Impact of COVID-19 on cardiovascular testing in the United States versus the rest of the world

Objectives: This study sought to quantify and compare the decline in volumes of cardiovascular procedures between the United States and non-US institutions during the early phase of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the care of many non-COVID-19 illnesses. Reductions in diagnostic cardiovascular testing around the world have led to concerns over the implications of reduced testing for cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality. Methods: Data were submitted to the INCAPS-COVID (International Atomic Energy Agency Non-Invasive Cardiology Protocols Study of COVID-19), a multinational registry comprising 909 institutions in 108 countries (including 155 facilities in 40 U.S. states), assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on volumes of diagnostic cardiovascular procedures. Data were obtained for April 2020 and compared with volumes of baseline procedures from March 2019. We compared laboratory characteristics, practices, and procedure volumes between U.S. and non-U.S. facilities and between U.S. geographic regions and identified factors associated with volume reduction in the United States. Results: Reductions in the volumes of procedures in the United States were similar to those in non-U.S. facilities (68% vs. 63%, respectively; p = 0.237), although U.S. facilities reported greater reductions in invasive coronary angiography (69% vs. 53%, respectively; p < 0.001). Significantly more U.S. facilities reported increased use of telehealth and patient screening measures than non-U.S. facilities, such as temperature checks, symptom screenings, and COVID-19 testing. Reductions in volumes of procedures differed between U.S. regions, with larger declines observed in the Northeast (76%) and Midwest (74%) than in the South (62%) and West (44%). Prevalence of COVID-19, staff redeployments, outpatient centers, and urban centers were associated with greater reductions in volume in U.S. facilities in a multivariable analysis. Conclusions: We observed marked reductions in U.S. cardiovascular testing in the early phase of the pandemic and significant variability between U.S. regions. The association between reductions of volumes and COVID-19 prevalence in the United States highlighted the need for proactive efforts to maintain access to cardiovascular testing in areas most affected by outbreaks of COVID-19 infection

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

Ekspresi siklooksigenase-2 pada membran korioalantois telur ayam berembrio setelah pemberian ekstrak biji jintan hitam (Nigella sativa) dan diinduksi BFGF dengan metode imunohistokimia

Nigella sativa (jinten hitam) merupakan salah satu tanaman yang dapat digunakan untuk pengobatan. Ekstrak etanol Nigella sativa mempunyai aktivitas sebagai kemopreventif. Aktivitas biologisnya terutama dipengaruhi oleh kandungan timokuinon. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui pengaruh pemberian ekstrak biji jintan hitam dan dosis efektifnya terhadap jumlah ekspresi COX-2 pada membran korioalantois telur ayam berembrio (TAB) yang diinduksi oleh bFGF. Subjek penelitian berupa telur ayam berembrio sebanyak 24 butir telur berumur 9 hari dengan 6 kelompok perlakuan, masing-masing kelompok menggunakan 4 butir telur. Kelompok K(+) menggunakan bFGF, kelompok K(-) menggunakan Tris-HCl, kelompok uji I menggunakan ekstrak Nigella sativa dengan dosis 75 µg, kelompok uji II menggunakan ekstrak Nigella sativa dengan dosis 90 µg, kelompok uji III menggunakan ekstrak Nigella sativa dengan dosis 110 µg, kelompok uji IV (pembanding) menggunakan celecoxib dengan dosis 3mg/kg BB. Penelitian ini merupakan jenis penelitian eksperimental laboratorik dengan menggunakan variabel bebas untuk mempengaruhi dampak pada variabel tergantung. Ekstrak Nigella sativa dibuat dengan metode sokhletasi dengan pelarut etanol. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode imunohistokimia dengan antibodi monoklonal anti siklooksigenase-2 (COX-2) dan dianalisis dengan skor imunoreaktif dari intensitas warna dan luas pewarnaan. Hasil penelitian membuktikan bahwa terjadi hambatan terhadap ekspresi COX-2 seiring dengan peningkatan dosis ekstrak etanol Nigella sativa. Dosis efektif dalam penelitian ini yaitu 110 µg yang menunjukkan ekspresi COX-2 kurang dari 10% jumlah sel teramati

Ekspresi siklooksigenase-2 pada membran korioalantois telur ayam berembrio setelah pemberian ekstrak biji jintan hitam (Nigella sativa) dan diinduksi BFGF dengan metode imunohistokimia

Nigella sativa (jinten hitam) merupakan salah satu tanaman yang dapat digunakan untuk pengobatan. Ekstrak etanol Nigella sativa mempunyai aktivitas sebagai kemopreventif. Aktivitas biologisnya terutama dipengaruhi oleh kandungan timokuinon. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui pengaruh pemberian ekstrak biji jintan hitam dan dosis efektifnya terhadap jumlah ekspresi COX-2 pada membran korioalantois telur ayam berembrio (TAB) yang diinduksi oleh bFGF. Subjek penelitian berupa telur ayam berembrio sebanyak 24 butir telur berumur 9 hari dengan 6 kelompok perlakuan, masing-masing kelompok menggunakan 4 butir telur. Kelompok K(+) menggunakan bFGF, kelompok K(-) menggunakan Tris-HCl, kelompok uji I menggunakan ekstrak Nigella sativa dengan dosis 75 µg, kelompok uji II menggunakan ekstrak Nigella sativa dengan dosis 90 µg, kelompok uji III menggunakan ekstrak Nigella sativa dengan dosis 110 µg, kelompok uji IV (pembanding) menggunakan celecoxib dengan dosis 3mg/kg BB. Penelitian ini merupakan jenis penelitian eksperimental laboratorik dengan menggunakan variabel bebas untuk mempengaruhi dampak pada variabel tergantung. Ekstrak Nigella sativa dibuat dengan metode sokhletasi dengan pelarut etanol. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode imunohistokimia dengan antibodi monoklonal anti siklooksigenase-2 (COX-2) dan dianalisis dengan skor imunoreaktif dari intensitas warna dan luas pewarnaan. Hasil penelitian membuktikan bahwa terjadi hambatan terhadap ekspresi COX-2 seiring dengan peningkatan dosis ekstrak etanol Nigella sativa. Dosis efektif dalam penelitian ini yaitu 110 µg yang menunjukkan ekspresi COX-2 kurang dari 10% jumlah sel teramati