Tag: statistics

Psychiatr Danub. 2021 Spring-Summer;33(Suppl 4):1330-1334.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Depression and anxiety are the most prevalent diseases that contribute to global disability, especially if they are not early recognised and properly treated. They occur as part of many chronic diseases, often remain unrecognised at an early stage, and significantly contribute to the progression of the underlying disease reducing the quality of life in these patients. Numerous studies have shown that anxiety / depression and dyspnea are the leading symptoms in patients with COPD that are associated with high morbidity and mortality. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between the degree of depression, anxiety and stress, using DASS- 21 scale, and changes in locomotor parameters in smokers who are prone to develop COPD.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS: The study included 164 patients, smokers and non-smokers, who underwent spirometry, 6-minute walk test and bicycle ergometer. They were all measured for body weight, height, waist circumference, pulse, blood pressure and each patient completed DASS-21, CAT and IPAQ questionnaire.

RESULTS: The results of the IPAQ questionnaire indicated a statistically significant difference in the physical activity of smokers and non-smokers. A statistically significant was found between DASS-21 and patients physical activity (p=0.0001), 6-minute walk test (r=-0.186, p=0.017), VO2 max (r=-0.220, p=0.005) and weekly calorie consumption (r=-0.222, p=0.004).

CONCLUSION: According to the results of the study, an increased degree of anxiety, depression and stress is an important factor influencing changes in locomotor parameters in smokers who are prone to develop COPD.

PMID:35503952

Psychiatr Danub. 2021 Spring-Summer;33(Suppl 4):1316-1319.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) is a non-pharmacological method widely used by medical specialists to manage acute and chronic pain in different circumstances. It can be used to manage pain during many dental procedures, as well as pain due to various conditions affecting the maxillofacial region. The aim of this study was to provide insight into the clinical research evidence for the analgetic application of TENS in pediatric patients. The hypothesis was that TENS device will achieve analgetic effect on teeth during dental procedure.

METHODS: This study included 125 patients treated at the School of Dental Medicine, University of Zagreb clinic during two-year period. After diagnosis of caries and need for restorative treatment, patients were randomly selected in three groups. Group 1 received local anesthesia, group 2 had no anesthesia and group 3 used TENS device. Level of pain was measured with Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). Research was conducted by one therapist that was calibrated.

RESULTS: We found no statistically significant difference between TENS group and group without anesthesia(p>0.05).

CONCLUSION: TENS device is not as efficient in achieving analgetic impact during dental procedure as local anesthesia.

PMID:35503949

Psychiatr Danub. 2021 Spring-Summer;33(Suppl 4):1298-1302.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Patients with obesity may have symptoms of sexual dysfunction (SD). Little is known about these symptoms in obese patients in Croatia and the aim of this study was to explore them.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS: This was a cross-sectional study carried out in tertiary healthcare centre at the Croatian Obesity Treatment Referral Center in University Hospital Center of Zagreb. 103 patients (72 female, 31 male, mean age 48.7±11.87 years, mean BMI 40.42) were included. SD symptoms were assessed using the internationally acclaimed questionnaire Arizona Sexual Experience Scale (ASEX), that was recently validated for Croatian language. Patients were also administered a questionnaire, prepared for this purpose, that enquired about their previous known chronic disorders. Statistical analyses included t-test, chi-squared test and bivariate Pearson’s correlations.

RESULTS: Average total response on the questionnaire was 12.4 (women 13.2, range 3-30; men 10.6, range from 5-19). A total score of 19 or more was present in 5 (4.8 %, range from 19-30, average 22.4; 1 man, 4 women), at least one question with a score 5 or greater on any item was found in 36 (34.9 %, 5 men, 31 women), while a score of 4 or more on three items was found in 20 patients (19.4 %, 2 men, 18 women). Overall median response was 3 (range 1-6). Women were found to have more pronounced symptoms of SD (p<0.05). The overall results on ASEX were found to be in significant correlation with regard to depression (r=0.22, p=0.03), as well as anxiety (r=0.2, p=0.04). Significant correlations were also found with regard to age (r=0.31), mobility (r=0.25), and pain/uneasiness (r=0.22) (p<0.05).

