Pulsed Magnetic Stimulation In The Treatment Of Stress Urinary Incontinence In Female Subjects

Stimulasi magnetik terdenyut (PMS) telah digunakan sebagai pilihan rawatan tanpa bedah untuk menangani masalah inkontinens urinari jenis stres (SUI) sejak tahun 1999 disebabkan faktor keselamatan, tidak invasif, dan prosedur rawatan yang mudah. Namun demikian, 'Fifth International Consultation on Incontinence' menekankan bahawa bukti kajian yang sedia ada adalah tidak mencukupi untuk membimbing sebarang cadangan tentang penggunaannya untuk menangani masalah inkontinens urinari, dan kajian klinikal terkawal yang berkualiti tinggi adalah diperlukan. Oleh yang demikian, kajian ini bertujuan menilai keberkesanan PMS untuk rawatan masalah inkontinens urinari. Sebelum kajian di atas dilaksanakan, kajian sistematik telah dijalankan untuk menilai bukti PMS yang sedia ada dalam rawatan pesakit yang didiagnosis mengalami masalah inkontinens urinari. Hasil kajian menunjukkan bahawa PMS mengurangkan simptom masalah inkontinens urinari dalam kalangan wanita untuk jangka masa pendek. Walau bagaimanapun, tanpa kajian klinikal berkualiti tinggi, kesesuaian PMS sebagai pilihan rawatan untuk menangani masalah inkontinens urinari masih diragui. Oleh itu, protokol kajian klinikal yang berkualiti tinggi direka untuk menangani batasan-batasan yang diperhatikan. Pulsed magnetic stimulation (PMS) has been used as a non-surgical option for stress urinary incontinence (SUI) since 1999 due to its established safety, noninvasiveness and simplicity of treatment procedures. However, the Fifth International Consultation on Incontinence (ICI) emphasised that the current evidence is insufficient to guide any recommendation on its use for urinary incontinence, and that well-powered randomised controlled trials are needed. Hence, the present study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of PMS for SUI in a randomized, double-blind, shamcontrolled trial. Prior to the above study, a systematic review was conducted to appraise existing evidence on PMS for patients with urinary incontinence. The results showed that PMS provided short-term improvement for incontinence symptoms in women. However, in the absence of high quality trials, the applicability of PMS as a treatment option for urinary incontinence remained uncertain. Thus, a high-quality clinical trial protocol was designed to address the key limitations noted

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

Patient-Reported Questionnaires to Identify Adverse Drug Reactions: A Systematic Review

Background: This systematic review aims to summarise available patient-reported questionnaires to detect adverse drug reactions (ADRs) that can be utilised by healthcare professionals in clinical practice and to summarise the psychometric properties (validity, reliability, and responsiveness) of the questionnaires. Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted using Medline, Pubmed, Embase, and Emcare databases to screen for articles published between January 2000 and July 2020. Data items regarding validity, reliability, and responsiveness were extracted independently by two authors. The methodological quality was assessed using the COSMIN (Consensus-Based Standards for the Selection of Health Measurement Instruments) checklist. Results: A total of 1563 unique article titles were identified after removing duplicates. Following shortlisting of relevant articles, 19 patient-reported ADR questionnaires were identified. Questionnaires most commonly focused on mental health medications (42.1%, n = 8), followed by general questionnaires applicable to any medication (21.1%, n = 4). Many questionnaires did not report assessing the validity and reliability of the measurement tool. For example, only 11 questionnaires (58%) mentioned assessing content validity, in addition to criterion or construct testing. Conclusion: This systematic review summarised the available patient-reported questionnaires that can be used in research and clinical practice to identify ADRs. Results of this systematic review highlight the need for more robust validity and reliability testing when developing patient-reported ADR questionnaires

Treatment of chronic back pain using indirect vibroacoustic therapy: A pilot study

