This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

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The increase we have witnessed in life expectancy in recent years has been a historical milestone in the history of humanity. Nevertheless, this social success presents great clinical and social challenges. After the first successful Special Issue on this topic, the Guest Editors aim to explore different initiatives that result in the health promotion of older adults, such as multicomponent physical exercise programs, interventions that try to avoid loneliness and social isolation and multidisciplinary assessment, and the treatment of frailty and other geriatric syndromes in various settings, such as the emergency unit, orthogeriatrics, and oncogeriatrics. Broadly, this Special Issue is seeking original submissions that examine (1) the method to detect and to reverse frailty and sarcopenia; (2) the method to diagnose early and prevent delirium and other geriatric syndromes; (3) best practices to manage the treatment of the older adults with specific situations, such as hip fracture or oncological disease; (4) best practices for designing, implementing, and/or evaluating integrated interventions to improve healthcare in older adults; and (5) best practices to develop healthcare to improve quality of life in older adults. Special interest will be given to innovative practices that expand and build upon geriatric approaches with multidisciplinary models. Other manuscript types of interest include relevant position papers, meta-analyses, reviews, brief reports, and commentaries.

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Global health, conceived as a discipline, aims to train, research and respond to problems of a transboundary nature, in order to improve health and health equity at the global level. The current worldwide situation is ruled by globalization, and therefore the concept of global health involves not only health-related issues, but also those related to the environment and climate change. Therefore, in this Special Issue, the problems related to global health have been addressed from a bibliometric approach in four main areas: environmental issues, diseases, health, education and society.

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The Special Issue “Body Image, Nutrition, and Mental Health” examines and illuminates the complex relationships among body image, nutrition, and mental health. It covers the psychological and social risk factors of body image disturbances and associated disorders, biological aspects of appetite regulation and the metabolic syndrome, and therapeutic approaches for eating and weight disorders and their health consequences.

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The present reprint, “Causal Inference for Heterogeneous Data and Information Theory”, is a special issue of Journal Entropy. This Special Issue belongs to the section "Information Theory, Probability, and Statistics". The reprint gathers thirteen original contributions of leading experts in the theory of causal inference, focusing namely on the utilization of instrumental variables in a causal model, estimation of average treatment effect, the role of interventions in causal models, graphical causal modeling, causal algebras, causal modeling using the theory of categories, temporal causal model, heterogeneous data, and information–theoretic approaches.

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Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most prevalent primary liver cancer, accounting for >80% of primary liver cancers worldwide. The diagnosis of HCC, relying solely on noninvasive criteria, is currently under debate due to the need for molecular information that necessitates tissue biopsies, while therapy is provided in accordance with tumor stages and the anticipated advantages of major interventions, following the Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) staging system. Principally, resection, transplantation and local ablation are most commonly performed in patients with early-stage HCC tumors, while TACE and systemic therapy are, respectively, the preferred treatment options for intermediate- and advanced-stage tumors. However, the HCC tumor immune microenvironment (TME) affects the response to current anti-PD-1/PD-L1 immunotherapies. Therefore, an enhanced understanding of the immunobiology of TME is essential for the development of predictive biomarkers of patient stratification and strategies of drug combinations to improve therapeutic efficacy, especially for patients with tumors that are unresponsive to anti-PD-1/PD-L1 therapy. Taking into account the health burden of HCC worldwide, with this Special Issue, we aim to enhance our knowledge of innovative diagnostic and prognostic methods and to discuss experimentation with different novel treatment modalities, believed to be of the utmost priority to progress in our seemingly never-ending fight against hepatocellular cancer.

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Savanna and grassland biomes cover more of the earth's surface than any other biome type, and yet they are still largely understudied. In recent decades, global savanna and grassland ecosystems have become more prominent in the literature focused on global change dynamics. Savanna and grasslands represent unique biomes with their own challenges, both in terms of their study and in terms of their complexity, leading to many contradictory and often controversial findings. The global threats to these systems are potentially significant, from climate change impacts to human management challenges, from possible degradation to complete desertification, which vary across disturbance regime shifts. This Special Issue of Applied Sciences, “Dynamics of Global Savanna and Grassland Biomes”, is intended for a wide and interdisciplinary audience, and covers recent advances in: - drivers of vegetation dynamics - further understanding carbon interactions in these critical landscapes - advances in modeling both current and future system states - tipping points in savanna systems - human-environment interactions and challenges for management - biodiversity and ecosystem services