CONCLUSIONS: This study brings valuable observations on the presence of SD symptoms in obese patients in Croatia. SD symptoms were found to be present in up to one-third of our patients, more pronounced in women, and in significant correlation with depression and anxiety. However, median response on ASEX suggests that overall SD symptoms in our group of patients are not that expressed.

PMID:35503945

Psychiatr Danub. 2021 Spring-Summer;33(Suppl 4):1309-1312.

ABSTRACT

Preservation of health, increase in life expectancy determine the need to improve the effectiveness of medical recommendations, which, despite the success of pharmacology, are insufficient for reasons related to the low level of compliance with these recommendations by patients. The authors of the article believe that compliance is a kind of quantifiable and behaviorally realized reflection of therapeutic interaction, refracted through the prism of the patient’s individual personality characteristics. Participants of the study-148 employees of medical institutions: 12 men, 136 women, their age ranged from 27 to 74 years. The research tool was the neuropsychological rapid method. 3 research subgroups were formed: 27-40 years (37 people), 41-50 years (60 people), 51 years and older (51 people). Comparison of the results of subtests of neuropsychological Express technique showed heterogeneous results in subgroups of the study. In addition, the dynamic characteristics of psychological processes were evaluated: depletion, inertia, impulsivity. A significant difference in the performance of the graphomotor test between the subjects of the age subgroup of 27-40 years and the subgroup of 41-50 years was statistically confirmed. For the qualitative performance of this simple test requires a sufficient level of development of all structural and functional components of brain functions and, in particular, the “front” function of programming and management and consistent organization of movements. In older people revealed a much greater number of errors, interruptions of the test than the representatives of the more “young” subgroup. Similar results were obtained when comparing the “young” and “old” subgroups. Despite the absence of signs of decompensation of concomitant pathology, representatives of the subgroups took a different amount of concomitant therapy. Using the scale of assessment of drug compliance, it was found that compliance is most reduced in the subgroup of 41-50 years. In this subgroup, a comprehensive decrease in compliance across the “behavioral”, “emotional”, and “cognitive” domains was detected in 87.8% of cases, while in the younger subgroup partial non-compliance was 32.4%, in the older subgroup – 74.5% An analysis of the states of cognitive functions in 52 representatives of the middle age subgroup with low compliance rates showed that, unlike other representatives of the same subgroup, their indices for a number of neuropsychological tests are close to the results of more adult participants in the study. Individuals demonstrating low compliance with quite favorable CNS resources are at risk for the formation of pathological aging.

PMID:35503947

Psychiatr Danub. 2021 Spring-Summer;33(Suppl 4):1287-1293.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have indicated that changes in the expression of certain inflammatory biomarkers are associated with cognitive impairment (CI), but only a limited number of studies were conducted in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS). The present study aimed to evaluate the potential association between serum levels of several inflammatory markers and cognitive impairment in AIS patients. These markers included interleukin 6 (IL-6), C-reactive protein (CRP), plasma fibrinogen, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), and white blood cell (WBC) count.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS: All participants were prospectively recruited from the Department of Neurology, Clinical Center University of Sarajevo. A total of 100 patients with first-ever AIS were included in stroke group and 30 in the non-stroke control group. Each patient underwent a comprehensive cognitive assessment and laboratory tests (IL-6, CRP, fibrinogen, ESR and WBC) within the first three days of admission. Cognitive status was assessed using cognitive instruments: the Mini-Mental State Examination, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the Frontal Assessment Battery, and the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination-Revised.

