International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM): Standardized Patient-Centered Outcomes Measurement Set for Heart Failure Patients

Whereas multiple national, international, and trial registries for heart failure have been created, international standards for clinical assessment and outcome measurement do not currently exist. The working group's objective was to facilitate international comparison in heart failure care, using standardized parameters and meaningful patient-centered outcomes for research and quality of care assessments. The International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement recruited an international working group of clinical heart failure experts, researchers, and patient representatives to define a standard set of outcomes and risk-adjustment variables. This was designed to document, compare, and ultimately improve patient care outcomes in the heart failure population, with a focus on global feasibility and relevance. The working group employed a Delphi process, patient focus groups, online patient surveys, and multiple systematic publications searches. The process occurred over 10 months, employing 7 international teleconferences. A 17-item set has been established, addressing selected functional, psychosocial, burden of care, and survival outcome domains. These measures were designed to include all patients with heart failure, whether entered at first presentation or subsequent decompensation, excluding cardiogenic shock. Sources include clinician report, administrative data, and validated patient-reported outcome measurement tools: the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire; the Patient Health Questionnaire-2; and the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System. Recommended data included those to support risk adjustment and benchmarking across providers and regions. The International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement developed a dataset designed to capture, compare, and improve care for heart failure, with feasibility and relevance for patients and clinicians worldwide

1H NMR spectroscopy of serum reveals unique metabolic fingerprints associated with subtypes of surgically induced osteoarthritis in sheep

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a highly prevalent joint disease. Its slow progressive nature and the correlation between pathological changes and clinical symptoms mean that OA is often well advanced by the time of diagnosis. In the absence of any specific pharmacological treatments, there is a pressing need to develop robust biomarkers for OA. We have adopted a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-based metabolomic strategy to identify molecular responses to surgically induced OA in an animal model. Sheep underwent one of three types of surgical procedure (sham (control), meniscal destabilization, MD or anterior cruciate ligament transaction, ACLT), and for every animal a serum sample was collected both pre- and postoperatively, thus, affording two types of "control" data for comparison. 1D 1H NMR spectra were acquired from each sample at 800 MHz and the digitized spectral data were analyzed using principal components analysis and partial least-squares regression discriminant analysis. Our approach, combined with the study design, allowed us to separate the metabolic responses to surgical intervention from those associated with OA. We were able to identify dimethyl sulfone (DMSO 2) as being increased in MD after 4 weeks, while ACLT-induced OA exhibited increased 3-methylhistidine and decreased branched chain amino acids (BCAAs). The findings are discussed in the context of interpretation of metabolomic results in studies of human disease, and the selection of appropriate "control" data sets

SUMO2014 - Modeling Mobility with Open Data

Dear reader, You are holding in your hands a volume of the series „Reports of the DLR-Institute of Transportation Systems“. We are publishing in this series fascinating, scientific topics from the Institute of Transportation Systems of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. - DLR) and from his environment. We are providing libraries with a part of the circulation. Outstanding scientific contributions and dissertations are here published as well as projects reports and proceedings of conferences in our house with different contributors from science, economy and politics. With this series we are pursuing the objective to enable a broad access to scientific works and results. We are using the series as well as to promote practically young researchers by the publication of the dissertation of our staff and external doctoral candidates, too. Publications are important milestones on the academic career path. With the series „Reports of the DLR-Institute of Transportation Systems / Berichte aus dem DLR-Institut für Verkehrssystem¬technik“ we are widening the spectrum of possible publications with a bulding block. Beyond that we understand the communication of our scientific fields of research as a contribution to the national and international research landscape in the fiels of automotive, railway systems and traffic management. This volume contains the proceedings of the SUMO2014 – Modeling Mobility with Open Data, which was held from 15th to 16th May 2014 in Berlin-Adlershof, Germany. SUMO is a well established microscopic traffic simulation suite which has been available since 2002 and provides a wide range of traffic planning and simulation tools. The conference proceedings give a good overview of the applicability and usefulness of simulation tools like SUMO ranging from new methods in traffic control and vehicular communication to the simulation of complete cities. Another aspect of the tool suite, its universal extensibility due to the availability of the source code, is reflected in contributions covering parallelization and interfacing improvements to govern microscopic traffic simulation results. The major topic of this second edition of the SUMO conference is open data. Several articles cover the acquisition and refinement of traffic networks as one of the fundamental data sources. Subsequent specialized issues such as data models for emissions and Bluetooth simulation are targeted as well. The conference’s aim was bringing together the large international user community and exchanging experience in using SUMO, while presenting results or solutions obtained using the software or modeling mobility with open data. Let you inspire to try your next project with the SUMO suite. There are many new applications in your environment. Prof. Dr.-Ing. Karsten Lemme