive wearing compression garments as burdensome, exhibited a low factor loading of 0.325 within the Function subscale. The researchers explain that this item is not directly related to functional ability, so a participant may demonstrate excellent functional capacity while still finding compression garments burdensome, likely accounting for the low loading. Modification indices indicated covariance between item 5 and item 8, both of which address the use of compression garments but belong in different subscales. Item 17 and item 18 were also highly correlated, as both assess similar symptoms: item 17 assesses the presence of a feeling of pressure in the legs, while item 18 assesses whether the legs feel heavier as the day progresses. The researchers limited the model modifications to two, aiming to make the minimum number of theoretically justifiable changes necessary to achieve acceptable model fit while minimizing the risk of overfitting.

Because missing responses were mainly in items that could conditionally not apply, the team conducted a sensitivity analysis to assess whether excluding participants with incomplete data affected the results. They re-estimated the same four-factor model using maximum likelihood estimation with and without full information maximum likelihood (FIML), which allows participants with partially missing item data to be included. The sensitivity analysis yielded results very much like those obtained from the complete-case analysis, with the overall model fit remaining essentially the same. This indicates that the missing data and the consequent selection of complete cases had only a minor effect on the substantive results of the CFA, although statistical missing-data methods such as FIML cannot completely resolve the underlying issue of item non-applicability.

Convergent validity was investigated by assessing correlations between the LIPQOL subscales and the PCS and MCS from RAND-12. All LIPQOL variables were significantly associated with both PCS and MCS (P < 0.001). Large correlations were observed between PCS and Function (Spearman’s rho = −0.682), Symptoms (Spearman’s rho = −0.550), and overall quality of life (Spearman’s rho = 0.554). Large correlations were also seen between MCS and Feelings (Spearman’s rho = −0.685) and overall quality of life (Spearman’s rho = 0.608). These findings suggest that the disease-specific impairments captured by the LIPQOL are reflected in broader aspects of generic health-related quality of life, while the measures remain sufficiently distinct to capture different aspects of quality of life.

The relatively strong association between the Function and Symptoms subscales, with a latent factor correlation of 0.819, should be considered when interpreting the instrument. However, the researchers note that strong associations between domains do not necessarily indicate that they measure the same construct. Symptoms and functional limitations are conceptually distinct aspects of quality of life but are also likely to be closely related in females with lipedema. The subscale scores should therefore be interpreted as related rather than independent dimensions of quality of life. The strong correlation between function and symptoms suggests that symptom severity has a substantial impact on physical functioning, highlighting the importance of symptom management for maintaining functional ability, quality of life, and work capacity.

The study has both strengths and limitations. Strengths include the robust overall sample size of 432 participants and the fact that this is the first validation study using this questionnaire. Other validated and non-validated lipedema-specific questionnaires assess symptom burden; however, this is the only multi-domain lipedema-specific health-related quality-of-life instrument. Moreover, most previous studies have used the LYMQOL questionnaire, which was originally developed for patients with lymphedema and includes items irrelevant for lipedema, or other generic PROMs not adapted to lipedema. Lymphedema and lipedema are often confused, although their pathophysiology differs substantially.

Nevertheless, several limitations should be acknowledged. The cross-sectional design precluded assessment of test-retest reliability and responsiveness. Information on previous lipedema surgery, stage, and type was not collected, limiting assessment of measurement properties across clinically relevant subgroups. As data collection was anonymous, reported diagnoses could not be independently verified. Recruitment through the patient organization may also have introduced selection bias towards more engaged patients, potentially limiting representativeness. Furthermore, the 25 percent of participants who also had concomitant lymphedema may affect the results, as patients with lymphedema seem to have more functional disability and lower life satisfaction compared to females with lipedema. Cross-cultural validity and formal content validity according to COSMIN recommendations were not evaluated, and formal cognitive interviewing was not undertaken.

The researchers conclude that the findings provide encouraging, although not unequivocal, initial support for the measurement properties of the Norwegian LIPQOL for assessing quality of life among females with lipedema. The tool may be useful in both clinical settings and research, as it is a short questionnaire with easy scoring that shows preliminary support for its validity and reliability. However, this is the first validation study of the LIPQOL questionnaire, and the German version has not yet been published or validated either. Future research should seek to further establish the measurement properties of the LIPQOL through continued German-Norwegian collaboration and resolve the remaining methodological issues identified in the present study, providing a stronger foundation for subsequent cross-cultural validation and evaluation of the instrument in other languages and populations. The questionnaire has the potential to become a standard disease-specific instrument for assessing quality of life in females with lipedema.

