The association of anthropometric measures and osteoarthritis knee in non‐obese subjects: a cross sectional study

OBJECTIVE: Body mass index (BMI) and knee osteoarthritis have a strong association, but other anthropometric measures lack such associations. To date, no study has evaluated non-obese knee osteoarthritis to negate the systemic and metabolic effects of obesity. This study examines the validity of the contention that BMI and other anthropometric measures have a significant relationship with knee osteoarthritis. METHODS: In total, 180 subjects with a diagnosis of knee osteoarthritis were recruited and classified according to Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) grades. Body mass index, mid-upper arm circumference, waist-hip ratio and triceps-skinfold thickness were recorded by standard procedures. Osteoarthritis outcome scores (WOMAC) were evaluated. RESULTS: (1) In both genders, the BMI was significantly higher for KL grade 4 than for grade 2; triceps-skinfold thickness was positively correlated with the joint space width of the tibial medial compartment. (2) In males, triceps-skinfold thickness significantly increased as the KL grades moved from 2 to 4; the significantly higher BMI found in varus aligned knees was positively correlated with WOMAC scores. (3) In females, the waist-hip ratio was significantly higher for KL grade 4 than for grade 2; a significant correlation was found between BMI and WOMAC scores. The waist-hip ratio was significantly associated with varus aligned knees and it positively correlated with WOMAC scores and with the joint space width of the tibial medial compartment. The mid-upper arm circumference demonstrated no correlation with knee osteoarthritis. CONCLUS'ON: This study validates the contention that BMI and other anthropometric measures have a significant association with knee osteoarthritis. Contrary to common belief, the triceps-skinfold thickness (peripheral fat) in males and the waist-hip ratio (central fat) in females were more strongly associated with knee osteoarthritis than BMI

Role of microbes in alleviating abiotic stress in plants

The leading threat to agricultural productivity is the recurrent variations in environmental conditions. A battery of abiotic stresses namely flooding, salinity, temperature, drought, heavy metal toxicities, nutrient deficiencies and oxidative stress causes irreversible damage resulting in loss of plant’s vigor and yield. The relationship between plants and microorganisms is a highly dynamic system. The plant microbiome consists of plant growth-promoting bacteria and fungi. In the last decade, many microbes that give hosts the ability to withstand abiotic stress have been characterized in detail. Their beneficial association with plants enables the plant to endure different stresses imposed on them thereby enhancing the plant's sustainability and productivity. For sustainable agriculture, it is very significant to comprehend microbiome-assisted mechanisms for mitigating abiotic stress. This review will shed light on the current knowledge about the roles of various microorganisms in mitigating against abiotic stresses. The understanding of these mechanisms will help to increase the yield of plants and meet the food demands of the expanding population

Public perceptions and experiences with the on-going COVID-19 immunisation programme in India: A survey based study

In countries with large population size, the process of spreading awareness about an entity is often a challenging task. India, ranking second in the world in terms of population, was one of the countries to produce effective vaccines and run a vaccination campaign in a span of months after the onset of COVID-19. The main objectives of the survey were to uncover the predilection of individuals regarding the available vaccines, the extent of safety and the necessity of vaccines. An attempt was made to find out the post-vaccination manifestations. The questionnaire was designed using Google forms which had a total of 31 questions and was circulated via various social media platforms. By the time of conduction of the survey, 18.40% of individuals had received both doses of vaccines and 58.10% of individuals had pain at the site of injection as the most common symptom irrespective of the type of vaccine they received. It can be concluded that the majority of individuals considered vaccination as the need of the hour. Covishield was the most favoured vaccine. Although most of the responses received were assertive, some of the respondents were still sceptical about the vaccination. It was found that vaccination helped in reducing the severity of disease and if coupled with other precautionary measures will lessen the transmission or spread of the virus

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

Increasing frailty is associated with higher prevalence and reduced recognition of delirium in older hospitalised inpatients: results of a multi-centre study