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A concise and self-contained introduction to causal inference, increasingly important in data science and machine learning.The mathematization of causality is a relatively recent development, and has become increasingly important in data science and machine learning. This book offers a self-contained and concise introduction to causal models and how to learn them from data. After explaining the need for causal models and discussing some of the principles underlying causal inference, the book teaches readers how to use causal models: how to compute intervention distributions, how to infer causal models from observational and interventional data, and how causal ideas could be exploited for classical machine learning problems. All of these topics are discussed first in terms of two variables and then in the more general multivariate case. The bivariate case turns out to be a particularly hard problem for causal learning because there are no conditional independences as used by classical methods for solving multivariate cases. The authors consider analyzing statistical asymmetries between cause and effect to be highly instructive, and they report on their decade of intensive research into this problem. The book is accessible to readers with a background in machine learning or statistics, and can be used in graduate courses or as a reference for researchers. The text includes code snippets that can be copied and pasted, exercises, and an appendix with a summary of the most important technical concepts.

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The book provides a rich, informative picture of the current state of student engagement evaluation, while also highlighting challenges and opportunities for future advances. A particular strength of this publication is its emphasis on the importance of taking evidence-based decisions, and showing how the South African Survey of Student Engagement (SASSE) can provide the evidence for well-informed changes in policy and practice in order to enhance student success." - Prof Magda Fourie-Malherbe, Stellenbosch University

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This scholarly book is Volume 2 of a duology that seeks to stimulate conversations among development evaluators, commissioners of evaluations and development programme decision-makers about the role of evaluation in addressing inequality and fostering an equitable society in Africa. The book chapters explore the following questions: (1) Take stock of what we know about inequality – what inequality is in the African context, and how does it affect the lives of the citizens of African countries? (2) What does equitable evaluation mean? How can the concept of equitable evaluation be adopted in evaluation practice? (3) What lessons can be learnt from evaluations of interventions that address inequality at various levels (sectoral, programmatic and project) levels? (4) What epistemological transformation in evaluation practice is needed to achieve an equitable society? and (5) How have issues of inequality manifested within evaluation practice through organisations, institutions and international development? This book’s target audience is academics engaged in the field of developmental programmes in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Before new interventions can be used in disease control programmes, it is essential that they are carefully evaluated in “field trials”, which may be complex and expensive undertakings. Descriptions of the detailed procedures and methods used in trials that have been conducted in the past have generally not been published. As a consequence, those planning such trials have few guidelines available and little access to previously accumulated knowledge. In this book the practical issues of trial design and conduct are discussed fully and in sufficient detail for the text to be used as a “toolbox” by field investigators. The toolbox has now been extensively tested through use of the first two editions and this third edition is a comprehensive revision, incorporating the many developments that have taken place with respect to trials since 1996 and involving more than 30 contributors. Most of the chapters have been extensively revised and 7 new chapters have been added.

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This reprint presents original research as well as reviews on current food safety issues. A wide range of biological hazards, food commodities and measures to assess, control and manage hazards are covered. With respect to food commodities, meat, milk/dairy and fish/seafood are covered, but also wild game and edible insects. The epidemiology of parasites and pathogenic bacteria (Clostridioides difficile and Listeria monocytogenes) in various food chains is reviewed, as well as the impact of food technology on food safety.

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Medical practice is a mixture of science and art, technique and humanism. The importance of human beings is more obvious in medicine than in any other field. At the center of medical care is the patient, and at its base and that of the entire medical system is the relationship that is established between the patient and the medical staff. Overspecialization is a big component of modern medicine, with professionals working in increasingly narrow fields, which makes patients routinely treated by multidisciplinary teams. This draws attention to the importance of appropriate relationships between members of the medical team for the success of the therapeutic approach. In the context of technological progress in medicine, the need to relate to the humanistic values of the medical profession and the complexity of the medical act in which technical aspects are intertwined with cultural, ethical, legal, psychological, and sociological issues becomes increasingly clear. This Special Issue is dedicated to the humanistic values of medical practice. It includes articles that approach various aspects of the so-called humanistic medicine, drawing a picture of what contemporary medicine should strive for.

