Crowdsourcing and COVID-19: a case study of Cochrane Crowd

Cochrane has used crowdsourcing effectively to identify health evidence since 2014. To date, over 175,000 trialshave been identified for Cochrane’s Central Register of Controlled Trials via Cochrane Crowd (https://crowd.cochrane.org), Cochrane’s citizen science platform, engaging a Crowd of over 20,000 people from 166 countries. The COVID-19 pandemic presented the evidence synthesis community with the enormous challenge of keeping up with the exponential output of COVID-19 research. This case study will detail the new tasks we developed to aid the production of COVID-19 rapid reviews and supply the Cochrane COVID-19 study register. The pandemic initially looked set to disrupt the Crowd team’s plans for 2020 but has in fact served to further our understanding of the potential role crowdsourcing can play in the health evidence ecosystem

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

The role of decision making in the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in the Australian child protection system

The over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in the child protection is a serious concern in Australia. A proportion of this group of children may have been removed from families who are providing an adequately safe and nurturing environment, reflecting false positive errors in decision making. Assuming this to be true, we draw on the decision-making ecology model of judgement and decision making in child protection to speculate on possible causes of such errors. This model suggests that false positive errors would occur if the level of risk children face is estimated to be higher than is actually the case or if the decision threshold applied in making decisions to remove children from their family are too low. We present a discussion of factors that could potentially influence judgements and decision thresholds, which has implications for practice. It is argued that false positive errors are most likely to be avoided through more thorough and accurate assessments families. When assessing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, we argue that this requires a theoretically grounded, culturally informed framework to improve assessments and decrease the likelihood of false positive errors in decisions involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Australia

"Brother Bosch", an airman's escape from Germany,

Mode of access: Internet

Caries inhibition in vital teeth using 9.6-μm CO2-laser irradiation

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that in a short-term clinical pilot trial short-pulsed 9.6 μm CO2-laser irradiation significantly inhibits demineralization in vivo. Twenty-four subjects scheduled for extraction of bicuspids for orthodontic reasons (age 14.9 ± 2.2 years) were recruited. Orthodontic brackets were placed on bicuspids (Transbond XT, 3M). An area next to the bracket was irradiated with a CO2-laser (Pulse System Inc, Los Alamos, New Mexico), wavelength 9.6 μm, pulse duration 20 μs, pulse repetition rate 20 Hz, beam diameter 1100 μm, average fluence 4.1 ± 0.3J/cm2, 20 laser pulses per spot. An adjacent nonirradiated area served as control. Bicuspids were extracted after four and twelve weeks, respectively, for a quantitative assessment of demineralization by cross-sectional microhardness testing. For the 4-week arm the mean relative mineral loss ΔZ (vol% × μm) for the laser treated enamel was 402 ± 85 (mean ± SE), while the control showed significantly higher mineral loss (ΔZ 738 ± 131; P = 0.04, t-test). The difference was even larger after twelve weeks (laser arm ΔZ 135 ± 98; control 1067 ± 254; P = 0.002). The laser treatment produced 46% demineralization inhibition for the 4-week and a marked 87% inhibition for the 12-week arm. This study shows, for the first time in vivo, that the short-pulsed 9.6 μm CO2-laser irradiation successfully inhibits demineralization of tooth enamel in humans