Purpose: Delirium is a neuropsychiatric disorder delineated by an acute change in cognition, attention, and consciousness. It is common, particularly in older adults, but poorly recognised. Frailty is the accumulation of deficits conferring an increased risk of adverse outcomes. We set out to determine how severity of frailty, as measured using the CFS, affected delirium rates, and recognition in hospitalised older people in the United Kingdom. Methods: Adults over 65 years were included in an observational multi-centre audit across UK hospitals, two prospective rounds, and one retrospective note review. Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS), delirium status, and 30-day outcomes were recorded. Results: The overall prevalence of delirium was 16.3% (483). Patients with delirium were more frail than patients without delirium (median CFS 6 vs 4). The risk of delirium was greater with increasing frailty [OR 2.9 (1.8–4.6) in CFS 4 vs 1–3; OR 12.4 (6.2–24.5) in CFS 8 vs 1–3]. Higher CFS was associated with reduced recognition of delirium (OR of 0.7 (0.3–1.9) in CFS 4 compared to 0.2 (0.1–0.7) in CFS 8). These risks were both independent of age and dementia. Conclusion: We have demonstrated an incremental increase in risk of delirium with increasing frailty. This has important clinical implications, suggesting that frailty may provide a more nuanced measure of vulnerability to delirium and poor outcomes. However, the most frail patients are least likely to have their delirium diagnosed and there is a significant lack of research into the underlying pathophysiology of both of these common geriatric syndromes

Global burden of 288 causes of death and life expectancy decomposition in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations, 1990–2021: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021

