Umbrella Review:Self-examination programmes to detect cancer, what’s the evidence?

Objectives: To gather, assess, and analyse the evidence for self-examination programmes for oral, breast, testicular, and skin cancer to inform intervention development for oral cancer.Methods: The Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for Umbrella Reviews informed protocol development apriori. Protocol registered on PROSPERO: CRD42021285966. Electronic databases searched included: Medline, Pubmed, CINAHL, Cochrane Health Database, PROSPERO, supplemented by hand searching of reference lists and contact with experts. No language restrictions applied. Screening, data extraction, and quality assessment were carried out independently and in duplicate. Inclusion criteria: systematic reviews (SR) summarising observational or experimental studies of community-based self-examination interventions to detect cancer in adults who have never had cancer. AMSTAR-2 guided quality assessment. Due to heterogeneity of included studies, a narrative synthesis was employed.Results: Results are reported according to PRISMA. 350 records were identified, de-duplication left 243 screened at abstract, 83 were sought for full text review, with 19 SR meeting inclusion criteria. The SR covered 199 primary studies with circa 2,460,600 participants. Eight SR focused on breast cancer, five on testicular cancer, three on skin cancer, one on oral cancer and two SR on both skin and breast cancer. AMSTAR-2 assessment found four SR to be of high quality, two of moderate quality and the remainder low or critically low. Analysis was restricted to reviews of high and moderate quality. Findings show low quality evidence across four cancer types to support self-examination. Educational interventions and personalised information on cancer risk showed some promise in increasing self-examination activity and awareness. Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in intervention design was reported for two primary studies.Conclusions: The quality of current evidence for self-examination programmes is low. Novel interventions for oral cancer self-examination should be tested with rigorous experimental design that is accurately reported and include patient and public involvement in intervention design

Umbrella Review:Self-examination programmes to detect cancer, what’s the evidence?

Objectives: To gather, assess, and analyse the evidence for self-examination programmes for oral, breast, testicular, and skin cancer to inform intervention development for oral cancer.Methods: The Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for Umbrella Reviews informed protocol development apriori. Protocol registered on PROSPERO: CRD42021285966. Electronic databases searched included: Medline, Pubmed, CINAHL, Cochrane Health Database, PROSPERO, supplemented by hand searching of reference lists and contact with experts. No language restrictions applied. Screening, data extraction, and quality assessment were carried out independently and in duplicate. Inclusion criteria: systematic reviews (SR) summarising observational or experimental studies of community-based self-examination interventions to detect cancer in adults who have never had cancer. AMSTAR-2 guided quality assessment. Due to heterogeneity of included studies, a narrative synthesis was employed.Results: Results are reported according to PRISMA. 350 records were identified, de-duplication left 243 screened at abstract, 83 were sought for full text review, with 19 SR meeting inclusion criteria. The SR covered 199 primary studies with circa 2,460,600 participants. Eight SR focused on breast cancer, five on testicular cancer, three on skin cancer, one on oral cancer and two SR on both skin and breast cancer. AMSTAR-2 assessment found four SR to be of high quality, two of moderate quality and the remainder low or critically low. Analysis was restricted to reviews of high and moderate quality. Findings show low quality evidence across four cancer types to support self-examination. Educational interventions and personalised information on cancer risk showed some promise in increasing self-examination activity and awareness. Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in intervention design was reported for two primary studies.Conclusions: The quality of current evidence for self-examination programmes is low. Novel interventions for oral cancer self-examination should be tested with rigorous experimental design that is accurately reported and include patient and public involvement in intervention design

Building a WordNet for Sinhala

Sinhala is one of the official languages of Sri Lanka and is used by over 19 million people. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the In-do-European languages and its origins date back to at least 2000 years. It has developed into its current form over a long period of time with influences from a wide variety of lan-guages including Tamil, Portuguese and Eng-lish. As for any other language, a WordNet is extremely important for Sinhala to take it into the digital era. This paper is based on the pro-ject to develop a WordNet for Sinhala based on the English (Princeton) WordNet. It de-scribes how we overcame the challenges in adding Sinhala specific characteristics which were deemed important by Sinhala language experts to the WordNet while keeping the structure of the original English WordNet. It also presents the details of the crowdsourcing system we developed as a part of the project - consisting of a NoSQL database in the backend and a web-based frontend. We con-clude by discussing the possibility of adapting this architecture for other languages and the road ahead for the Sinhala WordNet and Sin-hala NLP

Urban water quality

Anthropogenic activities which are common to urban areas generate a range of physical, chemical and biological pollutants which are subsequently incorporated in stormwater runoff, leading to the deterioration of receiving water environments. This poses risks to both human and ecosystem health including carcinogenic and neurological effects and the loss of aquatic biodiversity. Water environments are an essential asset for enhancing urban liveability. Significant research has been undertaken in relation to stormwater pollutant characterisation and pollutant processes, which forms the baseline knowledge for developing effective stormwater pollution mitigation strategies. The current practice of formulating strategies to improve stormwater quality relies on the fundamental understanding that pollutants accumulate on urban surfaces during dry weather periods and are subsequently washed-off during rainfall. However, there are significant gaps in the current knowledge base in relation to how pollutant load and composition could vary temporally and spatially, which is critical for understanding the dynamic nature of stormwater quality in urban catchments. This acts as a major constraint to informed decision-making in the context of designing effective stormwater pollution mitigation strategies. Moreover, climate change is a significant influential factor in relation to urban stormwater pollution. The predicted changes to dry and wet weather conditions would lead to changes to pollutant accumulation on urban surfaces, change pollutant characteristics and increase the likelihood of discharging shock loads of pollutants to receiving waters. Research is needed to understand the complex mechanisms underpinning pollutant processes and their influential factors and the role of climate change in order to enhance the well-being of urban communities