JMIR Public Health and Surveillance

Converging evidence indicates an adolescent mental health crisis in Western societies that has developed and exacerbated over the past decade. The proposed driving factors of this trend include more screen time, physical inactivity, and social isolation but their causal influence on mental health is insufficiently understood.

Hepatitis B is an important public health challenge facing China, Understanding the long-term epidemiological trends and evolving spatial distribution patterns is critical for optimizing prevention strategies and achieving the WHO's 2030 hepatitis elimination targets.

Social network data are essential and informative for public health research and implementation as they provide details on individuals and their social context. For example, health information and behaviors, such as HIV-related prevention and care, may disseminate within a network, or across society. By harmonizing egocentric and digital networks, researchers may construct a sociocentric-like “fuzzy” network based on a subgroup of the population.

Unemployment is a risk factor for the development and perpetuation of psychological distress. Finding support for affected individuals can be particularly challenging, which causes a vicious cycle of psychological distress and unemployment.

While survival among pediatric cancer patients has advanced, disparities persist. Public health tools such as the Area Deprivation Index, Child Opportunity Index, and the Social Vulnerability Index are potential proxies for social determinants of health and could help researchers, public health practitioners, and clinicians identify neighborhoods or populations most likely to experience adverse outcomes. However, evidence regarding their relationship with healthcare utilization, especially in the pediatric cancer population remains mixed.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) and diabetes share many common lifestyle risk factors, such as obesity. However, it remains largely unknown how different factors interact to influence the risk of CRC development among diabetes patients.

HIV infections have caused severe public health and economic burdens to the world. Adolescents and young people continue to constitute a large proportion of newly diagnosed HIV cases. Digital health interventions have been increasingly used to prevent the rising HIV epidemic. Behavior change techniques (BCTs) are intervention components designed to modify the underlying processes that regulate behavior. The BCT taxonomy offers a systematic approach to identifying, extracting, and coding these components, providing valuable insights into effective intervention strategies. However, few reviews have comprehensively identified the use of BCTs in digital HIV interventions among adolescents and young people.

Early diagnosis and treatment initiation for tuberculosis (TB) not only improve individual patient outcomes, but also reduce circulation within communities. Active case-finding (ACF), a cornerstone of TB control programs, aims to achieve this by targeting symptom screening and laboratory testing to individuals at high risk of infection. However, its efficiency is dependent on its ability to accurately identify such high risk individuals and communities. The socio-economic determinants of TB include difficulties in accessing healthcare and high within-household contact rates. These two determinants are common in the poorest neighborhoods of many sub-Saharan cities, where household crowding and lack of healthcare access often coincide with malnutrition and HIV infection, further contributing to the burden of tuberculosis.

Social norms provided a framework for understanding a variety of behaviors. Cultural tightness was introduced to measure the level of adherence to social norms and tolerance of deviant behavior.

The AIDS epidemic among older people is becoming more serious. Evidence-based, acceptable and effective preventive interventions are urgently needed. Video-based intervention has become an innovative way to change healthy behaviors, and we have developed a brief video-based intervention named Sunset Without AIDS.

Concerns have been raised about discrepancies in COVID-19 mortality data, particularly between preliminary and final vital statistics datasets for Serbia. In the original preliminary dataset, released daily during the ongoing pandemic, there was an underestimation of deaths in contrast to those reported in the subsequently released yearly vital statistics.

Social distancing behavior has been a critical non-pharmaceutical measure for mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, there has been widespread interest in the factors determining social distancing violations, with a particular focus on individual-based factors.