Five insights from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019 provides a rules-based synthesis of the available evidence on levels and trends in health outcomes, a diverse set of risk factors, and health system responses. GBD 2019 covered 204 countries and territories, as well as first administrative level disaggregations for 22 countries, from 1990 to 2019. Because GBD is highly standardised and comprehensive, spanning both fatal and non-fatal outcomes, and uses a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive list of hierarchical disease and injury causes, the study provides a powerful basis for detailed and broad insights on global health trends and emerging challenges. GBD 2019 incorporates data from 281 586 sources and provides more than 3.5 billion estimates of health outcome and health system measures of interest for global, national, and subnational policy dialogue. All GBD estimates are publicly available and adhere to the Guidelines on Accurate and Transparent Health Estimate Reporting. From this vast amount of information, five key insights that are important for health, social, and economic development strategies have been distilled. These insights are subject to the many limitations outlined in each of the component GBD capstone papers.Peer reviewe

Diagnosis and treatment of copper poisoning caused by accidental feeding on poultry litter in a sheep flock

We report a case of chronic copper poisoning in a flock of 182 grazing dairy sheep in Thessaly, Central Greece. Five ewes were found dead during the course of a week. The diagnosis of copper poisoning was confirmed by necropsy examination, blood test results, and abnormally high copper levels in liver and kidney samples. A field investigation revealed the source of copper as a litter heap from a broiler farm to which the sheep had accidental access during their movement between the milking parlour and the grazing area. Access to the litter was subsequently blocked and all sheep were provided with 50 g of a salt/gypsum/sodium molybdate mixture (90.0: 9.8: 0.2, w/w) mixed in 500 g of concentrate feed daily, for a period of 5 weeks. Follow-up blood samples were taken 3 and 8 wk after the initial diagnosis. A reduction in aspartate aminotransferase activity indicated the source of copper had been eliminated and the subsequent treatment was successful

The M&A dynamics of European science-based entrepreneurial firms

SBEFs, University spin-offs, Science-based entrepreneurship, Europe, IPOs, M&As, G34, M13, O32,

Evaluation of four clinical laboratory parameters for the diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis

Abstract Background Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) is a complex and debilitating disease that often initially presents with flu-like symptoms, accompanied by incapacitating fatigue. Currently, there are no objective biomarkers or laboratory tests that can be used to unequivocally diagnosis ME; therefore, a diagnosis is made when a patient meets series of a costly and subjective inclusion and exclusion criteria. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the utility of four clinical parameters in diagnosing ME. Methods In the present study, we utilized logistic regression and classification and regression tree analysis to conduct a retrospective investigation of four clinical laboratory in 140 ME cases and 140 healthy controls. Results Correlations between the covariates ranged between [− 0.26, 0.61]. The best model included the serum levels of the soluble form of CD14 (sCD14), serum levels of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), and serum levels of interleukin 8, with coefficients 0.002, 0.249, and 0.005, respectively, and p-values of 3 × 10−7, 1 × 10−5, and 3 × 10−3, respectively. Conclusions Our findings show that these parameters may help physicians in their diagnosis of ME and may additionally shed light on the pathophysiology of this disease