916 research outputs found

    Psychiatric Comorbidity and Greater Hospitalization Risk, Longer Length of Stay, and Higher Hospitalization Costs in Older Adults with Heart Failure

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    OBJECTIVES: To explore associations between psychiatric comorbidity and rehospitalization risk, length of hospitalization, and costs. DESIGN: Cross‐sectional study of 1‐year hospital administrative data. SETTING: Claims‐based study of older adults hospitalized in the United States. PARTICIPANTS: Twenty‐one thousand four hundred twenty‐nine patients from a 5% national random sample of U.S. Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 and older, with at least one acute care hospitalization in 1999 with a Diagnostic‐Related Group of congestive heart failure. MEASUREMENTS: The number of hospitalizations, mean length of hospital stay, and total hospitalization costs in calendar year 1999. RESULTS: Overall, 15.8% of patients hospitalized for heart failure (HF) had a coded psychiatric comorbidity; the most commonly coded comorbid psychiatric disorder was depression (8.5% of the sample). Most forms of psychiatric comorbidity were associated with greater inpatient utilization, including risk of additional hospitalizations, days of stay, and hospitalization charges. Additional hospitalization costs associated with psychiatric comorbidity ranged up to $7,763, and additional days length of stay ranged up to 1.4 days. CONCLUSION: Psychiatric comorbidity appears in a significant minority of patients hospitalized for HF and may affect their clinical and economic outcomes. The associations between psychiatric comorbidity and use of inpatient care are likely to be an underestimate, because psychiatric illness is known to be underdetected in older adults and in hospitalized medical patients

    Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 31, No. 3

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    • Jamison City • Domestic Architecture in Lancaster County • Conversation with Marguerite de Angeli • Who Put the Turnip on the Grave? • Pennsylfawnisch Deitsch un Pfalzer: Dialect Comparisons Old and New • John Philip Boehm: Pioneer Pennsylvania Pastor • The Search for our German Ancestors • Aldes un Neieshttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/pafolklifemag/1095/thumbnail.jp

    Systematic reviews: a cross-sectional study of location and citation counts

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    BACKGROUND: Systematic reviews summarize all pertinent evidence on a defined health question. They help clinical scientists to direct their research and clinicians to keep updated. Our objective was to determine the extent to which systematic reviews are clustered in a large collection of clinical journals and whether review type (narrative or systematic) affects citation counts. METHODS: We used hand searches of 170 clinical journals in the fields of general internal medicine, primary medical care, nursing, and mental health to identify review articles (year 2000). We defined 'review' as any full text article that was bannered as a review, overview, or meta-analysis in the title or in a section heading, or that indicated in the text that the intention of the authors was to review or summarize the literature on a particular topic. We obtained citation counts for review articles in the five journals that published the most systematic reviews. RESULTS: 11% of the journals concentrated 80% of all systematic reviews. Impact factors were weakly correlated with the publication of systematic reviews (R(2 )= 0.075, P = 0.0035). There were more citations for systematic reviews (median 26.5, IQR 12 – 56.5) than for narrative reviews (8, 20, P <.0001 for the difference). Systematic reviews had twice as many citations as narrative reviews published in the same journal (95% confidence interval 1.5 – 2.7). CONCLUSIONS: A few clinical journals published most systematic reviews. Authors cited systematic reviews more often than narrative reviews, an indirect endorsement of the 'hierarchy of evidence'

    International Coercion, Emulation and Policy Diffusion: Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reforms, 1977-1999

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    Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that the domestic adoption of market-oriented reforms is strongly influenced by international pressures of coercion and emulation. We find robust support for these arguments with an event-history analysis of the determinants of reform in the telecommunications and electricity sectors of as many as 205 countries and territories between 1977 and 1999. Our results also suggest that the coercive effect of multilateral lending from the IMF, the World Bank or Regional Development Banks is increasing over time, a finding that is consistent with anecdotal evidence that multilateral organizations have broadened the scope of the “conditionality” terms specifying market-oriented reforms imposed on borrowing countries. We discuss the possibility that, by pressuring countries into policy reform, cross-national coercion and emulation may not produce ideal outcomes.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40099/3/wp713.pd