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How to intervene? Interventions are in vogue in digital cultures as forms of critique or political actions into public spheres. By engaging in social, political, and economic contexts, interventions attempt to interrupt and change situations—often with artistic means. This volume maps methods of interventions under the specific conditions of the digital. How are interventions shaped by these conditions? And how can they contribute to altering them? In essays and interviews, this book interrogates modes of intervening in and through art, infrastructures, techno-ecological environments, bio-technology, and political protests to highlight their potentials as well as their ambivalences.

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Evaluations of intervention programs seek to present high-quality design, measures and data to assess their merit and worth. While evaluations differ in their purpose, theoretical framework and methodology, their collective aim is to obtain relevant and meaningful information to inform practice, research, and policy. As such, evaluation findings serve to build a body of knowledge on effective approaches to promote designated psychological outcomes, critical to an individual's overall health and well-being. However, as examined in this e-book, methodological weaknesses directly limit the potential of evaluations of intervention programs. As discussed by Chacón-Moscoso and Sanduvete-Chaves, methodological weaknesses can be attributed to how to define and measure methodological quality and the contextual dependency of instruments designed to measure this quality.In response, this e-book provides a collection of studies on methodological approaches to promote the quality of psychological interventions. Specifically, 10 original works published in the Research Topic Methodological Quality of Interventions in Psychology are included. The papers are organized into two chapters. Concretely, Chapter 1 includes studies pertaining to methodological approaches to enhance the quality of psychological intervention, being context independent solutions. Furthermore, Chapter 2 presents original work in different areas (health, education, sport and social welfare) where methodological quality has been better assessed. Collectively, the papers in this e-book serve to expand the awareness of practitioners and researchers interested in psychological interventions of the critical role of methodological quality in this work. This research was funded by the projects 1150096 (Chilean National Fund of Scientific and Technological Development, FONDECYT); and PSI2015-71947-REDT (Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness).

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There has been increased focus on evaluating the scientific knowledge base within the field of traumatic brain injury (TBI) rehabilitation. TBI rehabilitation comprises several phases, from acute medical care to post-acute care in rehabilitation facilities and chronic care in the community. Rehabilitation is a multidisciplinary effort that covers the full spectrum of medical neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, pharmacology, brain imaging, and assistive and smart technology. A future challenge is to integrate these areas to guide TBI rehabilitation into extensive research and clinical practice. The use of smart technologies and improved brain imaging techniques has an important future in the rehabilitation of patients with cognitive difficulties and disabilities. There is also the need for broad international collaboration to establish large multinational clinical trials in order to define effective service provision and to reach a consensus on the best evidence-based practice of TBI rehabilitation. With this Special Issue, we hope to encourage submissions that discuss ongoing knowledge gaps and controversies, and focus on new perspectives regarding the rehabilitation and management of TBI.

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This reprint includes 15 articles in the field of non-communicable Diseases, big data, and artificial intelligence, overviewing the most recent advances in the field of AI and their application potential in 3P medicine.

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Food insecurity and low resources continue to be a burden influencing the health, well-being, growth, and development of millions of U.S. children and adults. Groups and individuals experiencing restrained access to food are our neighbors, individuals we may see each day, and individuals who we may not interact with or see because of their isolated situations. They include the elderly, those experiencing mental illness, veterans, certain race/ethnic groups, adolescents, young women with children, those living in rural areas, and those using food pantries, among others. Many of these groups, both hidden and visible, have rates of food insecurity above the national average that are resistant to national improvements in food security. Yet, attention to these subsets of the population is imperative to improve U.S. health and nutrition and to reduce rates of chronic disease. Many groups face specific barriers to maintaining sufficient food, for example, rural populations may find it difficult to access federal food assistance or other resources such as food pantries and nutrition education because of distance or lack of consistent internet access separating them from these resources. Further, their remote locations may make it difficult to obtain the types of foods that they prefer. Other specific barriers may include limited facilities and equipment for food preparation, access to culturally appropriate foods and preparation supplies, and foods that complement the foods that they already have. Tailored approaches to quantify access to food, the nutrition environment, dietary intake, and other barriers are necessary to build successful interventions and to quantify the needs of these populations.

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Malnutrition lurks in the background of hospitalized medical patients. A large proportion of patients are malnourished upon hospital admission and patients often experience further nutritional deterioration during their stay and during disease recovery. However, although the negative effects of malnutrition on the outcomes of patients are well recognized, we still struggle to identify appropriate patients and efficacious nutritional interventions to overcome this problem. Recent studies have produced convincing evidence that adequate and timely nutritional management of medical in-patients can contribute to the prevention of negative consequences and thus improve the clinical outcome of patients. This Special Issue of the Journal of Clinical Medicine focuses on multiple practical aspects of nutritional management of medical in-patients, from screening for nutritional risk to the practical implementation of nutritional therapy and its possible complications, including financial aspects, to increasing clinician awareness and knowledge of nutritional care in hospitals.

