Lauren Maxwell

Emory University | EU · Department of Global Health

Introduction The benefits of sharing participant-level data, including clinical or epidemiological data, genomic data, high-dimensional imaging data, or human-derived samples, from biomedical studies have been widely touted and may be taken for granted. As investments in data sharing and reuse efforts continue to grow, understanding the cost and po...

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a serious human rights violation that has intensified in Yemen due to war, displacement, and pandemics. The cultural stigma surrounding discussions of VAWG, particularly sexual violence, compounded by a lack of resources for affected individuals, poses significant challenges for research and program implem...

Violence against women and children (VAWC) is a significant health and human rights issue closely tied to multiple Sustainable Development Goals. While VAWC is prevalent in all countries, the severity and incidence of VAWC increase during wars, natural disasters, economic crises, and pandemics, all of which have affected Yemen in recent years. This...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.2196/54281.].

Infectious disease (ID) cohorts are key to advancing public health surveillance, public policies, and pandemic responses. Unfortunately, ID cohorts often lack funding to store and share clinical-epidemiological (CE) data and high-dimensional laboratory (HDL) data long term, which is evident when the link between these data elements is not kept up t...

Providing accurate, evidence-based information to women with Zika infection during pregnancy was problematic because of the high degree of uncertainty in the diagnosis of the infection and the associated risk. The 2015–17 Zika virus epidemic overwhelmingly affected women in countries with limited access to safe abortion. Understanding women’s persp...

Background Recent research in life course epidemiology has demonstrated the importance of evaluating how prepregnancy and pregnancy exposures affect later life developmental outcomes. In this scoping review, we identified and described completed or ongoing pregnancy and prepregnancy cohorts to assess gaps in the maternal exposures and child outcome...

Observational data provide invaluable real-world information in medicine, but certain methodological considerations are required to derive causal estimates. In this systematic review, we evaluated the methodology and reporting quality of individual-level patient data meta-analyses (IPD-MAs) conducted with non-randomized exposures, published in 2009...

Introduction Providing accurate, evidence-based information to women with Zika infection during pregnancy was problematic because of the high degree of uncertainty in the diagnosis of the infection and the associated risk. The 2015-17 Zika virus epidemic overwhelmingly affected women in countries with limited access to safe abortion. Understanding...

Background Disrespect and abuse during facility-based abortion and postabortion care (PAC) manifests in various forms, including disrespect, abuse (physical, verbal, and sexual), stigma, discrimination, failure to meet standards of care, neglect, breaches in privacy and confidentiality, misinformation or a lack of information, mistreatment or undig...

UNSTRUCTURED Infectious disease (ID) cohorts are key to advancing public health surveillance, public policies, and pandemic responses. Unfortunately, ID cohorts often lack funding to store and share clinical-epidemiological (CE) data and high-dimensional laboratory (HDL) data long term, which is evident when the link between these data elements is...

Data sharing is central to the rapid translation of research into advances in clinical medicine and public health practice. In the context of COVID-19, there has been a rush to share data marked by an explosion of population-specific and discipline-specific resources for collecting, curating, and disseminating participant-level data. We conducted a...

Introduction The benefits of sharing participant-level data from biomedical studies have been widely touted and may be taken for granted. As investments in data sharing and reuse efforts continue to grow, understanding the cost and positive and negative effects of data sharing for research participants, the general public, individual researchers, r...

Individual participant data meta‐analyses (IPD‐MAs) have several benefits over standard aggregate data meta‐analyses, including the consideration of additional participants, follow‐up time, and the joint consideration of study‐ and participant‐level heterogeneity for improved diagnostic and prognostic model development and evaluation. However, IPD‐...

Observational data provide invaluable real-world information in medicine, but certain methodological considerations are required to derive causal estimates. In this systematic review, we evaluated the methodology and reporting quality of individual-level patient data meta-analyses (IPD-MAs) published in 2009, 2014, and 2019 that sought to estimate...

