THE WAY YOUNG PEOPLE SEE THE MENTALLY ILL: A QUESTIONNAIRE STUDY

Background: The stigmatizing of the mentally ill is quite common and has numerous social and economical consequences for these individuals. Subjects and methods: The aim of this paper was to examine young peoples’ beliefs regarding the mentally disordered. The authors’ questionnaire regarding the interviewees’ age, gender, social background and their opinions on the mentally ill was conducted among a popular portal’s users. Results: 11900 people were questioned, including 71% women. 30% of the interviewees were under the age of 19, while 34% of them were between 19 and 24 years old and 36% were over 24. 39% of the interviewees stated they closely knew at least one mentally ill person. 44% of the questioned believed a lot of criminal offenders were mentally ill. 66% of interviewees would not mind sharing a flat with a mentally disordered person, 64% would agree to work with one. Those who personally knew a mentally disordered person were more inclined to share a flat or start a relationship with such an individual, than the rest of the interviewed (51% vs. 37% for flat sharing and 38% vs. 26% for starting a relationship, p<0.001). More questioned under the age of 19 believed that significant number of criminal offenders were mentally ill, than those over the age of 24 (50% vs. 37%, p<0.001). Conclusions: According to the acquired data, many young Poles believe that the mentally disordered are inclined to break the law and behave aggressively. These opinions seem to be related amongst others to age and gender, and they result in unwillingness to have relations with the mentally disordered

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

The Web-Based Randomized Controlled Intervention as the Enhancer of Cancer Prevention

Background and Objectives: Cancer is an unresolved public health issue in society. With the advent of the internet and the development in the technological sector, access to basic health-related information has become more frequent among patients and healthy individuals. The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of educational intervention on the participant&rsquo;s willingness to undergo selected medical procedures in case of suspected cancer. Materials and Methods: From 14 May 2015 to 13 November 2016, a total of 1118 who visited the Polish scientific website were enrolled in the &lsquo;Polish Online Randomized Intervention aimed at Neoplasm Avoidance&rsquo; (PORINA) and randomized into two groups (educational and control). The original Cancer Knowledge Index (CKI) was used for the evaluation of participants&rsquo; cancer-related knowledge. They were asked to declare whether they would consent to undergo selected medical procedures necessary for cancer diagnosis or treatment. Results: Most participants declared their readiness to undergo abdominal ultrasonography, computed tomography, and a nevi excision. The most noticeable changes were found for potential consent to undergo breast fine needle aspiration, mammography and gastroscopy. Conclusions: The level of oncological knowledge has an impact on individual decision to consent to particular medical procedures. Conducted educational intervention has significantly increased the readiness to undergo selected medical procedures

Decreasing the Impact of Anxiety on Cancer Prevention through Online Intervention

Background: Low levels of public knowledge, incorrect beliefs, and anxiety are the most often mentioned factors that may negatively affect the implementation of preventive campaigns and timely diagnosis of cancer. Cancer is a major unresolved problem for global public health. As a result, many effective preventive measures need to be found and implemented. Methods: For a duration of 18 months, readers of the Polish scientific Internet portal were invited to participate in the Polish On-line Randomized Intervention aimed at Neoplasm Avoidance (PORINA) study. Level of cancer-related anxiety was our main measure (self-declared on a simple five-point Likert scale) in this analysis. Results: A total of 463 participants were qualified for the final analysis. Respondents with a positive family history of cancer (p &lt; 0.001) declared the highest level of cancer-related anxiety, whereas lower levels were declared by those previously treated for cancer (p = 0.006). The conducted educational intervention reduced the declared level of cancer-related anxiety. Conclusions: The results of this study provide evidence that the use of web-based interventions aimed at increasing awareness could reduce cancer-related anxiety and may lead to more frequent consent to undergo some of the medical procedures used to diagnose or treat cancer

The role of enzalutamide in the treatment of prostate cancer from the perspective of Polish oncologists

For several years, prostate cancer has remained the most common malignancy in male patients in Poland. A large number of patients combined with rising costs of therapy translate into a significant socio-economic burden. In a clinical oncologist’s practice, we usually deal with patients with advanced prostate cancer. Taking into account the poorer prognosis in advanced disease, development of new therapeutic options as well we their adequate selection is of paramount importance. Enzalutamide is one of the second-generation androgen axis inhibitors, which has the ability to overcome resistance to androgen deprivation therapy by inhibiting the androgen-DNA signalling on several levels. Its efficacy and safety had been proven in numerous phase II and phase III clinical studies and it has been registered by regulatory authorities in the United States and European Union in the treatment of mCRPC, mCSPC and nmCRPC. In this article selected issues related to the treatment of prostate cancer are discussed, with particular emphasis on the role of enzalutamide (including its mechanism of action, indications, efficacy and safety)

The review of prospective studies on mental health and the quality of life of physicians and medical students

