818 research outputs found
Influence of COVID-19 on the preventive health behaviours of indigenous peoples of Australia residing in New South Wales: a mixed-method study protocol.
Introduction Chronic conditions impact Indigenous Peoples of Australia at a much higher rate than non-Indigenous Australians. Attendance at the Medicare Benefits Scheme (MBS) supported Indigenous health checks are crucial to improve prevention and management of chronic health conditions. However, in conjunction with lifestyle and environmental factors, attendance rates at primary healthcare services for screening and treatment have fallen in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to explore the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on preventive health behaviours of Indigenous Australians and the associated barriers to, and enablers of, engagement with health services to formulate a targeted intervention strategy.
Methods and analysis A concurrent mixed-methods study (comprising quantitative and qualitative data collection methods) will be employed. Descriptive analysis of MBS data about the characteristics of Indigenous Peoples of Australia claiming health assessment services will be performed. Generalised estimating equation regression models will be used to examine the use of health assessment services over time. Qualitative interviews informed by Indigenous research methods will be conducted. Interviews will investigate barriers to, and enablers of, engagement with health services. Thematic approach guided by the principles of indigenist praxis, storytelling and collaborative research will be used to analyse the interview data. The project commenced in July 2020 and will be completed by July 2022.
Ethics and dissemination The project received ethics approval from the Aboriginal Health and Medical Research Council of New South Wales and the University of New England Human Research Ethics Committee. Findings will be disseminated via peer-reviewed journal articles, conferences, government and relevant stakeholder reports, and infographics
Assessing household wealth in health studies in developing countries: a comparison of participatory wealth ranking and survey techniques from rural South Africa
BACKGROUND: Accurate tools for assessing household wealth are essential for many health studies in developing countries. Household survey and participatory wealth ranking (PWR) are two approaches to generate data for this purpose. METHODS: A household survey and PWR were conducted among eight villages in rural South Africa. We developed three indicators of household wealth using the data. One indicator used PWR data only, one used principal components analysis to combine data from the survey, while the final indicator used survey data combined in a manner informed by the PWR. We assessed internal consistency of the indices and assessed their level of agreement in ranking household wealth. RESULTS: Food security, asset ownership, housing quality and employment were important indicators of household wealth. PWR, consisting of three independent rankings of 9671 households, showed a high level of internal consistency (intraclass correlation coefficient 0.81, 95% CI 0.79-0.82). Data on 1429 households were available from all three techniques. There was moderate agreement in ranking households into wealth tertiles between the two indicators based on survey data (spearman rho = 0.69, kappa = 0.43), but only limited agreement between these techniques and the PWR data (spearman rho = 0.38 and 0.31, kappa = 0.20 and 0.17). CONCLUSION: Both PWR and household survey can provide a rapid assessment of household wealth. Each technique had strengths and weaknesses. Reasons for differences might include data inaccuracies or limitations in the methods by which information was weighted. Alternatively, the techniques may measure different things. More research is needed to increase the validity of measures of socioeconomic position used in health studies in developing countries
Mechanisms of HTLV-1 persistence and transformation
Adult T-cell leukaemia (ATL) is caused by the human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1). HTLV-1 has elaborated strategies to persist and replicate in the presence of a strong immune response. In this review, we summarise these mechanisms and their contribution to T-cell transformation and ATL development
Do agreements between adolescent and parent reports on family socioeconomic status vary with household financial stress?
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Many studies compared the degree of concordance between adolescents' and parents' reports on family socioeconomic status (SES). However, none of these studies analyzed whether the degree of concordance varies by different levels of household financial stress. This research examines whether the degree of concordance between adolescents' and parent reports for the three traditional SES measures (parental education, parental occupation and household income) varied with parent-reported household financial stress and relative standard of living.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>2,593 adolescents with a mean age of 13 years, and one of their corresponding parents from the Taiwan Longitudinal Youth Project conducted in 2000 were analyzed. Consistency of adolescents' and parents' reports on parental educational attainment, parental occupation and household income were examined by parent-reported household financial stress and relative standard of living.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Parent-reported SES variables are closely associated with family financial stress. For all levels of household financial stress, the degree of concordance between adolescent's and parent's reports are highest for parental education (Îş ranging from 0.87 to 0.71) followed by parental occupation (Îş ranging from 0.50 to 0.34) and household income (Îş ranging from 0.43 to 0.31). Concordance for father's education and parental occupation decreases with higher parent-reported financial stress. This phenomenon was less significant for parent-reported relative standard of living.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Though the agreement between adolescents' and parents' reports on the three SES measures is generally judged to be good in most cases, using adolescents reports for family SES may still be biased if analysis is not stratified by family financial stress.</p
Conventional Versus Invaginated Stripping of the Great Saphenous Vein: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Controlled Clinical Trial
Utilisation of an operative difficulty grading scale for laparoscopic cholecystectomy
Background
A reliable system for grading operative difficulty of laparoscopic cholecystectomy would standardise description of findings and reporting of outcomes. The aim of this study was to validate a difficulty grading system (Nassar scale), testing its applicability and consistency in two large prospective datasets.