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Childhood cancer or pediatric cancer is one of the leading causes of death among children. Treatment strategies for pediatric cancers include chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, and stem cell transplantation. These therapeutic regimens are well known to develop highly toxic and long-lasting side-effects including secondary cancers in the future lifespan of pediatric patients. Despite these intensive therapeutic regimens, cancer may still relapse as refractory and metastatic cancer. Therefore, further understanding the causes of different pediatric cancers, mechanisms of drug-resistance, and causes of relapse and metastasis is required for developing and advancing less toxic and more effective therapeutic strategies for pediatric cancers. Recent advancements in immunotherapies and targeted therapeutic approaches using pharmacological inhibitors are one step in this direction.In this Special Issue of Cancers, authors contributed original research and review articles focusing on different aspects of pediatric cancer development, causes, maintenance, and therapeutic strategies. The collected articles in this Special Issue will further enhance our knowledge and understanding of pediatric cancers and drive the development of novel therapeutic strategies.

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The alleged responsibility of meats and processed meat products for some of our population’s major health issues has created an opportunity for the promotion of meat analogs. This emerging competition forces the need for changes in livestock production systems for improving nutritive value and obtaining healthier and safer meat products. The morbidity and mortality attributed to Salmonella and other pathogens remain a public health issue. Hence, there is an urgent need for developing intervention technologies to control such pathogens. Beef is packaged with an array of healthy nutrients and is the highest valued livestock product. However, staples (e.g., pork, poultry) and some co-products can also be nutrient dense and/or provide a unique sensory experience with advantageous technological quality. Carcass yield is a major determinant of livestock value. Hence, objective technologies are strongly needed to effectively segregate the heterogeneous supply of carcasses into homogeneous groups in yield of cuts. Not all meats are created equal, and differences in their intrinsic characteristics may be expected when they are produced in different regions and under diverse production schemes. Nevertheless, reports aiming to characterize meats originated from different zones (e.g., tropical latitudes) are scarce. This Special Issue of Foods, “Progress on Nutrient Composition, Meat Standardization, Grading, Processing, and Safety for Different Types of Meat Sources”, comprising fourteen peer-reviewed papers, is now being released as a book that will serve as an invaluable reference in addressing the current dearth of knowledge regarding the aforementioned topics, and is also envisaged to serve in updating food scientists and stakeholders of the meat value chain globally.

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This Special Issue of the journal Children constitutes an opportune moment to reflect on the psychosocial needs of children living with rare diseases and of their families. As medical advances, treatments, and developments have enabled many of these children to survive infancy and to live into adulthood, progress brings with it concerns and opportunities to enhance the psychosocial quality of life of children living with rare diseases, and of their families. This Special Issue reflects the current state of psychosocial research, which is primarily qualitative in nature. There are no scientifically rigorous randomized clinical trials to create an evidence base of effective psychosocial interventions for the provision of care to children with rare diseases and to their families; nevertheless, the papers within this Special Issue provide a reflection on the state of the science, including ideas about future research and practice. In this next section we share observations about the contributions made by each of the 13 articles, which cover a diverse range of topics.

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Reading fluency has been identified as a key component of proficient reading. Research has consistently demonstrated significant and substantial correlations between reading fluency and overall reading achievement. Despite the great potential for fluency to have a significant outcome on students’ reading achievement, it continues to be not well understood by teachers, school administrators and policy makers. The chapters in this volume examine reading fluency from a variety of perspectives. The initial chapter sketches the history of fluency as a literacy instruction component. Following chapters examine recent studies and approaches to reading fluency, followed by chapters that explore actual fluency instruction models and the impact of fluency instruction. Assessment of reading fluency is critical for monitoring progress and identifying students in need of intervention. Two articles on assessment, one focused on word recognition and the other on prosody, expand our understanding of fluency measurement. Finally, a study from Turkey explores the relationship of various reading competencies, including fluency, in an integrated model of reading. Our hope for this volume is that it may spark a renewed interest in research into reading fluency and fluency instruction and move toward making fluency instruction an even more integral part of all literacy instruction.

