The decomposition of disease and disability life expectancies in England 1992-2004

ISBN 978-1-905752-23-2 www.cass.city.ac.uk "This paper originated in an independent report for the Department of Health. Any opinions expressed in this paper are my/our own and not necessarily those of my/our employer or anyone else I/we have discussed them with. In particular, the views expressed may not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Department of Health. You must not copy this paper or quote it without my/our permission"

Quality of reporting on the vegetative state in Italian newspapers. The case of Eluana Englaro.

Background: Media coverage of the vegetative state (VS) includes refutations of the VS diagnosis and describes behaviors inconsistent with VS. We used a quality score to assess the reporting in articles describing the medical characteristics of VS in Italian newspapers. Methodology/Principal Findings: Our search covered a 7-month period from July 1, 2008, to February 28, 2009, using the online searchable databases of four major Italian newspapers: Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, La Stampa, and Avvenire. Medical reporting was judged as complete if three core VS characteristics were described: patient unawareness of self and the environment, preserved wakefulness (eyes open), and spontaneous respiration (artificial ventilator not needed). We retrieved 2,099 articles, and 967 were dedicated to VS. Of these, 853 (88.2%) were non-medical and mainly focused on describing the political, legal, and ethical aspects of VS. Of the 114 (11.8%) medical articles, 53 (5.5%) discussed other medical problems such as death by dehydration, artificial nutrition, neuroimaging, brain death, or uterine hemorrhage, and 61 (6.3%) described VS. Of these 61, only 18 (1.9%) reported all three CORE characteristics and were judged complete. We found no differences among the four investigated newspapers (Fisher’s exact = 0.798), and incomplete articles were equally distributed between journalistic pieces and expert opinions (x2 = 1.8854, P = 0.170). Incorrect descriptions of VS were significantly more common among incomplete articles (13 of 43 vs. 1 of 18; Fisher’s exact P = 0.047). Conclusions/Significance: Core VS characteristics are rarely reported in Italian newspaper articles, which can alter adequate comprehension of new developments and (mis)inform political, legal, and ethical decisions

Camp Rainbow Gold: New Design

Camp Rainbow Gold is a summer camp for children diagnosed with cancer. The camp has experienced substantial growth since its inception, reaching the capacity of its current site, and is exploring alternative sites. Awesome Engineering was tasked to design a new resident camp facility to meet the needs of a growing Camp Rainbow Gold as a Civil Engineering Design project. We were given a 77-acre site located two miles south of Bellevue, Idaho, and a list of facility requirements for the camp. Our job is to design the facilities as well as investigate the required permits and codes. We will design floor plans for a dining hall, an administration building, a medical facility, a multipurpose meeting facility, and recreation facilities, along with sleeping accommodations for 300 people. We will perform a detailed structural design for an arts and crafts building, drinking water and wastewater systems, and the roads and walkways throughout the camp. During the design, an emphasis will be placed on American’s Disability Act (ADA) compliance because many of the affected children have limited mobility due to their condition and its treatment

Visualizing Impending Cerebral Circulatory Arrest Caused by Intracranial Hypertension Following Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage.

Intracranial hypertension may represent an important complication during the early phase following aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage. 1 Timely diagnosis of intracranial hypertension is essential to avoid secondary brain ischemia; however, intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring requires the insertion of catheters either within the brain ventricles or parenchyma, and hence, invasive ICP monitoring is not frequently utilized.2 Transcranial Doppler can be used for noninvasive ICP estimation through calculation of the pulsatility index (PI).3 We describe a case where noninvasive ICP monitoring with transcranial colorcoded Doppler (TCCD) rapidly identified a condition of severe intracranial hypertension, which led to a life-saving treatment

Perioperative Hypothermia (33°C) Does Not Increase theOccurrence of Cardiovascular Events in PatientsUndergoing Cerebral Aneurysm SurgeryFindings from the Intraoperative Hypothermia for AneurysmSurgery Trial

The IHAST Trial randomized patients undergoing cerebral aneurysm surgery to intraoperative hypothermia or normothermia. Cardiovascular events were prospectively followed until 3-month follow-up and were compared in hypothermic and normothermic patients. Conclusion: In patients undergoing cerebral aneurysm surgery, perioperative hypothermia was not associated with an increased occurrence of cardiovascular events

Long-term complications of COVID-19 in ICU survivors: What do we know?

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused more than 175 million persons infected and 3.8 million deaths so far and is having a devastating impact on both low and high-income countries, in particular on hospitals and Intensive Care Units (ICU). The ICU mortality during the first pandemic wave ranged from 40% to 85% during the busiest ICU period for admissions around the peak of the surge, and those surviving are frequently faced with impairments affecting physical, cognitive, and mental health status, complicating the postacute phase of COVID-19, which in the pre-COVID period, were defined collectively as postintensive care syndrome (PICS). Long COVID is defined as four weeks of persisting symptoms after the acute illness, and post-COVID syndrome and chronic COVID-19 are the proposed terms to describe continued symptomatology for more than 12 weeks. Overall, 50% of ICU survivors suffer from new physical, mental, and/or cognitive problems at 1 year after ICU discharge. The prevalence, severity, and duration of the various impairments in ICU survivors are poorly defined, with substantial variations among published series, and may reflect differences in the timing of assessment, the outcome measured, the instruments utilized, and thresholds adopted to establish the diagnosis, the qualification of personnel delivering the tests, the resource availability as well diversity in patients' case-mix. Future longitudinal studies of adequate sample size with repeated assessments of validated outcomes and comparison with non-COVID-19 ICU patients are needed to fully explore the long-term outcome of ICU patients with COVID-19. In this article, we focus on chronic COVID-19 in ICU survivors and present state-of-the-art data regarding long-term complications related to critical illness and the treatments and organ support received

Simplified approach to integrate seismic retrofitting prioritization with social cost evaluation: A case study in central Italy

In the last three decades, bridge stock seismic retrofitting prioritization has become one of the cult topics for scientific discussions in the bridge management strategies. More recent methods are focusing on the evaluation of the generalized failure cost, of a specific bridge derived from direct and indirect costs induced to the users/residents of the area exposed to the seismic hazard as a consequence of bridge collapse. However, when these approaches have to be applied to large transport networks, appear still very complex and computa-tional demanding, and therefore simplified methods to evaluate the impact in terms of social cost related to the reduced efficiency of a transportation network due to potential bridge failure, are required.In this work, a simplified method for seismic retrofitting prioritization on a bridge stock is proposed, which is based on a "blended" approach considering specific fragility curves according to several bridge features and condition state, seismic inputs and generalized failure costs related to the transportation network. The effectiveness of the method has been showed on a case study of a local bridge stock placed in central Italy and the obtained results have been compared with those provided by more refined transport simulation models, on one hand, and by more traditional prioritization approaches, on the other. It is highlighted that this method can be very useful for transportation network managers with in a limited budget scenario, in case of lack of information about possible earthquake -induced impacts on a transportation network efficiency.(c) 2022 Periodical Offices of Chang'an University. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC -ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)