Tag: nevin manimala

Georgian Med News. 2023 Mar;(336):123-125.

ABSTRACT

Contamination of certain drugs and foods with one of the most potent carcinogens/mutagens- nitrosamines, remains to be an issue and unresolved at present. The increased contamination of these mutagens in the most commonly used drugs in the human population doesn’t ceases to baffle clinicians, critics, public scholars, and analysts of the nitrosamine saga. The introduction of permissive determinations of the presence of carcinogens in drugs only reinforces doubts about the powerlessness of regulatory authorities in the face of the influence of powerful pharmaceutical cartels. The FDA’s encouraging promises of 2018 for strict control of carcinogens in sartans seems to have been permanently forgotten? By 2021, it was unthinkable that these carcinogens would be present in blood drugs and affected batches were immediately removed. Following alert checks confirming their post-existence in diabetes drugs, anti-smoking drugs, a number of antibiotics, ACE inhibitors, Sartans, thiazide diuretics, ranitidine, but probably a number of others, the decision has been taken to give the green light to their permissible availability. An availability that in all likelihood has the flavour of death. A “flavour” that has been confirmed in hundreds of international publications. Or in data from scientific papers submitted to regulatory regional units for verification and which remain sadly silent to this day. The “silent confirmation” and the lack of any adequate response in favour of public health are a sufficient further indicator of the attitude and position of the regulatory authorities. A position that should be changed. Starting from the mentioned facts and the data announced already in 2016/2017 of all-American data shared originally in American scientific journals, using their statistical estimates, we present the first case in the world literature of nodular melanoma and basal cell carcinoma occurring after taking perindopril. This intake turns out to be confirmatory one with respect to the statistics presented by Beatrice Nardone dating back to 2017. The potential pro-carcinogenic effects of both nitrosamines and the generic substance of perindopril are discussed.

PMID:37166894

Georgian Med News. 2023 Mar;(336):63-65.

ABSTRACT

A comparative analysis of clinical and laboratory parameters was carried out in 49 children. The patients were divided into 3 groups depending on the type of insulin they received. Group 1 included 20 children who used Insulin human (Insulatard), group 2 included 15 children using insulin Glargine, and group 3 included 14 children using insulin Detemir. All children using Detemir and Glargine used short acting insulin Aspart. Those using Insulin human (Insulatard) used Human insulin (rDNA, Actrapid) in addition. In all children, blood glucose, glycohemoglobin and cholesterol were determined by laboratory methods. Statistical calculations were carried out using a statistical package at a confidence level of p＜0.05. A significant difference was found between the mean values of glycohemoglobin and glucose of Glargine users and patients with using Insulin human (Insulatard) (p≺0.05). These indicators were lower in Glargine users. There is a positive correlation between doses of Regular insulin and Insulin human (Insulatard) with body weight and height. There is a positive correlation between dose of Detemir and body mass. However, no such relationship between Glargine, body mass and height was recorded. It was a negative correlation between its dose Glargine with glycohemoglobin and also between glucose and cholesterol using Glargine.

PMID:37166882

Georgian Med News. 2023 Mar;(336):54-58.

ABSTRACT

The aim of study was identification of bone metastasis probability, in molecular subtypes among post-treated patients (hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer), considering statistical frequency of stages. 101 women (I, II, III stages; hormone-receptor-positive), who underwent bone scintigraphy before and after treatment, were retrospectively studied. The study was performed with radiotracer Tc99m MDP, intravenous injection. BS data were correlated with molecular subtype (Luminal-A, Luminal-B) and stage. According to the stages, molecular subtypes and bone metastasis was revealed: In the I stage – 32 (20,0%) patients: luminal A – 30 (93.7%) patients, among them with metastasis 12 (40%) cases; luminal B – 2 (6.2%) patients with metastasis 0 (0%) cases (p=0.282). II stage – 83 (51.9%) patients: luminal A = 71 (85.5%) patients, among them with metastasis – 43 (60.5%) cases; luminal B – 12 (14.4%) patients; among them with metastasis -3 (25%) cases (p=0.022) III stage =45 (28.1%) patients: Luminal A 38 (84.4%) patients, among them with metastasis – 30 (78.9%) cases; luminal B – 7 (15.5%) patients; among them with metastasis – 1 (14.2%) case (p=0.001). Among breast cancer patients’ molecular subtype luminal A has a high probability of spreading metastasis in bone, but there is more positive prognosis, rather than in luminal B type, that is much rarer and more aggressive molecular subtype. Taking into consideration molecular subtypes and stages of breast cancer is very important, as both of them are significant prognostic factors of disease, which might be helpful in the most cases.

PMID:37166880

Georgian Med News. 2023 Mar;(336):6-12.

