Ann Am Thorac Soc. 2022 Aug 31. doi: 10.1513/AnnalsATS.202202-154RL. Online ahead of print.
NO ABSTRACT
PMID:36044710 | DOI:10.1513/AnnalsATS.202202-154RL
Int J Periodontics Restorative Dent. 2022 Sep-Oct;42(5):683-689. doi: 10.11607/prd.5005.
ABSTRACT
The high biomechanical loads in molar region wounds challenge the indication for short implants to be used as a single-unit implant. This study reports on the outcomes of single-unit short implants (≤ 8.0 mm) in the maxillary and mandibular molar regions. Forty-nine short implants were placed in 48 patients to replace a missing molar tooth. Two-piece restorations with screw retention were fabricated. During the follow-up, implant survival and marginal bone loss (MBL) were assessed. The known implant length was used as a reference to calibrate the linear measurements on digital periapical radiographs, and descriptive statistical analysis was performed. The implants were followed over a period of 47 ± 12 months. No implant failure was recorded, and no prosthesis failure was observed. The average MBL was 0.15 ± 0.5 mm. The mean crown height space was 13 ± 3 mm. The overall crown-to-implant ratio was 1.7 ± 0.4. Two technical complications occurred due to the loosening of the unit abutment. After screw re-tightening, no more screw loosening was observed. This study supports the use of short implants as a single-unit implant in the maxillary and mandibular molar regions.
PMID:36044701 | DOI:10.11607/prd.5005
Int J Periodontics Restorative Dent. 2022 Sep-Oct;42(5):639-646. doi: 10.11607/prd.6036.
ABSTRACT
The present study evaluated the 2-year changes in soft tissue width after implant placement in healed sites, using two different methodologies to obtain tissue healing: preformed and anatomical abutment caps for customized healing (test) vs conventional healing abutments (control). The null hypothesis was that there would be no difference between the test group and the control group. Patients who suffered from a single-tooth edentulous area in the premolar/molar region were included. Both the standard abutments and the preformed and anatomical abutment caps were immediately screwed on the implants. The final crown restoration was fabricated 3 months later. Primary outcomes (changes in the alveolar soft tissue ridge) and secondary outcomes (testing adverse events and measuring implant/prosthesis survival) were evaluated. Thirty-nine patients (24 women) with a mean age of 57.7 ± 7.1 years (range: 42.6 to 72.8 years) were included. Alveolar widths in both groups showed significant increases from baseline to the 3-month follow-up, with augmentations of 3.6 ± 0.7 mm for the test group and 1.1 ± 0.9 mm for the control group. The gain in soft tissue appeared to be statistically different between the two groups (P < .0001). Contrarily, any subsequent change in width from 3 months to 2 years was negligible and insignificant (< 0.33 mm for both groups). The technique described in the present study encourages the potential for alternative healing based on the guided soft tissue concept, as it either eliminated the need for second-stage surgery or it reduced step-by-step peri-implant soft tissue conditioning, obtaining a tissue contour immediately very similar to that of a final prosthesis.
PMID:36044695 | DOI:10.11607/prd.6036
Int J Periodontics Restorative Dent. 2022 Sep-Oct;42(5):e121-e131. doi: 10.11607/prd.6265.
ABSTRACT
The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to assess whether the addition of enamel matrix derivative (EMD) to a coronally advanced flap (CAF) combined with a connective tissue graft (CTG) resulted in a greater amount of root coverage in patients treated for gingival recessions, as compared to CAF+CTG alone. The search for clinical trials on root coverage procedures comparing CAF+CTG+EDM vs CAF+CTG was completed on online databases and gray literature, and it included studies published up to January 2022. The risk of bias was assessed using the Cochrane bias assessment tool, and the quantitative analysis was performed using a random effects model. A total of 1,917 articles were identified, and 12 underwent full-text review. Three studies were excluded, and 9 were selected for full analysis. The meta-analysis showed that there is a statistically significant difference (P = .04) in favor of CAF+CTG+EMD compared to CAF+CTG alone for the amount of root coverage (mean difference: 0.30 mm; 95% CI: 0.01, 0.58 mm). According to the results of this systematic review and meta-analysis, the addition of EMD to CAF+CTG results in a greater amount of root coverage in teeth treated for gingival recessions.
PMID:36044689 | DOI:10.11607/prd.6265
Retina. 2022 May 23. doi: 10.1097/IAE.0000000000003540. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
PURPOSE: The importance of consistent outpatient follow-up for management of diabetic eye disease has been well-established. The objective of this study was to identify patient factors associated with being lost to follow-up in post-surgical patients after undergoing pars plana vitrectomy for diabetic eye disease.
METHODS: The charts of diabetic patients undergoing pars plana vitrectomy for non-clearing vitreous hemorrhage at an academic medical center by a single surgeon between 2012 and 2019 were reviewed. The rates of loss to follow-up during the postoperative period were compared based on patient distance from clinic and insurance status.