Determinanty psychospołeczne odgrywają istotną rolę w kształtowaniu zdrowia psychicznego oraz jakości życia pracowników, w tym lekarzy. W niniejszym przeglądzie piśmiennictwa wykazano, że problemy zdrowia psychicznego lekarzy przejawiają się w postaci zespołu przewlekłego zmęczenia oraz wypalenia zawodowego i mają związek z przewlekłym narażeniem na stres w pracy. Ponadto opublikowane dane wskazują, że do najistotniejszych problemów zdrowia psychicznego studentów medycyny oraz młodych lekarzy należą: uzależnienie od alkoholu oraz ryzykowny sposób jego konsumpcji, depresja, a także potencjalne zachowania samobójcze. Omówione w pracy badania mające na celu identyfikację stanu zdrowia psychicznego i jakości życia lekarzy oraz ich uwarunkowań były prowadzone głównie na podstawie obserwacji prospektywnych, dających możliwość śledzenia zmian w czasie.Psychosocial determinants play a significant role in shaping mental health and the quality of life of workers, including physicians. The results of the presented review indicate that mental health problems of physicians are particularly manifested by chronic fatigue syndrome and burnout syndrome, and are related to chronic stress exposure at the workplace. Moreover, published data suggest that the most important mental health problems of medical students and young doctors include alcohol addiction and risky alcohol consumption, depression, and potential suicidal ideation. The studies on mental health and the quality of life of physicians, including their determinants, as presented in this paper, were mostly conducted on the basis of prospective observations that enable the tracking of changes over time

Changes in alcohol consumption among medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic – results from POLLEK study

Objectives Social distancing and remote learning as one of the ways to fight against COVID-19 pandemic have affected universities and changed the lifestyle of many students. Psychoactive substances use was one of the way to deal with the anxiety caused by these new settings. Studies published so far have not provided a clear answer on whether COVID-19 leads to changes in the structure of alcohol consumption among medical students. The presented study attempted to answer this question based on the data available from the POLLEK study. Material and Methods The study group included 3 separate groups of medical students (recruited in the following academic years: 2019/2020, 2020/2021, and 2021/2022) with a total number of 899 students. To assess the characteristics of alcohol consumption the authors used a Polish version of the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT). Results Students surveyed during the lockdown lived in the family home much more often, reported good health, and declared consumption of a smaller number of alcoholic beverages. Their AUDIT scores were statistically significantly (p = 0.04) lower compared to the group surveyed before the pandemic (5 vs. 6, respectively). There were no significant differences in the AUDIT results between other study periods. Conclusions Lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic might be associated with a decrease in alcohol intake among medical students. This may be due to a different place of residence of students, a family home rather than a dormitory. However, the debate on this topic seems to be still open. Int J Occup Med Environ Health. 2023;36(3):406–1

Impact of Two Different Recruitment Procedures (Random vs. Volunteer Selection) on the Results of Seroepidemiological Study (SARS-CoV-2)

The proper recruitment of subjects for population-based epidemiological studies is critical to the external validity of the studies and, above all, to the sound and correct interpretation of the findings. Since 2020, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been a new factor that has been, additionally, hindering studies. Therefore, the aim of our study is to compare demographic, socio-economic, health-related characteristics and the frequency of SARS-CoV-2 infection occurrence among the randomly selected group and the group composed of volunteers. We compare two groups of participants from the cross-sectional study assessing the seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which was conducted in autumn 2020, in three cities of the Silesian Voivodeship in Poland. The first group consisted of a randomly selected, nationally representative, age-stratified sample of subjects (1167 participants, “RG” group) and was recruited using personal invitation letters and postal addresses obtained from a national registry. The second group (4321 volunteers, “VG” group) included those who expressed their willingness to participate in response to an advertisement published in the media. Compared with RG subjects, volunteers were more often females, younger and professionally active, more often had a history of contact with a COVID-19 patient, post-contact nasopharyngeal swab, fewer comorbidities, as well as declared the occurrence of symptoms that might suggest infection with SARS-CoV-2. Additionally, in the VG group the percentage of positive IgG results and tuberculosis vaccination were higher. The findings of the study confirm that surveys limited to volunteers are biased. The presence of the bias may seriously affect and distort inference and make the generalizability of the results more than questionable. Although effective control over selection bias in surveys, including volunteers, is virtually impossible, its impact on the survey results is impossible to predict. However, whenever possible, such surveys could include a small component of a random sample to assess the presence and potential effects of selection bias

Evaluation of the First Polish Web-Based Intervention Aimed at Improving Cancer Prevention (the PORINA Study)

The appropriate level of the society&rsquo;s health-oriented knowledge is essential for improving the effectiveness of actions to reduce the number of new cases and deaths caused by cancer. The aim of this study was to identify the role of web-based educational campaigns in the field of cancer prevention in Poland. From 14.05.2015 to 13.11.2016 readers of Polish scientific websites were invited to participate in the &ldquo;PORINA&rdquo; prospective interventional study. A total of 1118 volunteers (unrepresentative sample) were recruited and randomized (interventional and control groups). After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 463 participants (41.4% of the recruited) qualified for the final analysis; 207 were allocated to the interventional and 256 to the control group. A specially designed internet platform, a self-reported questionnaire (validated during the study) and educational materials which were prepared by a physician specialized in clinical oncology were used. Assessments of participants&rsquo; knowledge were based on the authors Cancer Knowledge Index (CKI). The number of subjects with an increase in CKI score was significantly higher for the interventional group with minor changes in the control (p &lt; 0.001). The highest increase in CKI scores was obtained in the following demographic groups: females, younger participants, those living in smaller villages and also among the less educated. An overall impact of presented web-based educational intervention was moderate. However, the results obtained confirmed that well-organized intervention supported by oncologists may be useful in cancer prevention