ABSTRACT

The ACL is the primary stabilizer of the knee joint. The injury leads to instability of the knee joint, which is a trigger for the subsequent destructive changes of the intra-articular structures such as menisci and cartilage of the joint surfaces. The most affected group is people of an active age, engaged in amateur sports. Also, this pathology is an occupational hazard in the military. In this community, ACL injuries have reached 3.24% in men and 3.51% in women, with increasing trends, especially among women. This data is derived from a study by Keller Army Hospital, West Point, New York. In this study we selected 2 groups of patients – operated with autograft and operated with allograft. The groups included 25 patients followed for a period of 18 months. The tissues used for ACL reconstruction were: 1) for allograft – BTB donor tissue / allograft / 2) for autologous transplantation – mm. Semitendinosus et Gracillis / autograft /. After the operation, the patients are placed in a rehabilitation program in five interconnected phases. The way they are performed allows the principle of gradual loading and constant feedback between the patient and the physiotherapist to be observed. Each of the phases has specific goals in the rehabilitation cycle, which has a certain approximate duration. After completion of the rehabilitation process, the clinical outcomes of both groups were compared using the International Documentation Committee (IKDC), Lysholm, and three in-house diagnostic methods. Our own diagnostic methods are Power test (a strength simulator is used, which directly examines the strength of the limb in flexion and extension in real life test. The results from IKDC were in favor of the autograft group (92.82) and from Lischolm of the allograft group (92.24). In terms of the power test the results were in favor of the allograft group. The result from the Power 1 test clearly shows statistically significant difference in symmetry of power in flexion and extension which is better in the allograft group compared to the autograft group. In our research we did not come across such a test in other studies. In conclusion we proved that the development of a single strict rehabilitation protocol focusing on the principle of gradual increase in workloads achieves comparable results in the frequency of re-rupture in both the allograft and auto-graft groups.

PMID:37166871

Psychol Aging. 2023 May 11. doi: 10.1037/pag0000752. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Organizing information is beneficial to episodic memory performance. Among several possible organizational strategies, two consist of organizing the information in semantic clusters (semantic organization) or self-organizing the information based on new associations that do not exist in semantic memory (subjective organization). Here, we investigated in a single study how these two organizational behaviors were underlined by different controlled processes and whether these relations were subjected to age-related differences. We tested 123 younger adults (n = 63) and older adults (n = 60) on two episodic memory tasks, one where the words were organizable and another where the words were not organizable, allowing for semantic and subjective organization, respectively. Additionally, participants were tested on three cognitive control tasks (Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Stroop Test and Trail Making Test) and three working memory tasks (Backward Digit Span, Alpha Span and N-back test). Results revealed well-established age-related differences in terms of recall performance and organizational strategy implementation. More importantly, we found evidence that the different cognitive tests statistically yielded two different latent factors, a cognitive control factor and a working memory factor. Based on this dissociation, we found that only cognitive control contributed to semantic organization in all age groups whereas only working memory contributed to subjective organization, also in all age groups. These results shed new lights on our understanding of how controlled processes differently contribute to organizational behaviors in episodic memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:37166861 | DOI:10.1037/pag0000752

Psychol Methods. 2023 May 11. doi: 10.1037/met0000559. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Researcher degrees of freedom refer to arbitrary decisions in the execution and reporting of hypothesis-testing research that allow for many possible outcomes from a single study. Selective reporting of results (p-hacking) from this “multiverse” of outcomes can inflate effect size estimates and false positive rates. We studied the effects of researcher degrees of freedom and selective reporting using empirical data from extensive multistudy projects in psychology (Registered Replication Reports) featuring 211 samples and 14 dependent variables. We used a counterfactual design to examine what biases could have emerged if the studies (and ensuing meta-analyses) had not been preregistered and could have been subjected to selective reporting based on the significance of the outcomes in the primary studies. Our results show the substantial variability in effect sizes that researcher degrees of freedom can create in relatively standard psychological studies, and how selective reporting of outcomes can alter conclusions and introduce bias in meta-analysis. Despite the typically thousands of outcomes appearing in the multiverses of the 294 included studies, only in about 30% of studies did significant effect sizes in the hypothesized direction emerge. We also observed that the effect of a particular researcher degree of freedom was inconsistent across replication studies using the same protocol, meaning multiverse analyses often fail to replicate across samples. We recommend hypothesis-testing researchers to preregister their preferred analysis and openly report multiverse analysis. We propose a descriptive index (underlying multiverse variability) that quantifies the robustness of results across alternative ways to analyze the data. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:37166859 | DOI:10.1037/met0000559

Psychol Methods. 2023 May 11. doi: 10.1037/met0000571. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

R-squared measures of explained variance are easy to understand, naturally interpretable, and widely used by substantive researchers. In mediation analysis, however, despite recent advances in measures of mediation effect, few effect sizes have good statistical properties. Also, most of these measures are only available for the simplest three-variable mediation model, especially for R²-type measures. By decomposing the mediator into two parts (i.e., the part related to the predictor and the part unrelated to the predictor), this article proposes a systematic framework to develop new effect-size measures of explained variance in mediation analysis. The framework can be easily extended to more complex mediation models and provides more delicate R² measures for empirical researchers. A Monte Carlo simulation study is conducted to examine the statistical properties of the proposed R² effect-size measure. Results show that the new R2 measure performs well in approximating the true value of the explained variance of the mediation effect. The use of the proposed measure is illustrated with empirical examples together with program code for its implementation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:37166856 | DOI:10.1037/met0000571