Background Individual participant data meta-analyses (IPD-MAs), which involve harmonising and analysing participant-level data from related studies, provide several advantages over aggregate data meta-analyses, which pool study-level findings. IPD-MAs are especially important for building and evaluating diagnostic and prognostic models, making them...

Objectives To support the Zika virus (ZIKV) Individual Participant Data (IPD) Consortium’s efforts to harmonise and analyse IPD from ZIKV-related prospective cohort studies and surveillance-based studies of pregnant women and their infants and children; we developed and disseminated a metadata survey among ZIKV-IPD Meta-Analysis (MA) study particip...

Background Individual participant data meta-analyses (IPD-MAs), which include harmonising and analysing participant-level data from related studies, provide several advantages over aggregate data meta-analyses, which pool study-level findings. IPD-MAs are especially important for building and evaluating diagnostic and prognostic models, making them...

A common problem in the analysis of multiple data sources, including individual participant data meta‐analysis (IPD‐MA), is the misclassification of binary variables. Misclassification may lead to biased estimators of model parameters, even when the misclassification is entirely random. We aimed to develop statistical methods that facilitate unbias...

Background Individual participant data meta-analyses (IPD-MAs), which include harmonising and analysing participant-level data from related studies, provide several advantages over aggregate data meta-analyses, which pool study-level findings. IPD-MAs are especially important for building and evaluating diagnostic and prognostic models, making them...

Objective To externally validate various prognostic models and scoring rules for predicting short term mortality in patients admitted to hospital for covid-19. Design Two stage individual participant data meta-analysis. Setting Secondary and tertiary care. Participants 46 914 patients across 18 countries, admitted to a hospital with polymerase c...

Zika virus (ZIKV) infection during pregnancy is a cause of pregnancy loss and multiple clinical and neurological anomalies in children. This systematic review aimed to assess the effect of ZIKV exposure in utero on the long-term neurodevelopment of normocephalic children born to women with ZIKV infection in pregnancy. This review was conducted acco...

Background: Countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) host 16 million displaced people, out of whom 2.7 million meet the UNHCR definition of refugees. As one of the world's most vulnerable populations, refugees have limited access to healthcare services, especially in developing countries where the resources are scarce. Given the ongoing...

Objectives Among ID studies seeking to make causal inferences and pooling individual-level longitudinal data from multiple infectious disease cohorts, we sought to assess what methods are being used, how those methods are being reported, and whether these factors have changed over time. Study Design and Setting Systematic review of longitudinal ob...

A common problem in the analysis of multiple data sources, including individual participant data meta-analysis (IPD-MA), is the misclassification of binary variables. Misclassification may lead to biased estimates of model parameters, even when the misclassification is entirely random. We aimed to develop statistical methods that facilitate unbiase...

Introduction Causal methods have been adopted and adapted across health disciplines, particularly for the analysis of single studies. However, the sample sizes necessary to best inform decision-making are often not attainable with single studies, making pooled individual-level data analysis invaluable for public health efforts. Researchers commonly...

In this analysis, we assess whether laws that promote gender equity and freedom from violence are associated with a lower risk of prior-year physical and sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) among adolescent girls and adult women (AGW) and whether these laws protect more and less vulnerable AGW equally. We included all 15 countries that administe...

Introduction: Recent research in life course epidemiology has demonstrated the importance of evaluating how pre-pregnancy and pregnancy exposures affect later life developmental outcomes. While the fields of nutrition, non-communicable disease, and social epidemiology have examined a diversity of birth- and longer-term outcomes related to different...

Ideally, a meta‐analysis will summarize data from several unbiased studies. Here we look into the less than ideal situation in which contributing studies may be compromised by non‐differential measurement error in the exposure variable. Specifically, we consider a meta‐analysis for the association between a continuous outcome variable and one or mo...