BACKGROUND: Low frequency sound wave stimulation therapy has become increasingly popular in the rehabilitation fields,due to its ease, less fatiguing and time efficient application.OBJECTIVE: This 12-week pilot study examines the efficacy of applying low frequency sound wave stimulation (between16-160 Hz) through both hands and feet on relieving pain and improving functional ability in patients with chronic back pain.METHODS: Twenty-three participants with chronic shoulder (eleven participants) or low back pain (twelve participants) underwent a 12-week vibration therapy program of three sessions per week. A low frequency sound wave device comprising fourpiezoelectric vibration-type tactile tranducers enclosed in separate 5-cm diameter circular plates, which generate sinusoidal vibratory stimuli at a frequency of 16-160 Hz, was used in this study. Primary outcome measure was pain sensation measuredusing the Visual Analogue Scale (P-VAS). The secondary outcome measures were pain-related disability measured using thepain disability index (PDI) and quality of life measured using the SF-12.RESULTS: At week 12, significant reductions in pain sensation and pain-related disability were observed, with mean reductionsof 3.5 points in P-VAS and 13.5 points in the PDI scores. Sixty-five percent of the participants had a reduction of at least 3 pointson the P-VAS score, while 52% participants showed a decrease of at least 10 points in the PDI score. Significant improvementwas observed in the SF-12 physical composite score but not the mental composite score.CONCLUSIONS: The preliminary findings showed that passive application of low frequency sound wave stimulation therapythrough both hands and feet was effective in alleviating pain and improving functional ability in patients with chronic back pain

Development of a Web-Based System to Report Medication-Related Adverse Effects:Design and Usability Study

BACKGROUND: Medicine use is the most common intervention in health care. The frequency with which medicines are used means medication-related problems are very common. One common type of medication-related problems is adverse drug events, which are unintended and harmful effects associated with use of medicines. Reporting of adverse drug events to regulatory authorities is important for evaluation of safety of medicines; however, these adverse effects are frequently unreported due to various factors, including lack of consumer-friendly reporting tools. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to develop a user-friendly digital tool for consumers to report medication-related adverse effects. METHODS: The project consisted of 3 parts: (1) content development, including a systematic literature search; (2) iterative system development; and (3) usability testing. The project was guided by participatory design principles, which suggest involving key stakeholders throughout the design process. The first 2 versions were developed as a mobile app and were tested with end users in 2 workshops. The third version was developed as a web application and was tested with consumers who were taking regular medicines. Consumers were asked to complete a modified version of the mHealth app usability questionnaire (MAUQ), an 18-item questionnaire with each item scored using a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The MAUQ assessed 3 subscales including ease of use (5 items), interface and satisfaction (7 items), and usefulness (6 items). Continuous variables were reported as mean (SD) values, whereas categorical variables were presented as frequencies (percentages). Data analysis was conducted in Microsoft Excel. RESULTS: The content for the system was based on a systematic literature search and short-listing of questions, followed by feedback from project team members and consumers. Feedback from consumers in the 2 workshops were incorporated to improve the functionality, visual design, and stability of the third (current) version. The third version of the system was tested with 26 consumers. A total of 79% (N=307/390) of all responses on the MAUQ were scored 6 or 7, indicating that users generally strongly agree with the usability of the system. When looking at the individual domains, the system had an average score of 6.3 (SD 0.9) for “ease of use,” 6.3 (SD 0.8) for “interface and satisfaction,” and 5.2 (SD 1.4) for “usefulness.” CONCLUSIONS: The web-based system for medicine adverse effects reporting is a user-friendly tool developed using an iterative participatory design approach. Future research includes further improving the system, particularly the usefulness of the system, as well as testing the scalability and performance of the system in practice

Can’t spell ‘medicine’ without ‘me’:finding the spirit of co-design in multidisciplinary collaboration

In this article we reflect on our experience as a multidisciplinary project team with backgrounds in communication design, clinical pharmacy, and software systems development. Teams such as ours face challenges when implementing different methodological processes and can struggle with communication when vocabularies may be understood in vastly different ways. We reflect on our experience, for better and for worse, within the context of an ongoing and active project, and aim to contribute to recent dialogues around participatory and human-centred design for improved healthcare outcomes. For us, this is an active, critical case study, and we speak more about our experience of multidisciplinary team-building than the outcomes of the project itself – they are still in progress. We hope this dialogue will prove useful to inform future multidisciplinary collaborations

Correction: Lim et al. Patient-Reported Questionnaires to Identify Adverse Drug Reactions: A Systematic Review. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 11877

There was an error in the original publication [...

