RHYTHM-AF: design of an international registry on cardioversion of atrial fibrillation and characteristics of participating centers

BACKGROUND Atrial fibrillation is a serious public health problem posing a considerable burden to not only patients, but the healthcare environment due to high rates of morbidity, mortality, and medical resource utilization. There are limited data on the variation in treatment practice patterns across different countries, healthcare settings and the associated health outcomes. METHODS/DESIGN RHYTHM-AF was a prospective observational multinational study of management of recent onset atrial fibrillation patients considered for cardioversion designed to collect data on international treatment patterns and short term outcomes related to cardioversion. We present data collected in 10 countries between May 2010 and June 2011. Enrollment was ongoing in Italy and Brazil at the time of data analysis. Data were collected at the time of atrial fibrillation episode in all countries (Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom), and cumulative follow-up data were collected at day 60 (±10) in all but Spain. Information on center characteristics, enrollment data, patient demographics, detail of atrial fibrillation episode, medical history, diagnostic procedures, acute treatment of atrial fibrillation, discharge information and the follow-up data on major events and rehospitalizations up to day 60 were collected. DISCUSSIN A total of 3940 patients were enrolled from 175 acute care centers. 70.5% of the centers were either academic (44%) or teaching (26%) hospitals with an overall median capacity of 510 beds. The sites were mostly specialized with anticoagulation clinics (65.9%), heart failure (75.1%) and hypertension clinics (60.1%) available. The RHYTHM-AF registry will provide insight into regional variability of antiarrhythmic and antithrombotic treatment of atrial fibrillation, the appropriateness of such treatments with respect to outcomes, and their cost-efficacy. Observations will help inform strategies to improve cardiovascular outcomes in patients with atrial fibrillation. TRIAL REGISTRATION Clinical trials NCT01119716Harry JGM Crijns, Lori D Bash, François Chazelle, Jean-Yves Le Heuzey, Thorsten Lewalter, Gregory YH Lip, Aldo P Maggioni, Alfonso Martín, Piotr Ponikowski, Mårten Rosenqvist, Prashanthan Sanders, Mauricio Scanavacca, Alexandra A Bernhardt, Sreevalsa Unniachan, Hemant M Phatak and Anselm K Git

Feasibility of a mental practice intervention in stroke patients in nursing homes; a process evaluation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Within a multi-centre randomised controlled trial in three nursing homes, a process evaluation of a mental practice intervention was conducted. The main aims were to determine if the intervention was performed according to the framework and to describe the therapists' and participants' experiences with and opinions on the intervention.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The six week mental practice intervention was given by physiotherapists and occupational therapists in the rehabilitation teams and consisted of four phases: explanation of imagery, teaching patients how to use imagery, using imagery as part of therapy, and facilitating the patient in using it alone and for new tasks. It had a mandatory and an optional part. Data were collected by means of registration forms, pre structured patient files, patient logs and self-administered questionnaires.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of 14 therapists and 18 patients with stroke in the sub acute phase of recovery were involved. Response rates differed per assessment (range 57-93%). Two patients dropped out of the study (total n = 16). The mandatory part of the intervention was given to 11 of 16 patients: 13 received the prescribed amount of mental practice and 12 practiced unguided outside of therapy. The facilitating techniques of the optional part of the framework were partly used. Therapists were moderately positive about the use of imagery in this specific sample. Although it was more difficult for some patients to generate images than others, all patients were positive about the intervention and reported perceived short term benefits from mental practice.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The intervention was less feasible than we hoped. Implementing a complex therapy delivered by existing multi-professional teams to a vulnerable population with a complex pathology poses many challenges.</p

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Latent clinical-anatomical dimensions of schizophrenia

Widespread structural brain abnormalities have been consistently reported in schizophrenia, but their relation to the heterogeneous clinical manifestations remains unknown. In particular, it is unclear whether anatomical abnormalities in discrete regions give rise to discrete symptoms or whether distributed abnormalities give rise to the broad clinical profile associated with schizophrenia. Here, we apply a multivariate data-driven approach to investigate covariance patterns between multiple-symptom domains and distributed brain abnormalities in schizophrenia. Structural magnetic resonance imaging and clinical data were derived from one discovery sample (133 patients and 113 controls) and one independent validation sample (108 patients and 69 controls). Disease-related voxel-wise brain abnormalities were estimated using deformation-based morphometry. Partial least-squares analysis was used to comprehensively map clinical, neuropsychological, and demographic data onto distributed deformation in a single multivariate model. The analysis identified 3 latent clinical-anatomical dimensions that collectively accounted for 55% of the covariance between clinical data and brain deformation. The first latent clinical-anatomical dimension was replicated in an independent sample, encompassing cognitive impairments, negative symptom severity, and brain abnormalities within the default mode and visual networks. This cognitive-negative dimension was associated with low socioeconomic status and was represented across multiple races. Altogether, we identified a continuous cognitive-negative dimension of schizophrenia, centered on 2 intrinsic networks. By simultaneously taking into account both clinical manifestations and neuroanatomical abnormalities, the present results open new avenues for multi-omic stratification and biotyping of individuals with schizophrenia

Nitroimidazopyrazinones with Oral Activity against Tuberculosis and Chagas Disease in Mouse Models of Infection.

Tuberculosis and parasitic infections continue to impose a significant threat to global public health and economic growth. There is an urgent need to develop new treatments to combat these diseases. Here, we report the in vitro and in vivo profiles of a new bicyclic nitroimidazole subclass, namely, nitroimidazopyrazinones, against mycobacteria and Trypanosoma cruzi. Derivatives with monocyclic side chains were selective against Mycobacterium tuberculosis and were able to reduce the bacterial load when dosed orally in mice. We demonstrated that deazaflavin-dependent nitroreductase (Ddn) could act effectively on nitroimidazopyrazinones, indicating the potential of Ddn as an activating enzyme for these new compounds in M. tuberculosis. Oral administration of compounds with extended biaryl side chains (73 and 74) was effective in suppressing infection in an acute T. cruzi-infected murine model. These findings demonstrate that active nitroimidazopyrazinones have potential to be developed as orally available clinical candidates against both tuberculosis and Chagas disease