RESULTS: Female stroke patients with CI had higher levels of IL-6 compared to those without CI and controls (p<0.017). AIS patients with CI had significantly higher plasma fibrinogen (p<0.001) and CRP levels (p<0.001) than controls, whereas there was no significant difference in comparison with cognitively intact patients. There were no statistical differences in ESR or WBC count between groups.

CONCLUSIONS: Of the inflammatory markers, only IL-6 levels were associated with CI in AIS patients. Measuring circulating IL-6 could be used as a screening test to identify all such patients.

PMID:35503943

Can J Diet Pract Res. 2022 May 3:1-4. doi: 10.3148/cjdpr-2022-012. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Purpose: To determine if intake (servings/day) of total dairy and/or dairy subtypes (milk, cheese, and yogurt) were associated with biomarkers related to dyslipidemia, insulin sensitivity and inflammation in a sample of cardio-metabolically healthy young children from the Guelph Family Health Study at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.Methods: Baseline data from 42 children (aged 2.0-6.2 years) from 33 families who provided a dietary assessment and a fasted blood sample were included in this cross-sectional analysis. Linear and logistic regressions using generalized estimating equations were used for analysis and models were adjusted for age, gender, and household income.Results: In total, 42 children (3.74 ± 1.23 years old; mean (± SD)) consumed median (25th percentile, 75th percentile) servings/day of 1.70 (1.16, 2.81) for total dairy, 0.74 (0.50, 1.70) for milk, 0.63 (0.00, 1.16) for cheese, and 0.00 (0.00, 0.38) for yogurt. Cheese intake was significantly inversely associated with LDL cholesterol (-0.16 (95% CI: -0.29, -0.03) mmol/L per serving; P = 0.02)). No other associations between dairy intake and biomarkers were significant.Conclusions: Cheese intake was inversely associated with LDL cholesterol in this preliminary study of cardio-metabolically healthy young children, thereby warranting further research on dairy intake and cardiometabolic risk factors.

PMID:35503897 | DOI:10.3148/cjdpr-2022-012

Am J Dermatopathol. 2022 Apr 27. doi: 10.1097/DAD.0000000000002208. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Spitzoid melanocytic neoplasms are a diagnostically challenging class of lesions in dermatopathology. Recently, molecular assays and immunohistochemical markers have been explored as ancillary methods to assist in the diagnostic workup. Specifically, preferentially expressed antigen in melanoma (PRAME) immunohistochemistry is a nuclear stain commonly positive in melanomas, but not in nevi. This study investigates PRAME immunoreactivity (≥75% positive nuclear staining in tumor cells) in a set of 59 spitzoid melanocytic neoplasms with known clinical outcomes. We compared PRAME status with (1) the clinical outcomes, (2) the morphologic diagnoses, and (3) the status of TERT promoter mutation. Regarding clinical outcomes, 3 cases developed metastatic disease, of which 2 expressed diffusely positive PRAME staining. Of the 56 cases that did not show evidence of metastasis, 6 expressed diffusely positive PRAME staining. Morphologically, diffusely positive PRAME staining was seen in 7 of 21 cases (33.3%) diagnosed as melanoma and only 1 benign tumor 1 of 38 (2.6%). There were 4 of 8 cases with a TERT promoter mutation which were diffusely PRAME-positive compared with 4 of 51 cases without TERT promoter mutation (P = 0.001). Our results show a statistically significant correlation between PRAME expression and the diagnosis, outcome, and TERT promoter mutation status of atypical spitzoid melanocytic neoplasms, suggesting immunohistochemistry for PRAME can help support a suspected diagnosis. However, because of occasional false-positive and negative test results, correlation with the clinical and histologic findings as well as results from other tests is needed for the interpretation of diagnostically challenging spitzoid melanocytic neoplasms.