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International governments have committed to supporting the development of greater equity and inclusion in education. However—despite some progress—many individuals and communities continue to face discrimination, remaining on the margins of society. This collection of papers highlights the many challenges faced by persons perceived to be different from the majority population in their communities. This labelling of individuals has served to exclude many from engaging fully with the social and educational opportunities that the majority take for granted. The authors who have contributed to this Special Edition have challenged the stereotypical views of such individuals, ensuring that the voices of those who best understand the experience of living with discrimination can be heard.These papers demonstrate how listening to the voices of marginalised individuals can become an important first step towards a process of change. Such an action fundamentally challenges established procedures whereby opportunities to learn from the experiences of marginalised individuals have been neglected. We acknowledge that listening is only the starting point for a radical reengagement that enables marginalised individuals to fully participate in society. However, several of the authors who have contributed to this Special Edition have provided an indication of how the movement towards equity and inclusion may be advanced.

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This book reflects and analyses the working of power in the field of global health– and what this goes on to produce. In so doing, Rethinking Global Health asks the pivotal questions of, ‘who is global health for’ and ‘what is it that limits our ability to build responses that meet people where they are?’ Covering a wide range of topics from global mental health to Ebola, this book combines power analyses with interviews and personal reflections spanning the author’s decade-long career in global health. It interrogates how the search for global solutions can often end up far from where we anticipated. It also introduces readers to different frameworks for power analyses in the field, including an adaptation of the ‘matrix of domination’ for global health practice. Through this work, Dr Burgess develops a new model of Transformative Global Health, a framework that calls researchers and practitioners to adopt new orienting principles, placing community interests and voices at the heart of global health planning and solutions at all times. This book will be beneficial to students and academics working in the global and public health landscape. It will also hold appeal to activists, practitioners and individuals invested in the discipline and in health equity around the world.

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This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

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This book highlights the global concern about the teaching workforce, from recruitment and retention of teachers to the development and quality of teachers in schools. The collection of papers in this book is international in scope, representing a range of research designs (from longitudinal studies using national and international datasets, large-scale surveys, reviews and syntheses of evidence to randomized control trials, value-added models and design-based action research). These papers exemplify the high standard of research in education.

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An increasing number of countries are shifting toward sustainable energy economies, emphasizing the use of renewable energy sources, increases in energy efficiency and the abatement of greenhouse gas emissions. The success of such an energy transition will depend not only on the development of new energy technologies, but also on major changes in the patterns of individual energy-related decisions and behaviors resulting in substantial reductions in energy demand. Consequently, the behavioral sciences can make important contributions to the energy transition by increasing our understanding of the multiple factors and mechanisms that underlie individual as well as group-based decisions and behaviors in the energy domain and by creating a basis for systematic interventions that reduce energy usage. Many different types of relevant behaviors and decisions need to be considered in this context, including decisions to invest in energy-efficient household equipment, adjustments of energy-critical habits related to heating, eating, or mode of transportation, and participation in the political discourse related to questions of energy. An integration of the expertise of the different disciplines of the behavioral sciences is thus needed to comprehensively investigate the impact of the different drivers and barriers that may determine energy-related decisions and behaviors, including economic factors such as price level, social factors such as norms, communication patterns and social learning processes, and individual factors such as values, attitudes, beliefs, heuristics, affective biases and emotions. The potential impact of these factors on the success of the energy transition is considerable: for example, a recent projection of the energy demand in Switzerland until 2050 has estimated the reduction potential related to psychological and sociological factors between 0% and 30%, depending on which behavioral changes will be implemented in society. Increased research efforts from the behavioral sciences are required to ensure that the full reduction potential can be achieved. This Research Topic brings together contributions from different disciplines such as psychology, affective science, behavioral economics, economics, sociology, consumer behavior, business science, sociology, and political science, that improve our understanding of the many factors underlying decision-making and behavior in the energy domain, and contribute to the development of targeted interventions that aim at reducing energy demand based on these factors.

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Sleep-related symptoms are common in the majority of psychiatric diagnostic categories. The overlap of sleep and psychiatric disorders have been demonstrated in numerous studies. The understanding of sleep and child psychiatry has progressively evolved in the last decade and newer insights have developed regarding the complex interaction between sleep and psychopathology. This collection of articles represents updates on sleep and psychiatric disorders with medical and neurological co-morbidities in children and adolescents.

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