Clinical outcomes in critically ill COVID-19 patients on the intensive care unit of the University Hospital of Zurich based on the use of corticosteroids

Introduction: In spring 2020, a new respiratory virus called SARS-CoV-2 was detected, causing the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) disease. Scientists all over the world tried to get a better understanding of this disease; how it progressed and how it could be treated best. It appeared that bacterial superinfections in COVID-19 lead to heavier courses of the infection. Some research suggested that systemic corticosteroid therapy lowers mortality in COVID-19 patients, why this therapy was administered to many of those patients. It is though not investigated in detail whether steroid therapy in critically ill COVID-19 patients is associated with superinfections. The aim of this retrospective cohort study with prospectively gathered data is to understand if different use of steroids in COVID-19 therapy can be linked with the incidence and characteristics of superinfections in COVID-19 patients. Methods: The data used for this project contains characteristics and medical information of critically ill COVID-19 patients treated at the intensive care unit of University Hospital of Zurich (USZ) between March 2020 and February 2022. The information was extracted from electronic medical database of the University Hospital of Zurich by our team members. We divided the included patients into 2 subgroups, based on the steroid medication they received in order to limit inflammation: The first one received corticosteroid therapy, the second one received no corticosteroid therapy. The incidence of superinfection was analyzed in the 2 subgroups. Results: In total, 149 patients on the USZ ICU were diagnosed with COVID-19 and agreed to the informed consent. In this population, we detected 70 patients (46.98%) with superinfections. 128 (85.91%) of the patients were given corticosteroids to target SARS- CoV-2 - infection, 21 (14.09%) hat no corticosteroid therapy against the virus. Out of the 128 patients in subgroup 1, 61 (47.66%) developed a superinfection. In subgroup 2, containing 21 patients, 9 (42.86%) patients developed a superinfection. Conclusion: Within our population of 149 patients at the COVID-ICU in the University Hospital of Zurich between March 2020 and February 2022 there has been no significant difference in the number of superinfections between subgroup 1 and subgroup 2. We could not see a direct impact of the therapy with systemic steroids on superinfections detected in patients

Erotismo moderno en literatura antigua. Ejemplos en los cancioneros castellanos del siglo XVI

Eroticism is already established as a serious field of literary research, contributing new material as well as new aspects of known works. The studies about the Golden Age have already proofed that the image of Spain as dominated by censorship and religion is only very partial. The best known and studied as well as most published aspect of sensual love is the eroticism jocular of the erotic-burlesque poetry. Although very common it is not the only form of expressing sensuousness in the Golden Age. Here I contribute and analyze examples to demonstrate that also Golden Age has known sensual verses that can be called erotic in the most modern sense of the word without being centred in laughter. The latter is precisely the main difference from what we consider as erotic today. Being eroticism a sensitive subject it illustrates especially well, how the approach of the researcher restricts actually the vision of the whole

EXPERIENCES WITH URBAN CANOPY LAYER DATA

It is common believe that field data are best be suited for the purpose of model calibration and validation since they represent the ‘truth’. At the example of field data from several urban measurement campaigns, it will be demonstrated that this believe is rather a fiction. As will be pointed out, data sampled within the urban canopy layer exhibit a large inherent variability. They are very distinct from those a numerical model produces. This makes comparisons of model results with data a challenging task

Bend it Like Beckham

This is a review of Bend it Like Beckham (2002)

Consideraciones acerca del erotismo:en la investigación y en la poesía del siglo XVI

The first part of this article takes a historic review on the investigation of eroticism in XVIth century cancionero-poetry from the beginning as a serious subject of investigation and summarize bibliographically the most important publications of literary criticism, dictionaries and anthologies dedicated to the erotic subject. The second part compares definitions of amor and erotismo and sketches the expanse of the erotic love subject. It wants to open the vision limited by social and moral concepts of the moment inorder to be able to understand better the poetry of other centuries