BACKGROUND Regular, detailed reporting on population health by underlying cause of death is fundamental for public health decision making. Cause-specific estimates of mortality and the subsequent effects on life expectancy worldwide are valuable metrics to gauge progress in reducing mortality rates. These estimates are particularly important following large-scale mortality spikes, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. When systematically analysed, mortality rates and life expectancy allow comparisons of the consequences of causes of death globally and over time, providing a nuanced understanding of the effect of these causes on global populations. METHODS The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2021 cause-of-death analysis estimated mortality and years of life lost (YLLs) from 288 causes of death by age-sex-location-year in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations for each year from 1990 until 2021. The analysis used 56 604 data sources, including data from vital registration and verbal autopsy as well as surveys, censuses, surveillance systems, and cancer registries, among others. As with previous GBD rounds, cause-specific death rates for most causes were estimated using the Cause of Death Ensemble model-a modelling tool developed for GBD to assess the out-of-sample predictive validity of different statistical models and covariate permutations and combine those results to produce cause-specific mortality estimates-with alternative strategies adapted to model causes with insufficient data, substantial changes in reporting over the study period, or unusual epidemiology. YLLs were computed as the product of the number of deaths for each cause-age-sex-location-year and the standard life expectancy at each age. As part of the modelling process, uncertainty intervals (UIs) were generated using the 2·5th and 97·5th percentiles from a 1000-draw distribution for each metric. We decomposed life expectancy by cause of death, location, and year to show cause-specific effects on life expectancy from 1990 to 2021. We also used the coefficient of variation and the fraction of population affected by 90% of deaths to highlight concentrations of mortality. Findings are reported in counts and age-standardised rates. Methodological improvements for cause-of-death estimates in GBD 2021 include the expansion of under-5-years age group to include four new age groups, enhanced methods to account for stochastic variation of sparse data, and the inclusion of COVID-19 and other pandemic-related mortality-which includes excess mortality associated with the pandemic, excluding COVID-19, lower respiratory infections, measles, malaria, and pertussis. For this analysis, 199 new country-years of vital registration cause-of-death data, 5 country-years of surveillance data, 21 country-years of verbal autopsy data, and 94 country-years of other data types were added to those used in previous GBD rounds. FINDINGS The leading causes of age-standardised deaths globally were the same in 2019 as they were in 1990; in descending order, these were, ischaemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lower respiratory infections. In 2021, however, COVID-19 replaced stroke as the second-leading age-standardised cause of death, with 94·0 deaths (95% UI 89·2-100·0) per 100 000 population. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the rankings of the leading five causes, lowering stroke to the third-leading and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to the fourth-leading position. In 2021, the highest age-standardised death rates from COVID-19 occurred in sub-Saharan Africa (271·0 deaths [250·1-290·7] per 100 000 population) and Latin America and the Caribbean (195·4 deaths [182·1-211·4] per 100 000 population). The lowest age-standardised death rates from COVID-19 were in the high-income super-region (48·1 deaths [47·4-48·8] per 100 000 population) and southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania (23·2 deaths [16·3-37·2] per 100 000 population). Globally, life expectancy steadily improved between 1990 and 2019 for 18 of the 22 investigated causes. Decomposition of global and regional life expectancy showed the positive effect that reductions in deaths from enteric infections, lower respiratory infections, stroke, and neonatal deaths, among others have contributed to improved survival over the study period. However, a net reduction of 1·6 years occurred in global life expectancy between 2019 and 2021, primarily due to increased death rates from COVID-19 and other pandemic-related mortality. Life expectancy was highly variable between super-regions over the study period, with southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania gaining 8·3 years (6·7-9·9) overall, while having the smallest reduction in life expectancy due to COVID-19 (0·4 years). The largest reduction in life expectancy due to COVID-19 occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean (3·6 years). Additionally, 53 of the 288 causes of death were highly concentrated in locations with less than 50% of the global population as of 2021, and these causes of death became progressively more concentrated since 1990, when only 44 causes showed this pattern. The concentration phenomenon is discussed heuristically with respect to enteric and lower respiratory infections, malaria, HIV/AIDS, neonatal disorders, tuberculosis, and measles. INTERPRETATION Long-standing gains in life expectancy and reductions in many of the leading causes of death have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the adverse effects of which were spread unevenly among populations. Despite the pandemic, there has been continued progress in combatting several notable causes of death, leading to improved global life expectancy over the study period. Each of the seven GBD super-regions showed an overall improvement from 1990 and 2021, obscuring the negative effect in the years of the pandemic. Additionally, our findings regarding regional variation in causes of death driving increases in life expectancy hold clear policy utility. Analyses of shifting mortality trends reveal that several causes, once widespread globally, are now increasingly concentrated geographically. These changes in mortality concentration, alongside further investigation of changing risks, interventions, and relevant policy, present an important opportunity to deepen our understanding of mortality-reduction strategies. Examining patterns in mortality concentration might reveal areas where successful public health interventions have been implemented. Translating these successes to locations where certain causes of death remain entrenched can inform policies that work to improve life expectancy for people everywhere. FUNDING Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Public perceptions and experiences with the ongoing COVID-19 immunisation programme in India: A survey-based study

140-161In countries with large population size, the process of spreading awareness about an entity is often a challenging task. India, ranking second in the world in terms of population, was one of the countries to produce effective vaccines and run a vaccination campaign in a span of months after the onset of COVID-19. The main objectives of the survey were to uncover the predilection of individuals regarding the available vaccines, the extent of safety and the necessity of vaccines. An attempt was made to find out the post-vaccination manifestations. The questionnaire was designed using Google forms which had a total of 31 questions and was circulated via various social media platforms. By the time of conduction of the survey, 18.40% of individuals had received both doses of vaccines and 58.10% of individuals had pain at the site of injection as the most common symptom irrespective of the type of vaccine they received. It can be concluded that the majority of individuals considered vaccination as the need of the hour. Covishield was the most favoured vaccine. Although most of the responses received were assertive, some of the respondents were still sceptical about the vaccination. It was found that vaccination helped in reducing the severity of disease and if coupled with other precautionary measures will lessen the transmission or spread of the virus