Type 2 diabetes and risk of hip fractures and non-skeletal fall injuries in the elderly: A study from the Fractures and Fall Injuries in the Elderly Cohort (FRAILCO)

Questions remain about whether the increased risk of fractures in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) is related mainly to increased risk of falling or to bone‐specific properties. The primary aim of this study was to investigate the risk of hip fractures and non‐skeletal fall injuries in older men and women with and without T2DM. We included 429,313 individuals (aged 80.8 ± 8.2 years [mean ± SD], 58% women) from the Swedish registry “Senior Alert” and linked the data to several nationwide registers. We identified 79,159 individuals with T2DM (45% with insulin [T2DM‐I], 41% with oral antidiabetics [T2DM‐O], and 14% with no antidiabetic treatment [T2DM‐none]) and 343,603 individuals without diabetes. During a follow‐up of approximately 670,000 person‐years, we identified in total 36,132 fractures (15,572 hip fractures) and 20,019 non‐skeletal fall injuries. In multivariable Cox regression models where the reference group was patients without diabetes and the outcome was hip fracture, T2DM‐I was associated with increased risk (adjusted hazard ratio (HR) [95% CI] 1.24 [1.16–1.32]), T2DM‐O with unaffected risk (1.03 [0.97–1.11]), and T2DM‐none with reduced risk (0.88 [0.79–0.98]). Both the diagnosis of T2DM‐I (1.22 [1.16–1.29]) and T2DM‐O (1.12 [1.06–1.18]) but not T2DM‐none (1.07 [0.98–1.16]) predicted non‐skeletal fall injury. The same pattern was found regarding other fractures (any, upper arm, ankle, and major osteoporotic fracture) but not for wrist fracture. Subset analyses revealed that in men, the risk of hip fracture was only increased in those with T2DM‐I, but in women, both the diagnosis of T2DM‐O and T2DM‐I were related to increased hip fracture risk. In conclusion, the risk of fractures differs substantially among patients with T2DM and an increased risk of hip fracture was primarily found in insulin‐treated patients, whereas the risk of non‐skeletal fall injury was consistently increased in T2DM with any diabetes medication. © 2016 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research

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

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

Association between alendronate use and hip fracture risk in older patients using oral prednisolone

Importance Oral glucocorticoid treatment increases fracture risk, and evidence is lacking regarding the efficacy of alendronate to protect against hip fracture in older patients using glucocorticoids. Objective To investigate whether alendronate treatment in older patients using oral prednisolone is associated with decreased hip fracture risk and adverse effects. Design, Setting, and Participants Retrospective cohort study using a national database (N = 433 195) of patients aged 65 years or older undergoing a health evaluation (baseline) at Swedish health care facilities; 1802 patients who were prescribed alendronate after at least 3 months of oral prednisolone treatment (≥5 mg/d) were identified. Propensity score matching was used to select 1802 patients without alendronate use from 6076 patients taking prednisolone with the same dose and treatment time criteria. Follow-up occurred between January 2008 and December 2014. Exposures Alendronate vs no alendronate use; no patients had previously taken alendronate at the time of prednisolone initiation. Main Outcomes and Measures The primary outcome was incident hip fracture. Results Of the 3604 included patients, the mean age was 79.9 (SD, 7.5) years, and 2524 (70%) were women. After a median follow-up of 1.32 years (interquartile range, 0.57-2.34 years), there were 27 hip fractures in the alendronate group and 73 in the no-alendronate group, corresponding to incidence rates of 9.5 (95% CI, 6.5-13.9) and 27.2 (95% CI, 21.6-34.2) fractures per 1000 person-years, with an absolute rate difference of −17.6 (95% CI, −24.8 to −10.4). The use of alendronate was associated with a lower risk of hip fracture in a multivariable-adjusted Cox model (hazard ratio, 0.35; 95% CI, 0.22-0.54). Alendronate treatment was not associated with increased risk of mild upper gastrointestinal tract symptoms (alendronate vs no alendronate, 15.6 [95% CI, 11.6-21.0] vs 12.9 [95% CI, 9.3-18.0] per 1000 person-years; P = .40) or peptic ulcers (10.9 [95% CI, 7.7-15.5] vs 11.4 [95% CI, 8.0-16.2] per 1000 person-years; P = .86). There were no cases of incident drug-induced osteonecrosis and only 1 case of femoral shaft fracture in each group. Conclusions and Relevance Among older patients using medium to high doses of prednisolone, alendronate treatment was associated with a significantly lower risk of hip fracture over a median of 1.32 years. Although the findings are limited by the observational study design and the small number of events, these results support the use of alendronate in this patient group

Maternal dietary selenium intake is associated with increased gestational length and decreased risk for preterm delivery

The first positive genome-wide association study on gestational length and preterm delivery showed associations with a gene involved in the selenium metabolism. In this study we examine the associations between maternal intake of selenium and selenium status with gestational length and preterm delivery in 72,025 women with singleton live births from the population based, prospective Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa). A self-reported, semi-quantitativ food-frequency questionnaire answered in pregnancy week 22 was used to estimate selenium intake during the first half of pregnancy. Associations were analysed with adjusted linear and cox regressions. Selenium status was assessed in whole blood collected in gestational week 17 (n=2,637). Median dietary selenium intake was 53 (IQR: 44-62) μg/day, supplements provided additionally 50 (30-75) μg/day for supplement-users (n=23,409). Maternal dietary selenium intake was significantly associated with prolonged gestational length (β per SD=0.25, 95% CI=0.07-0.43) and decreased risk for preterm delivery (n=3,618, HR per SD=0.92, 95% CI=0.87-0.98). Neither selenium intake from supplements nor maternal blood selenium status was associated with gestational length or preterm delivery. Hence, this study showed that maternal dietary selenium intake, but not intake of selenium containing supplements, during the first half of pregnancy was significantly associated with decreased risk for preterm delivery. Further investigations, preferably in the form of a large RCT, are needed to elucidate the impact of selenium on pregnancy duration

Cognitive Foundation Skills Following Vocational versus General Upper Secondary Education : A Long Term Perspective

The present study aims at investigating the long-term cognitive effects of vocational education (VET) in Sweden and Denmark, using data from the PIAAC Survey of Adult Skills. While Sweden has moved towards a more academic vocational education, Denmark has kept the apprenticeship system. Using multiple regression analysis we estimate the contribution of VET versus general upper secondary education to the proficiency in literacy. The results show a higher literacy performance in those Swedish age groups in more academic VET programs compared to the older Swedish age groups and to all the Danish age groups. A reasonable interpretation is that the amount of cognitively challenging subjects at the upper-secondary level gives a lasting imprint on literacy proficiency later in life.