RESULTS: A total of 144 patients met inclusion criteria. 45 patients (31.25%) were lost to follow-up during the three-month postoperative period. The rate of loss to follow-up increased with every postoperative visit and was significantly higher for patients living greater than 30 miles from clinic versus patients living within 30 miles from clinic. There was no statistically significant difference in loss to follow-up based on insurance status.
CONCLUSIONS: Increased distance from clinic presents a challenge to providing safe and effective post-surgical care to diabetic patients. This presents opportunities for co-management or other creative strategies to improve post-surgical follow-up rates for at-risk patients.
PMID:36044683 | DOI:10.1097/IAE.0000000000003540
J Med Internet Res. 2022 May 17. doi: 10.2196/35860. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: COVID-19 has been observed to be associated with venous and arterial thrombosis. The inflammatory disease prolongs hospitalization, and preexisting comorbidities can intensify thrombotic burden in COVID-19 patients. However, venous thromboembolism, arterial thrombosis, and other vascular complications may go unnoticed in critical care settings. Early risk stratification is paramount in the COVID-19 patient population for proactive monitoring of thrombotic complications.
OBJECTIVE: This exploratory research seeks to characterize thrombotic complication risk factors associated with COVID-19 using information from Electronic Health Record (EHR) databases and insurance claims databases. The goal is to develop an approach for analysis using real-world data evidence that can be generalized to characterize thrombotic complications and additional conditions in other clinical settings as well, such as pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome in COVID-19 patients or in ICU settings.
METHODS: We extracted deidentified patient data from the insurance claims database, IBM MarketScan, and formulated hypotheses on thrombotic complications in COVID-19 patients with respect to patient demographic and clinical factors using logistic regression. The analysis then verified the hypotheses with deidentified patient data from the Mass General Brigham (MGB) patient EHR database, the Research Patient Data Registry (RPDR). A combination of odds ratios, 95% confidence intervals (CI), and P-values were obtained via the statistical analysis.
RESULTS: The analysis identified significant predictors (with P-value <.001) for thrombotic complications in 184,831 COVID-19 patients out of the millions of records from IBM MarketScan and MGB RPDR. With respect to age groups, patients 60 years old and older had higher odds (4.866 in Marketscan and 6.357 in RPDR) to have thrombotic complications than those under 60 years old. In terms of gender, men were more likely (odds ratio of 1.245 in Marketscan and 1.693 in RPDR) to have thrombotic complications than women. Among the pre-existing comorbidities, heart disease, cerebrovascular diseases, hypertension, and personal history of thrombosis all had significantly higher odds of developing a thrombotic complication. Cancer and obesity had odds greater than 1 as well. The results from RPDR validated the IBM MarketScan findings. They are largely consistent and afford mutual enrichment.
CONCLUSIONS: The analysis approach can work across heterogeneous databases from diverse organizations and thus facilitates collaboration. Searching through millions of patient records, the analysis helped identify factors influencing a phenotype. Use of thrombotic complications in COVID-19 patients is just a case study, and the same design can be used across other disease areas by extracting corresponding disease specific patient data from the databases.
PMID:36044652 | DOI:10.2196/35860
JMIR Res Protoc. 2022 Aug 6. doi: 10.2196/38866. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: At the beginning of 2020, mothers and fathers who experienced perinatal events (from conception to pregnancy and postpartum period) found themselves facing problems relating to the emergency caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and the associated difficulties for healthcare centers in providing care. In the unexpected and negative event of perinatal loss (miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death) more complications occurred. Perinatal loss is a painful and traumatic life experience that causes grief and can cause affective disorders in the parental couple: the baby dies and the couple’s plans for a family are abruptly interrupted. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the limited access to perinatal bereavement care, due to the lockdown measures imposed on medical Healthcare Centers and the social distancing rules to prevent contagion, was an additional risk factor for parental mental health, such as suffering a prolonged and complicated grief.
OBJECTIVE: The main aims of this study are: to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on mothers and fathers who experienced perinatal loss during the pandemic, comparing their perceptions; to evaluate their change over time between first survey administration after bereavement and the second survey, after 6 months; to examine correlations of bereavement with anxiety, depression, couple satisfaction, spirituality and socio-demographic variables; to investigate which psychosocial factors may negatively affect the mourning process and to identify the potential predictors of the development of complicated grief.
METHODS: This longitudinal observational multicenter study is structured according to a mixed methods design, with a quantitative and qualitative section. It will include a sample of parents (mothers and fathers) who experienced perinatal loss during the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020. There are two phases: a baseline and a follow-up after 6 months.
RESULTS: This protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of Psychological Research, University of Padova, and by the Institutional Ethics Board of the Spedali Civili of Brescia, Italy. We expect to collect data from 34 or more couples, as determined by our sample size calculation.
CONCLUSIONS: This study will contribute to the understanding of the psychological processes related to perinatal loss and bereavement care during the COVID-19 pandemic. It will provide information useful to prevent the risk of complicated grief and psychopathologies among bereaved parents and to promote perinatal mental health.
PMID:36044641 | DOI:10.2196/38866
Sci Adv. 2022 Sep 2;8(35):eabq2157. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abq2157. Epub 2022 Aug 31.