PMID:35503885 | DOI:10.1097/DAD.0000000000002208

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2022 May 3;PP. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2022.3171673. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Sepsis is a systemic inflammatory response caused by pathogens such as bacteria. Because its pathogenesis is not clear, the clinical manifestations of patients vary greatly, and the alarming incidence and mortality pose a great threat to patients and medical systems, especially in Intensive Care Unit (ICU). The traditional judgment criteria have the problem of low specificity. Artificial intelligence models could greatly improve the accuracy of sepsis prediction and judgment. Based on the XGBoost machine learning framework taken demographic, vital signs, laboratory tests and medical intervention data as input, this paper proposes a novel model for dynamically predicting sepsis and assessing risk. To realize the model, two methods for feature construction are introduced. For the observed time series data of vital signs and laboratory tests, time-dependent method performs to construct the time- dependent characteristics after statistical screening. For the clinical intervention data, statistical counting method is applied to construct count-dependent characteristics. Moreover, a new objective function is proposed for the XGBoost framework, and the first-order and second-order gradient of the objective function are also given for model training. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods at present, the proposed model has the best performance, with AUROC improved by 5.4% on the MIMIC-III dataset and 2.1% on PhysioNet Challenge 2019 dataset. The data processing and training methods of this model can be conveniently applied in different electronic health record systems, and has a wide application prospect.

PMID:35503852 | DOI:10.1109/JBHI.2022.3171673

IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2022 May 3;PP. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2022.3171982. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder affecting 1% of people worldwide, deep learning (DL) algorithms-based electroencephalograph (EEG) analysis provides the possibility for accurate epileptic seizure (ES) prediction, thereby benefiting patients suffering from epilepsy. To identify the preictal region that precedes the onset of seizure, a large number of annotated EEG signals are required to train DL algorithms. However, the scarcity of seizure onsets leads to significant insufficiency of data for training the DL algorithms. To overcome this data insufficiency, in this paper, we propose a preictal artificial signal synthesis algorithm based on a generative adversarial network to generate synthetic multichannel EEG preictal samples. A high-quality single-channel architecture, determined by visual and statistical evaluations, is used to train the generators of multichannel samples. The effectiveness of the synthetic samples is evaluated by comparing the ES prediction performances without and with synthetic preictal sample augmentation. The leave-one-seizure-out cross validation ES prediction accuracy and corresponding area under the receiver operating characteristic curve evaluation improve from 73.0% and 0.676 to 78.0% and 0.704 by 10x synthetic sample augmentation, respectively. The obtained results indicate that synthetic preictal samples are effective for enhancing ES prediction performance.

PMID:35503840 | DOI:10.1109/TBME.2022.3171982

IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2022 May 3;PP. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2022.3171493. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: Acoustic emission (AE) sensed from knee joints during weight-bearing movements greatly increases with joint deterioration, but the relationship between AE patterns and specific anatomical damage, as seen for example in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), is unknown. This knowledge is essential to validate AE biomarkers for the evaluation of knee joints, and forms the objective of this exploratory work to associate knee AE and MRI.

METHODS: A novel processing framework is proposed to enable direct correlation between static 3D MRI of knees and their dynamic 1D AE during sit-stand-sit movements. It comprises a method to estimate articular cartilage thickness according to joint angle from knee MRI, and a method to derive statistically representative waveform features according to joint angle from movement and load-dependent knee AE.

RESULTS: In 10 subjects diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis, age 55~79 years and body mass index 25~35 kg/m2, a strong inverse relationship between knee AE and cartilage thickness in the medial tibiofemoral compartment around the fully standing position was observed. Knees with thinner articular cartilage generated more AE with higher amplitude, greater energy, longer duration, and higher frequencies, in agreement with the assumption of more intense articulation friction under full body weight.

CONCLUSION: AE provides promising quantitative biomarkers in knee joint disease.

SIGNIFICANCE: These findings provide impetus for the further development of AE as a low-cost non-invasive biomarker modality to improve the management of knee joint disease.

PMID:35503843 | DOI:10.1109/TBME.2022.3171493