Churn prediction based on text mining and CRM data analysis

Within quantitative marketing, churn prediction on a single customer level has become a major issue. An extensive body of literature shows that, today, churn prediction is mainly based on structured CRM data. However, in the past years, more and more digitized customer text data has become available, originating from emails, surveys or scripts of phone calls. To date, this data source remains vastly untapped for churn prediction, and corresponding methods are rarely described in literature. Filling this gap, we present a method for estimating churn probabilities directly from text data, by adopting classical text mining methods and combining them with state-of-the-art statistical prediction modelling. We transform every customer text document into a vector in a high-dimensional word space, after applying text mining pre-processing steps such as removal of stop words, stemming and word selection. The churn probability is then estimated by statistical modelling, using random forest models. We applied these methods to customer text data of a major Swiss telecommunication provider, with data originating from transcripts of phone calls between customers and call-centre agents. In addition to the analysis of the text data, a similar churn prediction was performed for the same customers, based on structured CRM data. This second approach serves as a benchmark for the text data churn prediction, and is performed by using random forest on the structured CRM data which contains more than 300 variables. Comparing the churn prediction based on text data to classical churn prediction based on structured CRM data, we found that the churn prediction based on text data performs as well as the prediction using structured CRM data. Furthermore we found that by combining both structured and text data, the prediction accuracy can be increased up to 10%. These results show clearly that text data contains valuable information and should be considered for churn estimation

Susceptibility of the Elderly to SARS-CoV-2 Infection: ACE-2 Overexpression, Shedding, and Antibodydependent Enhancement (ADE)

The world is currently facing a serious SARS-CoV-2 infection pandemic. This virus is a new isolate of coronavirus, and the current infection crisis has surpassed the SARS and MERS epidemics that occurred in 2002 and 2013, respectively. SARS-CoV-2 has currently infected more than 142,000 people, causing 5,000 deaths and spreading across more than 130 countries worldwide. The spreading capacity of the virus clearly demonstrates the potential threat of respiratory viruses to human health, thereby reiterating to the governments around the world that preventive health policies and scientific research are pivotal to overcoming the crisis. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) causes flu-like symptoms in most cases. However, approximately 15% of the patients need hospitalization, and 5% require assisted ventilation, depending on the cohorts studied. What is intriguing, however, is the higher susceptibility of the elderly, especially individuals who are older than 60 years of age, and have comorbidities, including hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease. In fact, the death rate in this group may be up to 10-12%. Interestingly, children are somehow less susceptible and are not considered as a risk group. Therefore, in this review, we discuss some possible molecular and cellular mechanisms by virtue of which the elderly subjects may be more susceptible to severe COVID-19. Toward this, we raise two main points, i) increased ACE-2 expression in pulmonary and heart tissues in users of chronic angiotensin 1 receptor (AT1R) blockers; and ii) antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) after previous exposure to other circulating coronaviruses. We believe that these points are pivotal for a better understanding of the pathogenesis of severe COVID-19, and must be carefully addressed by physicians and scientists in the field

Measures of Niche Overlap, I

Many methods of measuring niche overlap have been proposed, such as those of Renkonen, Morisita, and Horn. In this paper, conditions are put forward which overlap indices should reasonably be expected to satisfy. A general description of a good index is given, which covers as special cases those of the well-known indices which satisfy all the conditions. A mixture of the Renkonen and van Belle & Ahmad indices is suggested, as it has many desirable properties. The problem of estimating overlap from data is discussed briefl

Optimizing Dialog Strategies for Conversational Agents Interacting in AmI Environments

Proceedings of: 3rd International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence (ISAmI 2012). Salamanca (Spain), 28-30 March 2012In this paper, we describe a conversational agent which provides academic information. The dialog model of this agent has been developed by means of a statistical methodology that automatically explores the dialog space and allows learning new enhanced dialog strategies from a dialog corpus. A dialog simulation technique has been applied to acquire data required to train the dialog model and then explore the new dialog strategies. A set of measures has also been defined to evaluate the dialog strategy. The results of the evaluation show how the dialogmodel deviates from the initially predefined strategy, allowing the conversational agent to tackle new situations and generate new coherent answers for the situations already present in the initial corpus. The proposed technique can be used not only to develop new dialog managers but also to explore new enhanced dialog strategies focused on user adaptation required to interact in AmI environments.Research funded by projects CICYT TIN2011-28620-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485), and DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad

SESC Joinville: unidade de Itaúm

TCC (graduação) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Centro Tecnológico. ArquiteturaEste TCC não tem resumo