Subject of Research: Initial psychometric evaluation of the Lipedema Quality of Life questionnaire in females with lipedema in Norway

Article Title: Initial psychometric evaluation of the Lipedema Quality of Life questionnaire in females with lipedema in Norway

Article References: Lundanes, J., Andersen, J. R., Dierkes, J., Schrader, K., & Nymo, S. (2026). Initial psychometric evaluation of the Lipedema Quality of Life questionnaire in females with lipedema in Norway. Frontiers in Global Women's Health, 7, Article 1917274. https://doi.org/10.3389/fgwh.2026.1917274

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fgwh.2026.1917274

Keywords: lipedema, LIPQOL, quality of life, psychometric validation, patient-reported outcome measures, womens health, Norway, Initial, psychometric, evaluation, Quality, Life

Dementia villages are small-scale, person-centred care environments designed to look and function like ordinary communities rather than institutions. Residents live in homelike units of roughly six to eight people, move freely within secure grounds, and take part in everyday activities such as walking, cooking, and social events. Safety is maintained through environmental design and welfare technologies, including GPS tracking, electronic access bracelets, and sensor-based monitoring cameras. Norway currently has more than 115,000 people living with dementia, and roughly 80 percent of those needing long-term care reside in nursing homes, prompting national policy initiatives such as the Dementia Plan 2025 to emphasise dementia-friendly communities and innovative care models.

The research team, led by Ann Kristin Bjørnnes of the University of South-Eastern Norway together with colleagues from Oslo Metropolitan University and Mid Sweden University, used an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. Thirty family caregivers completed questionnaires measuring caregiver reactions with the Caregiver Reaction Assessment, health-related quality of life with the EQ-5D, and residents’ thriving with the proxy version of the Thriving of Older People Assessment Scale, a 32-item instrument scored from 32 to 192. Sixteen of those caregivers then took part in semi-structured interviews lasting 30 to 90 minutes, which were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.

The quantitative results were striking. Caregivers reported high levels of caregiver esteem, with a mean score of 3.9 on a 5-point scale, and generally low burden across the domains of family support, finances, and health. Residents were perceived as thriving overall, with a TOPAS-Proxy total mean of 4.3 on a 6-point scale and an overall thriving rating of 6.89 on a 10-point scale. Staff relationships received the highest domain rating at 4.7, while meaningful activities scored lowest at 3.9. Overall thriving correlated positively with every TOPAS domain, with the strongest correlations observed for relationships with co-residents, quality of care and support, and attitudes toward the place of living.

Notably, no significant correlations emerged between overall thriving and any caregiver burden domain. Financial strain, schedule disruption, and health burden were strongly associated with one another, suggesting that different dimensions of burden cluster together, but caregivers’ own experiences did not appear to colour their assessments of residents’ wellbeing. The authors interpret this as evidence that family caregivers distinguish between their own caregiving experience and their perception of their relative’s everyday life, consistent with prior research showing that positive and negative caregiving appraisals can coexist rather than sit at opposite ends of a single continuum.

The interviews revealed an overarching theme the researchers summarised as being between trust and uncertainty. Admission to the village was emotionally demanding, but many caregivers described profound relief once responsibility for daily care, particularly overnight supervision, shifted to staff. One wife said the only thing she felt was relief at no longer being responsible throughout the night, while others described the welcome as dignified and warm. Caregiving responsibilities did not disappear after admission but were transformed into new forms of involvement, with many relatives continuing to monitor wellbeing, coordinate appointments, and advocate for residents.

Challenges persisted alongside the praise. Some caregivers reported that staff did not always act on information about residents’ needs, described unclear onboarding procedures, and expressed a desire to be treated as partners in care rather than simply as relatives. Trust in welfare technology was sometimes shaken: one wife recounted that an alarm failed and her husband was found the next morning with a fractured hip, while others described camera-based night monitoring that missed falls. The authors stress that the digital safety net works only when systematically paired with adequate physical staffing, particularly during evenings, nights, and weekends, and should be understood as an auxiliary relational tool rather than a replacement for human presence.