Psychol Methods. 2023 May 11. doi: 10.1037/met0000582. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Cognitive models provide a substantively meaningful quantitative description of latent cognitive processes. The quantitative formulation of these models supports cumulative theory building and enables strong empirical tests. However, the nonlinearity of these models and pervasive correlations among model parameters pose special challenges when applying cognitive models to data. Firstly, estimating cognitive models typically requires large hierarchical data sets that need to be accommodated by an appropriate statistical structure within the model. Secondly, statistical inference needs to appropriately account for model uncertainty to avoid overconfidence and biased parameter estimates. In the present work, we show how these challenges can be addressed through a combination of Bayesian hierarchical modeling and Bayesian model averaging. To illustrate these techniques, we apply the popular diffusion decision model to data from a collaborative selective influence study. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:37166854 | DOI:10.1037/met0000582

Ann Am Thorac Soc. 2023 Feb 27. doi: 10.1513/AnnalsATS.202209-814OC. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

RATIONALE: Little is known about the safety of infusing vasopressors through a midline catheter.

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate safety outcomes following vasopressor administration though a midline.

METHODS: We conducted a cohort study of adults admitted to 39 hospitals in Michigan (December 2017 – March 2022) who received vasopressors while either a midline or peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) was in place. Patients receiving vasopressors through a midline were compared to those receiving vasopressors through a PICC and, separately, to those with midlines in place but who received vasopressors through a different catheter. We used descriptive statistics to characterize and compare cohort characteristics. Multivariable mixed effects logistic regression models were fit to determine the association between vasopressor administration through a midline with outcomes, primarily catheter-related complications (bloodstream infection, superficial thrombophlebitis, exit site infection, or catheter occlusion).

RESULTS: Our cohort included 287 patients with midlines through which vasopressors were administered, 1660 with PICCs through which vasopressors were administered, and 884 patients with midlines who received vasopressors through a separate catheter. Age (median [interquartile range]: 68.7 [58.6-75.7], 66.6 [57.1-75.0], and 67.6 [58.7-75.8] years) and gender (percent female: 50.5%, 47.3%, and 43.8%) were similar in all groups. The frequency of catheter-related complications was lower in patients with midlines used for vasopressors than PICCs used for vasopressors (5.2% vs. 13.4%, p<0.001), but similar to midlines with vasopressor administration through a different device (5.2% vs. 6.3%, p=0.49). Following adjustment, administration of vasopressors through a midline was not associated with catheter-related complications compared to PICCs with vasopressors (adjusted odds ratios [aOR] 0.65 [95% confidence interval, 0.31-1.33], p=0.23), nor midlines with vasopressors elsewhere (aOR 0.85 [0.46-1.58], p=0.59). Midlines used for vasopressors were associated with greater risk of systemic thromboembolism (vs PICCs with vasopressors: (aOR 2.69 [1.31,5.49] , p=0.008; vs midlines with vasopressors elsewhere: aOR 2.42 [1.29,4.54], p=0.008) yet not thromboses restricted to the ipsilateral upper extremity (vs PICCs with vasopressors: aOR 2.35 [0.83,6.63], p=0.10; model did not converge for vs midlines with vasopressors elsewhere).

CONCLUSIONS: We found no significant association of vasopressor administration though a midline with catheter-related complications. However, we identified an increased odds of systemic (but not ipsilateral upper extremity) venous thromboembolism warranting further evaluation.

PMID:37166852 | DOI:10.1513/AnnalsATS.202209-814OC

Psychol Assess. 2023 May 11. doi: 10.1037/pas0001218. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP; Kotov et al., 2017, 2021) is offered as a dimensional alternative to traditional categorical diagnostic nosologies such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD). HiTOP researchers have recently published an open-source assessment system for clinical implementation, the HiTOP Digital Assessment and Tracker (Jonas et al., 2021). Here, we argue that the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-3 (MMPI-3; Ben-Porath & Tellegen 2020a), given its structural similarities to HiTOP, can augment these efforts to shift the diagnostic paradigm, with the additional strength of being comprehensively validated, standardized, and normed. Sellbom et al. (2021) examined the factor structure of the MMPI-3 Specific Problems Scales (plus RC6 and RC8), finding a pattern of latent factors much like those proposed by HiTOP in both a general mental health sample and a prisoner sample. The present study is a partial replication of Sellbom et al. (2021) with a primary medical care outpatient sample (n = 164) and a college student sample (n = 529). A sequential factoring approach yielded emergent structures that are comparable to the HiTOP model. These findings with different and important samples support the generalizability of the MMPI-3 in assessing HiTOP constructs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:37166849 | DOI:10.1037/pas0001218