Ilio inguinal block: do we know the correct dose?

No Abstract. Southern African Journal of Anaesthesia and Analgesia Vol. 12(1) 2006: 37-3

Impacts of biomedical hashtag-based Twitter campaign: #DHPSP utilization for promotion of open innovation in digital health, patient safety, and personalized medicine

The open innovation hub Digital Health and Patient Safety Platform (DHPSP) was recently established with the purpose to invigorate collaborative scientific research and the development of new digital products and personalized solutions aiming to improve human health and patient safety. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of a Twitter-based campaign centered on using the hashtag #DHPSP to promote the visibility of the DHPSP initiative. Thus, tweets containing #DHPSP were monitored for five weeks for the period 20.10.2020–24.11.2020 and were analyzed with Symplur Signals (social media analytics tool). In the study period, a total of 11,005 tweets containing #DHPSP were posted by 3020 Twitter users, generating 151,984,378 impressions. Analysis of the healthcare stakeholder-identity of the Twitter users who used #DHPSP revealed that the most of participating user accounts belonged to individuals or doctors, with the top three user locations being the United States (501 users), the United Kingdom (155 users), and India (121 users). Analysis of co-occurring hashtags and the full text of the posted tweets further revealed that the major themes of attention in the #DHPSP Twitter-community were related to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), medicine and health, digital health technologies, and science communication in general. Overall, these results indicate that the #DHPSP initiative achieved high visibility and engaged a large body of Twitter users interested in the DHPSP focus area. Moreover, the conducted campaign resulted in an increase of DHPSP member enrollments and website visitors, and new scientific collaborations were formed. Thus, Twitter campaigns centered on a dedicated hashtag prove to be a highly efficient tool for visibility-promotion, which could be successfully utilized by healthcare-related open innovation platforms or initiatives

Digital health and mobile health: a bibliometric analysis of the 100 most cited papers and their contributing authors

Aim: This study aimed to identify and analyze the top 100 most cited digital health and mobile health (m-health) publications. It could aid researchers in the identification of promising new research avenues, additionally supporting the establishment of international scientific collaboration between interdisciplinary research groups with demonstrated achievements in the area of interest. Methods: On 30th August, 2023, the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC) electronic database was queried to identify the top 100 most cited digital health papers with a comprehensive search string. From the initial search, 106 papers were identified. After screening for relevance, six papers were excluded, resulting in the final list of the top 100 papers. The basic bibliographic data was directly extracted from WOSCC using its “Analyze” and “Create Citation Report” functions. The complete records of the top 100 papers were downloaded and imported into a bibliometric software called VOSviewer (version 1.6.19) to generate an author keyword map and author collaboration map. Results: The top 100 papers on digital health received a total of 49,653 citations. Over half of them (n = 55) were published during 2013–2017. Among these 100 papers, 59 were original articles, 36 were reviews, 4 were editorial materials, and 1 was a proceeding paper. All papers were written in English. The University of London and the University of California system were the most represented affiliations. The USA and the UK were the most represented countries. The Journal of Medical Internet Research was the most represented journal. Several diseases and health conditions were identified as a focus of these works, including anxiety, depression, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular diseases, and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Conclusions: The findings underscore key areas of focus in the field and prominent contributors, providing a roadmap for future research in digital and m-health

Ilio inguinal block: do we know the correct dose?

No Abstract. Southern African Journal of Anaesthesia and Analgesia Vol. 12(1) 2006: 37-3

A new instrument for pain assessment in the immediate postoperative period

Perceptual-cognitive impairment after general anaesthesia may affect the ability to reliably report pain severity with the standard visual analog scale (VAS). To minimise these limitations, we developed 'PAULA the PAIN-METER' (PAULA): it has five coloured emoticon faces on the forefront, it is twice as long as a standard VAS scale, and patients use a slider to mark their pain experience. Forty-eight postoperative patients rated descriptive pain terms on PAULA and on a standard VAS immediately after admission and before discharge from the postanaesthesia care unit. Visual acuity was determined before both assessments. The values obtained with PAULA showed less variance than those obtained with the standard VAS, even at the first assessment, where only 23% of the patients had regained their visual acuity. Furthermore, the deviations of the absolute VAS values in individual patients for each descriptive pain term were significantly smaller with PAULA than with the standard VAS

Ultrasonographic-guided ilioinguinal/iliohypogastric nerve block in pediatric anesthesia: what is the optimal volume?

Recently, our study group demonstrated the usefulness of ultrasonographic guidance in ilioinguinal/iliohypogastric nerve blocks in children. As a consequence, we designed a follow-up study to evaluate the optimal volume of local anesthetic for this regional anesthetic technique. Using a modified step-up-step-down approach, with 10 children in each study group, a starting dose of 0.2 mL/kg of 0.25% levobupivacaine was administered to perform an ilioinguinal/iliohypogastric nerve block under ultrasonographic guidance. After each group of 10 patients, the results were analyzed, and if all blocks were successful, the volume of local anesthetic was decreased by 50%, and a further 10 patients were enrolled into the study. Failure to achieve a 100% success rate within a group subjected patients to an automatic increase of half the previous volume reduction to be used in the subsequent group. Using 0.2 and 0.1 mL/kg of 0.25% levobupivacaine, the success rate was 100%. With a volume of 0.05 mL/kg of 0.25% levobupivacaine, 4 of 10 children received additional analgesia because of an inadequate block. Therefore, according to the protocol, the amount was increased to 0.075 mL/kg of 0.25% levobupivacaine, where the success rate was again 100%. We conclude that ultrasonographic guidance for ilioinguinal/iliohypogastric nerve blocks in children allowed a reduction of the volume of local anesthetic to 0.075 mL/kg