The physical and social environment emerged as the model’s greatest strength. Caregivers valued homelike surroundings, access to outdoor spaces, personalised rooms, and the freedom for residents to walk without getting lost. Organised activities, cultural events, bonfires, and choir sessions contributed to a sense of life and activity. Yet meaningful activities received the lowest quantitative ratings, and some caregivers felt the offerings were insufficiently tailored, particularly for male residents, or that communal facilities sat quiet outside scheduled events. The researchers propose co-designing activities with families, leveraging their biographical knowledge, and aligning activities with residents’ prior professional and gender-specific identities to prevent social withdrawal.

Viewed through Meleis’ Transition Theory, the move to a dementia village is not a single event but a gradual transition in caregivers’ identities, responsibilities, and relationships with healthcare professionals. Successful adaptation depended on information sharing, dialogue, and role negotiation, which explains why confidence often grew over time despite initial uncertainty. The findings also align with recent evidence from the French dementia village Landais Alzheimer, where residents experienced fewer and shorter hospitalisations and were less likely to die in hospital compared with those in traditional nursing homes, outcomes linked to higher staffing levels, interdisciplinary presence, and continuity of care.

The authors conclude that dementia villages may contribute to more sustainable dementia care by supporting residents’ autonomy, social inclusion, and personhood while sustaining constructive partnerships between formal and informal caregivers. Despite ongoing challenges with communication, involvement, and the balance between autonomy and safety, caregivers consistently said they would choose the model again, describing their relatives as safe, engaged, and well cared for. The team cautions that the small sample of 30 caregivers, proxy ratings of thriving, and the Norwegian context limit generalisability, and calls for comparative and longitudinal research to determine how consistently these benefits are achieved across settings and populations.

Subject of Research: Dementia care

Article Title: Family caregivers’ experiences in dementia villages: a model for sustainable and meaningful care

Article References: Bjørnnes, A. K., Grov, E.-K., Hessevaagbakke, E. E., Lindeflaten, K., Tschudi-Madsen, C., Holmström-Rising, M., Tørris, C., Hovland, J., & Lillekroken, D. (2026). Family caregivers’ experiences in dementia villages: a model for sustainable and meaningful care. Frontiers in Dementia, 5, Article 1949032. https://doi.org/10.3389/frdem.2026.1949032

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frdem.2026.1949032

Keywords: dementia villages, family caregivers, resident thriving, mixed methods, sustainable dementia care, Norway, Hogeweyk model, welfare technology, Family, caregivers, experiences, dementia

The headline numbers are striking enough on their own. Some 54.0 percent of respondents reported positive attitudes toward developing nuclear power for electricity generation in Norway, while 24.5 percent were undecided and 21.5 percent were negative. Men expressed markedly more favorable attitudes than women, with mean attitude scores of 5.08 versus 4.06 on a seven-point scale—a gap of over one full scale point. Perceived advantages of nuclear power slightly outweighed perceived disadvantages across the sample, and the two belief domains were moderately negatively correlated, suggesting that benefits and risks are not simply two ends of one dimension but partially independent evaluative tracks.

Norway is an unusual and informative setting for this kind of research. The country generates 87 percent of its electricity from hydropower, operates no nuclear reactors, and has historically opposed incorporating nuclear energy into national strategy. Yet its ambition to become a low-emission society by 2050 implies substantial growth in electricity demand across transportation, industry, and heating, and recent survey evidence suggests roughly 60 percent of Norwegians express support for nuclear energy. The researchers note that nuclear power is debated there as a prospective addition to an already largely renewable system rather than as a replacement for fossil generation—a framing that plausibly shapes which beliefs matter most to citizens.

The methodological approach departs from traditional attitude research, which typically examines beliefs in isolation or summarizes them as indicators of underlying latent dimensions. Instead, the team drew on the Causal Attitude Network framework, which conceptualizes attitudes as networks of interconnected belief elements. Each of the thirteen beliefs was modeled as a node, and the statistical associations between them—estimated with polychoric correlations suited to ordered rating scales—were modeled as edges. The estimation method, EBICglasso, applies regularization that shrinks weak associations to exactly zero, producing a conservative, interpretable map rather than a tangle of every small correlation. Crucially, the researchers emphasize that edges represent conditional associations, not causal influence.