Methods
Patient and disease-related variables and 30-day outcomes were identified in two prospective cholecystectomy databases: the multi-centre prospective cohort of 8820 patients from the recent CholeS Study and the single-surgeon series containing 4089 patients. Operative data and patient outcomes were correlated with Nassar operative difficultly scale, using Kendallâs tau for dichotomous variables, or JonckheereâTerpstra tests for continuous variables. A ROC curve analysis was performed, to quantify the predictive accuracy of the scale for each outcome, with continuous outcomes dichotomised, prior to analysis.
Results
A higher operative difficulty grade was consistently associated with worse outcomes for the patients in both the reference and CholeS cohorts. The median length of stay increased from 0 to 4 days, and the 30-day complication rate from 7.6 to 24.4% as the difficulty grade increased from 1 to 4/5 (both pâ<â0.001). In the CholeS cohort, a higher difficulty grade was found to be most strongly associated with conversion to open and 30-day mortality (AUROCâ=â0.903, 0.822, respectively). On multivariable analysis, the Nassar operative difficultly scale was found to be a significant independent predictor of operative duration, conversion to open surgery, 30-day complications and 30-day reintervention (all pâ<â0.001).
Conclusion
We have shown that an operative difficulty scale can standardise the description of operative findings by multiple grades of surgeons to facilitate audit, training assessment and research. It provides a tool for reporting operative findings, disease severity and technical difficulty and can be utilised in future research to reliably compare outcomes according to case mix and intra-operative difficulty
Performance of CMS muon reconstruction in pp collision events at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV
The performance of muon reconstruction, identification, and triggering in CMS
has been studied using 40 inverse picobarns of data collected in pp collisions
at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV at the LHC in 2010. A few benchmark sets of selection
criteria covering a wide range of physics analysis needs have been examined.
For all considered selections, the efficiency to reconstruct and identify a
muon with a transverse momentum pT larger than a few GeV is above 95% over the
whole region of pseudorapidity covered by the CMS muon system, abs(eta) < 2.4,
while the probability to misidentify a hadron as a muon is well below 1%. The
efficiency to trigger on single muons with pT above a few GeV is higher than
90% over the full eta range, and typically substantially better. The overall
momentum scale is measured to a precision of 0.2% with muons from Z decays. The
transverse momentum resolution varies from 1% to 6% depending on pseudorapidity
for muons with pT below 100 GeV and, using cosmic rays, it is shown to be
better than 10% in the central region up to pT = 1 TeV. Observed distributions
of all quantities are well reproduced by the Monte Carlo simulation.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO
Performance of CMS muon reconstruction in pp collision events at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV
The performance of muon reconstruction, identification, and triggering in CMS
has been studied using 40 inverse picobarns of data collected in pp collisions
at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV at the LHC in 2010. A few benchmark sets of selection
criteria covering a wide range of physics analysis needs have been examined.
For all considered selections, the efficiency to reconstruct and identify a
muon with a transverse momentum pT larger than a few GeV is above 95% over the
whole region of pseudorapidity covered by the CMS muon system, abs(eta) < 2.4,
while the probability to misidentify a hadron as a muon is well below 1%. The
efficiency to trigger on single muons with pT above a few GeV is higher than
90% over the full eta range, and typically substantially better. The overall
momentum scale is measured to a precision of 0.2% with muons from Z decays. The
transverse momentum resolution varies from 1% to 6% depending on pseudorapidity
for muons with pT below 100 GeV and, using cosmic rays, it is shown to be
better than 10% in the central region up to pT = 1 TeV. Observed distributions
of all quantities are well reproduced by the Monte Carlo simulation.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO
Measurement of the Forward-Backward Asymmetry in the B -> K(*) mu+ mu- Decay and First Observation of the Bs -> phi mu+ mu- Decay
We reconstruct the rare decays , , and in a data sample
corresponding to collected in collisions at
by the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron
Collider. Using and decays we report the branching ratios. In addition, we report
the measurement of the differential branching ratio and the muon
forward-backward asymmetry in the and decay modes, and the
longitudinal polarization in the decay mode with respect to the squared
dimuon mass. These are consistent with the theoretical prediction from the
standard model, and most recent determinations from other experiments and of
comparable accuracy. We also report the first observation of the {\mathcal{B}}(B^0_s \to
\phi\mu^+\mu^-) = [1.44 \pm 0.33 \pm 0.46] \times 10^{-6}27 \pm 6B^0_s$ decay observed.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Let
Azimuthal anisotropy of charged particles at high transverse momenta in PbPb collisions at sqrt(s[NN]) = 2.76 TeV
The azimuthal anisotropy of charged particles in PbPb collisions at
nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV is measured with the CMS
detector at the LHC over an extended transverse momentum (pt) range up to
approximately 60 GeV. The data cover both the low-pt region associated with
hydrodynamic flow phenomena and the high-pt region where the anisotropies may
reflect the path-length dependence of parton energy loss in the created medium.
The anisotropy parameter (v2) of the particles is extracted by correlating
charged tracks with respect to the event-plane reconstructed by using the
energy deposited in forward-angle calorimeters. For the six bins of collision
centrality studied, spanning the range of 0-60% most-central events, the
observed v2 values are found to first increase with pt, reaching a maximum
around pt = 3 GeV, and then to gradually decrease to almost zero, with the
decline persisting up to at least pt = 40 GeV over the full centrality range
measured.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO
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