ABSTRACT
Genome-scale functional screening accelerates comprehensive assessment of gene function in cells. Here, we have established a genome-scale loss-of-function screening strategy that combined a cytosine base editor with approximately 12,000 parallel sgRNAs targeting 98.1% of total genes in Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032. Unlike previous data processing methods developed in yeast or mammalian cells, we developed a new data processing procedure to locate candidate genes by statistical sgRNA enrichment analysis. Known and novel functional genes related to 5-fluorouracil resistance, 5-fluoroorotate resistance, oxidative stress tolerance, or furfural tolerance have been identified. In particular, purU and serA were proven to be related to the furfural tolerance in C. glutamicum. A cloud platform named FSsgRNA-Analyzer was provided to accelerate sequencing data processing for CRISPR-based functional screening. Our method would be broadly useful to functional genomics study and strain engineering in other microorganisms.
PMID:36044571 | DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abq2157
Soc Work Public Health. 2022 Aug 31:1-12. doi: 10.1080/19371918.2022.2118924. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
The extension of the human lifespan has led to an increase in the proportion of the elderly population worldwide. This situation has also brought the issue of healthy aging to the agenda. The importance of more active participation of elderly individuals in life in the development of health is increasing. Depression and self-efficacy of the elderly people are primarily addressed to support this situation. This study is a randomized controlled intervention study in which evaluating the change in depression and self-efficacy levels of elderly individuals after the empowerment intervention. In the study, which was conducted to improve elderly individuals’ depression and self-efficacy levels, an empowerment intervention consisting of 7 sessions was applied to these individuals. In the sessions, practices were carried out to increase the functionality of the elderly in cognitive, social, emotional, physical and spiritual areas. In this study, 60 elderly individuals (intervention and control groups) who were hospitalized for physical therapy and rehabilitation in a state hospital in Turkey between September 2019 and December 2020 were included. The simple random sampling method was used for sampling. The sample size was determined by G Power analysis. Geriatric depression and self-efficacy scales were used in the study. The study data were analyzed on the IBM SPSS Statistics 25.0 software package. Descriptive statistics were used to calculate descriptive data. Pearson, Chi-Square, and Fisher Exact tests were used to compare the sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of the participants. Paired Samples t-test was used to compare the intervention and the control groups’ pretest and posttest scores. In the study, it was determined that the mean geriatric depression pretest score was 15.43 ± 7.05 in the control group and 14.46 ± 7.21 in the intervention group, and there was no significant difference between the groups’ geriatric depression pretest scores (p = .602). However, it was determined that the mean geriatric depression posttest score was 13.50 ± 9.02 in the control group and 9.23 ± 6.71 in the intervention group, and there was a significant difference between the posttest scores of the groups (p = .042). No significant difference was found between the pretest and posttest geriatric depression scale scores of the control group (t = 1.346; p = .189). The posttest geriatric depression score of the intervention group was significantly lower than the pretest score (t = 5.966; p = .0001). In the study, it was determined that the mean self-efficacy pretest score was 79.63 ± 12.62 in the control group, 75.63 ± 14.20 in the intervention group, and there was no significant difference between the pretest scores of the groups (p = .254). It was determined that the mean self-efficacy posttest score was 83.10 ± 11.35 in the control group and 84.50 ± 14.41 in the intervention group, and there was no significant difference between the posttest scores of the groups (p = .678). The posttest self-efficacy score of the intervention group was found to be significantly higher than the pretest score (p = .001). The empowerment intervention was determined to decrease the elderly individuals’ depression and increase their self-efficacy levels.
PMID:36044559 | DOI:10.1080/19371918.2022.2118924
Sci Robot. 2022 Aug 31;7(69):eabo0235. doi: 10.1126/scirobotics.abo0235. Epub 2022 Aug 31.
ABSTRACT
Learning to combine control at the level of joint torques with longer-term goal-directed behavior is a long-standing challenge for physically embodied artificial agents. Intelligent behavior in the physical world unfolds across multiple spatial and temporal scales: Although movements are ultimately executed at the level of instantaneous muscle tensions or joint torques, they must be selected to serve goals that are defined on much longer time scales and that often involve complex interactions with the environment and other agents. Recent research has demonstrated the potential of learning-based approaches applied to the respective problems of complex movement, long-term planning, and multiagent coordination. However, their integration traditionally required the design and optimization of independent subsystems and remains challenging. In this work, we tackled the integration of motor control and long-horizon decision-making in the context of simulated humanoid football, which requires agile motor control and multiagent coordination. We optimized teams of agents to play simulated football via reinforcement learning, constraining the solution space to that of plausible movements learned using human motion capture data. They were trained to maximize several environment rewards and to imitate pretrained football-specific skills if doing so led to improved performance. The result is a team of coordinated humanoid football players that exhibit complex behavior at different scales, quantified by a range of analysis and statistics, including those used in real-world sport analytics. Our work constitutes a complete demonstration of learned integrated decision-making at multiple scales in a multiagent setting.
PMID:36044556 | DOI:10.1126/scirobotics.abo0235