Network analysis revealed three clusters of interrelated beliefs. A Materialist cluster emphasized economic and self-sufficiency considerations, including job creation, lower electricity prices, and reduced dependency on electricity from abroad. An Environmental cluster encompassed both climate-related benefits and ecological concerns, spanning beliefs about clean electricity production, greenhouse-gas emissions, and impacts on local environments and wildlife. A Burden cluster focused on perceived risks and costs, with terrorism and warfare risk, accident risk, and waste management forming a tightly interconnected group of concerns. The researchers suggest these clusters may reflect common evaluative frameworks citizens use when assessing contested energy technologies: utilitarian economic reasoning, environmental trade-offs, and perceived burdens.

The most structurally prominent belief in the full-sample network was the idea that nuclear power provides a stable source of electricity independent of sun and wind. This node showed connections to beliefs across all three clusters, linking to greenhouse-gas emissions and accident risk within the Environmental cluster, reduced import dependency within the Materialist cluster, and terrorism and warfare risk within the Burden cluster. The pattern suggests that perceived supply stability functions as a cross-cutting belief, weaving together multiple evaluative dimensions rather than belonging to any single domain. By contrast, beliefs about job creation and high construction costs were among the least central nodes in the network.

When the researchers estimated belief networks separately for supporters, undecided respondents, and opponents, a subtle but important pattern emerged. Global connectivity—the overall density of the belief system—was essentially identical across the three attitude groups, and permutation-based network comparison tests confirmed no differences in either connectivity or structure. What distinguished the groups was which beliefs occupied focal positions. Among supporters, the belief in stable energy supply was the most central node, and this was the only node-level group difference that remained significant after correction for multiple comparisons. Among opponents, terrorism and warfare concerns were descriptively most central, though the researchers caution that the negative-only network’s centrality estimates were insufficiently stable to support strong conclusions.

The undecided group proved equally revealing. Contrary to the researchers’ registered expectation, the belief system of undecided respondents was no less connected than those of decided respondents. Descriptively, undecided respondents were predominantly women, somewhat younger than the negative group, and showed agreement levels intermediate between supporters and opponents across both advantages and disadvantages. Notably, 23.3 percent of undecided respondents answered “don’t know” to at least seven of the thirteen belief items, compared with just 1.5 percent of positive respondents. The researchers interpret this pattern as most consistent with relatively weakly developed or weakly crystallized attitudes—closer to what survey methodologists call “nonattitudes” than to firmly held neutral positions—though they acknowledge that cross-sectional data cannot distinguish among uncertainty, ambivalence, indifference, or response tendencies.

The study carries important caveats. The cross-sectional design precludes causal inference about relations among beliefs or between beliefs and overall attitudes, and the researchers explicitly warn that centrality should be read as structural prominence rather than demonstrated causal importance. Recent evidence suggests that central attitudes are not necessarily more effective persuasion targets, so the findings should not be taken as a communication playbook. The belief set also deliberately excluded broader constructs such as political ideology, environmental values, and institutional trust, which prior research—including a Polish network analysis that found political ideology centrally positioned—suggests could occupy influential positions in more comprehensive networks. Data were collected in February 2024, during a period when energy security and electricity prices were salient topics in Europe, so the network structure may not generalize to other time periods.

Despite these limitations, the findings contribute to a growing literature on the social dimensions of energy transitions. The researchers argue that mapping belief configurations clarifies the evaluative frameworks through which contested low-carbon technologies are perceived, and that different segments of the public may approach nuclear energy through different lenses. For public engagement processes, they suggest that a single framing of nuclear energy is unlikely to address the range of concerns and perceived benefits present in the population, and that engagement efforts acknowledging trade-offs across multiple belief domains may be more appropriate than narrow messaging strategies. Future research, they propose, should use longitudinal and experimental designs to test whether changes in specific beliefs propagate to other beliefs and overall attitudes, and whether network connectivity predicts temporal stability as individuals move from undecided to more clearly positive or negative positions.

Subject of Research: The structure of nuclear energy beliefs in Norway: a psychological network analysis

Article Title: The structure of nuclear energy beliefs in Norway: a psychological network analysis

Article References: Kraft, B., Chambon, M., & Kraft, P. (2026). The structure of nuclear energy beliefs in Norway: a psychological network analysis. Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy, 5, Article 1860422. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsuep.2026.1860422

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsuep.2026.1860422

Keywords: structure, nuclear, energy, beliefs, Norway, psychological, network, analysis, scientific research