Introduction Pooling (or combining) and analysing observational, longitudinal data at the individual level facilitates inference through increased sample sizes, allowing for joint estimation of study- and individual-level exposure variables, and better enabling the assessment of rare exposures and diseases. Empirical studies leveraging such methods...

Ideally, a meta-analysis will summarize data from several unbiased studies. Here we consider the less than ideal situation in which contributing studies may be compromised by measurement error. Measurement error affects every study design, from randomized controlled trials to retrospective observational studies. We outline a flexible Bayesian frame...

This commentary describes the creation of the Zika Virus Individual Participant Data Consortium, a global collaboration to address outstanding questions in Zika virus (ZIKV) epidemiology through conducting an individual participant data meta-analysis (IPD-MA). The aims of the IPD-MA are to (1) estimate the absolute and relative risks of miscarriage...

Background: Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a human-rights violation with adverse long-term and inter-generational consequences. Redefining VAWG as legally unacceptable is one strategy for social change. The co-occurrence of national laws against VAWG is understudied, and tools to monitor the national legal environment are lacking. We d...

A key challenge in estimating the infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 is determining the total number of cases. The total number of cases is not known because not everyone is tested but also, more importantly, because tested individuals are not representative of the population at large. We refer to the phenomenon whereby infected individuals...

Women comprise two-thirds of the global-health (GH) workforce but are underrepresented in leadership. GH departments are platforms to advance gender equality in GH leadership. Using a survey of graduates from one GH department, we compared women’s and men’s post-training career agency and GH employment and assessed whether gender gaps in training a...

Women's empowerment is a process that includes increases in intrinsic agency (power within); instrumental agency (power to); and collective agency (power with). We used baseline data from two studies-Targeting and Realigning Agriculture for Improved Nutrition (TRAIN) in Bangladesh and Building Resilience in Burkina Faso (BRB)-to assess the measurem...

Objective: To describe the prevalence of recent physical, sexual, and emotional violence against children 0 - 19 years of age in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) by age, sex, and perpetrator. Methods: A systematic review and analysis of published literature and large international datasets was conducted. Eligible sources from first record t...

Introduction Zika virus (ZIKV) infection during pregnancy is a known cause of microcephaly and other congenital and developmental anomalies. In the absence of a ZIKV vaccine or prophylactics, principal investigators (PIs) and international leaders in ZIKV research have formed the ZIKV Individual Participant Data (IPD) Consortium to identify, collec...

Objective The epidemiology of violence against children is likely to differ substantially by sex and age of the victim and the perpetrator. Thus far, investment in effective prevention strategies has been hindered by lack of clarity in the burden of childhood violence across these dimensions. We produced the first age-specific and sex-specific prev...

Introduction Inadequately spaced pregnancies, defined as pregnancies fewer than 18 months apart, are linked to maternal, infant, and child morbidity and mortality, and adverse social, educational and economic outcomes in later life for women and children. Quantifying the relation between intimate partner violence (IPV) and women’s ability to space...

Understanding what factors influence the receipt of postabortion contraception can help improve comprehensive abortion care services. The abortion visit is an ideal time to reach women at the highest risk of unintended pregnancy with the most effective contraceptive methods. The objectives of this study were to estimate the relationship between the...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is an important global public health problem. While there is a growing literature on the association between IPV and women's reproductive health (RH) outcomes, most studies are cross-sectional-which weakens inference about the causal effect of IPV on women's RH. This systematic review synthesizes existing evidence fr...

Mexican immigrant mothers face many challenges that put them at increased risk for poor mental health. To understand the factors that lead to the development of depressive symptoms among Mexican immigrant mothers, we analyzed data from 20 qualitative, semistructured interviews. Participants included low-income, Mexican-born mothers of young childre...

Latina mothers of infants and toddlers are at high risk for developing serious depressive symptoms if they are newly immigrated and have limited English proficiency (LEP). Depressive symptoms compromise these mothers and result in severe consequences for their U.S.-born children. A randomized clinical trial of a short-term, in-home psychotherapy in...