    Covalent targeting of remote cysteine residues to develop CDK12 and CDK13 inhibitors

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    Cyclin-dependent kinases 12 and 13 (CDK12 and CDK13) play critical roles in the regulation of gene transcription. However, the absence of CDK12 and CDK13 inhibitors has hindered the ability to investigate the consequences of their inhibition in healthy cells and cancer cells. Here we describe the rational design of a first-in-class CDK12 and CDK13 covalent inhibitor, THZ531. Co-crystallization of THZ531 with CDK12–cyclin K indicates that THZ531 irreversibly targets a cysteine located outside the kinase domain. THZ531 causes a loss of gene expression with concurrent loss of elongating and hyperphosphorylated RNA polymerase II. In particular, THZ531 substantially decreases the expression of DNA damage response genes and key super-enhancer-associated transcription factor genes. Coincident with transcriptional perturbation, THZ531 dramatically induced apoptotic cell death. Small molecules capable of specifically targeting CDK12 and CDK13 may thus help identify cancer subtypes that are particularly dependent on their kinase activities.United States. National Institutes of Health (HG002668)United States. National Institutes of Health (CA109901

    Covalent targeting of remote cysteine residues to develop CDK12 and CDK13 inhibitors

    Get PDF
    Cyclin-dependent kinases 12 and 13 (CDK12 and CDK13) play critical roles in the regulation of gene transcription. However, the absence of CDK12 and CDK13 inhibitors has hindered the ability to investigate the consequences of their inhibition in healthy cells and cancer cells. Here we describe the rational design of a first-in-class CDK12 and CDK13 covalent inhibitor, THZ531. Co-crystallization of THZ531 with CDK12–cyclin K indicates that THZ531 irreversibly targets a cysteine located outside the kinase domain. THZ531 causes a loss of gene expression with concurrent loss of elongating and hyperphosphorylated RNA polymerase II. In particular, THZ531 substantially decreases the expression of DNA damage response genes and key super-enhancer-associated transcription factor genes. Coincident with transcriptional perturbation, THZ531 dramatically induced apoptotic cell death. Small molecules capable of specifically targeting CDK12 and CDK13 may thus help identify cancer subtypes that are particularly dependent on their kinase activities.United States. National Institutes of Health (HG002668)United States. National Institutes of Health (CA109901

    Randomized trial of neoadjuvant vaccination with tumor-cell lysate induces T cell response in low-grade gliomas

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    BACKGROUND. Long-term prognosis of WHO grade II low-grade gliomas (LGGs) is poor, with a high risk of recurrence and malignant transformation into high-grade gliomas. Given the relatively intact immune system of patients with LGGs and the slow tumor growth rate, vaccines are an attractive treatment strategy. METHODS. We conducted a pilot study to evaluate the safety and immunological effects of vaccination with GBM6-AD, lysate of an allogeneic glioblastoma stem cell line, with poly-ICLC in patients with LGGs. Patients were randomized to receive the vaccines before surgery (arm 1) or not (arm 2) and all patients received adjuvant vaccines. Coprimary outcomes were to evaluate safety and immune response in the tumor. RESULTS. A total of 17 eligible patients were enrolled — 9 in arm 1 and 8 in arm 2. This regimen was well tolerated with no regimen-limiting toxicity. Neoadjuvant vaccination induced upregulation of type-1 cytokines and chemokines and increased activated CD8+ T cells in peripheral blood. Single-cell RNA/T cell receptor sequencing detected CD8+ T cell clones that expanded with effector phenotype and migrated into the tumor microenvironment (TME) in response to neoadjuvant vaccination. Mass cytometric analyses detected increased tissue resident–like CD8+ T cells with effector memory phenotype in the TME after the neoadjuvant vaccination. CONCLUSION. The regimen induced effector CD8+ T cell response in peripheral blood and enabled vaccine-reactive CD8+ T cells to migrate into the TME. Further refinements of the regimen may have to be integrated into future strategies
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