Drama as a community engagement strategy for malaria in rural Cambodia [version 1; referees: 1 approved, 2 approved with reservations]

Background: Countries in Southeast Asia are working to eliminate multidrug-resistant falciparum malaria, a major cause of mortality in tropical regions. Malaria is declining but transmission persists in many rural areas and among forest workers and isolated populations. In these remote communities, conventional health services and education are limited. Mobilising and educating these populations require new approaches as many people are illiterate and do not attend village meetings. This article describes a qualitative study to assess the feasibility of a drama project as a community engagement strategy. Methods: A drama project was conducted in twenty villages in Cambodia with three key messages: to use insecticide-treated bednets and repellents, to get early diagnosis and treatment, and to learn about risks of forest-acquired malaria. Qualitative interviews were conducted with the drama team members, village malaria workers, local health staffs and villagers, to explore the feasibility of using drama to engage the community and the associated challenges. Results: 29 people were interviewed, which included 18 semi-structured interviews and one focus group discussion. Analysis of the interviews resulted in development of the following seven themes: i) exposure to malaria and engagement activities, ii) readiness and barriers to participation, iii) understanding and learning about malaria using drama, iv) entertainment value and engagement method preferences, v) challenges to community engagement, vi) future participation and vii) sustainability. The event saw a very positive response, with an encouraging average participation rate of 66%. The project faced several challenges including logistic problems, rescheduling due to raining season, and time- and budget-constraints. Conclusions: Our evaluation demonstrated that the drama project was feasible in promoting awareness and understanding of malaria prevention and control. Audience members perceived drama as entertaining and as the preferred choice of engagement activity. Participatory drama could be considered as part of the community engagement for malaria elimination

Reducing hypnotic use in insomnia management among Australian veterans: results from repeated national interventions

Abstract Background The Australian Government Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) Veterans’ Medicines Advice and Therapeutics Education Services (Veterans’ MATES) programme conducted two intervention (March 2009, follow-up intervention June 2012) both of which aimed to reduce hypnotic use among Australian veterans. We evaluated the effectiveness of the interventions, and estimated the associated health consequences. Methods Both interventions targeted veterans who had been dispensed hypnotics prior to the intervention. Patient-specific prescriber feedback containing patient details and the volume of hypnotics dispensed, along with tailored educational information, was mailed to general practitioners. Veterans, pharmacists and directors of care in residential aged care facilities were mailed tailored educational information. Interrupted time-series and segmented regression modelling were used to determine the effect of the two interventions on the rate of hypnotics dispensing. The cumulative patient-months of hypnotic treatment avoided as a result of the interventions was calculated. We estimated improvements in health consequences of as a result of hypnotic treatment avoided based on the results of cohort studies in the same population identifying the association between hypnotic and sedative use on the outcomes of falls, and confusion. Results After the first Veterans’ MATES intervention in March 2009, hypnotic use declined by 0.2% each month, when compared to the baseline level (p = 0.006). The intervention effect was attenuated after one year, and use of hypnotics was found to increase by 0.2% per month after March 2010. Following the second intervention in June 2012, there was a further significant decline in use of 0.18% each month over the 12 months of follow up (p = 0.049). The cumulative effect of both interventions resulted in 20,850 fewer patient-months of treatment with hypnotics. This cumulative reduction in hypnotic use was estimated to lead to a minimum of 1 fewer hospital admissions for acute confusion and 7 fewer hospital admissions due to falls. Conclusions The Veterans’ MATES insomnia interventions which involved multiple stakeholders were effective in reducing hypnotic use among older Australians. Repetition of key messages led to sustained practice change