Ustekinumab for the treatment of psoriatic arthritis: an update.

Psoriatic arthritis occurs in 30% of psoriasis patients, and the treatment can be challenging in some patients. Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration approved ustekinumab, a fully human monoclonal antibody, for the management of psoriatic arthritis. In this article, we review large-scale randomized clinical trials addressing the efficacy and safety profile of ustekinumab for the treatment of psoriatic arthritis

Adherence to Gluten Free Diet in Pakistan-Role of Dietitian

Celiac disease (CD) is a common multi-system autoimmune disease, affecting approximately 1% of people worldwide 1. Predisposed individuals develop an immune response to gluten, a protein found in the cereal grains: wheat, barley and rye. Autoimmune intestinal damage is the cardinal feature of celiac disease, and typically involves villous atrophy, crypt hyperplasia, and increased intraepithelial lymphocytes 2. Symptoms may be subclinical, varying from gastrointestinal upset to severe malabsorption 3,4. Skin, nervous system, and multisystem involvement is also recognized. Strict avoidance of gluten-containing foods can reverse both enteric and extra-intestinal manifestations of the disease

Advancing Spatiotemporal Modeling of Access to Healthcare – A Methodological Perspective

Modelers apply system dynamics (SD) modeling in various fields for different purposes including policy analysis, however, they need to integrate SD with other methodologies to facilitate the inclusion of spatial factors and study their influence on the system’s behavior. We investigate the combination of SD modeling with Geographic Information Systems using healthcare data to facilitate the study of both spatial and systemic factors for more effective policy design. We propose an algorithm for integrating these methodologies and explain one of its applications in the complex health systems—Medicaid beneficiaries’ access to primary care (PC). Our results reveal insights and information that were not available through merely SD modeling; this approach provides the opportunity for policymakers to learn about the influence of spatiotemporal factors on health outcomes in a complex health system, and identify the areas with a high need for PC providers

Effect of Advertisement on Purchasing Energy Drink in Dhaka City of Bangladesh

Public announcement intended to promote the sale, purchase or rental of a product or service to advance a cause or idea or to bring about some other effect desired by the advertiser, for which transmission time has been given to the advertiser for remuneration or similar consideration. The consumer durables usually calls for a greater exchange and hence the consumer decision-making process turns into a comparative critical evaluation method before the purchase is made; the first moving consumers good (FMCG) do not follow the same procedure in reaching at the purchase decision. Failure to address the advertising communication tools accordingly is wastage of valuable time, money, effort as well as other resources. For instances, communicating through an ineffective media or otherwise failing to reach the target segment is wastage of resources along with loss of sales as well as other favorable consequences. So that this paper tries to identify the advertisement effectiveness of energy drinks in different media on the buying decision among the peoples of Dhaka in Bangladesh. In order to reach the study objectives convenience/purposive sampling has been employed and sample is selected from different shopping mall of different areas of Dhaka city. The results of this study show that advertisement has great influence in expanding Energy drink Company. So producer should spend huge amount of money in advertisement and also should prepare the advertisement in such way that people of all classes are attracted of that advertisement and the most effective media is TV. Keywords: Energy Drink, Advertisement, Dhaka City, Banglades

Price Clustering After the Introduction of Bitcoin Futures

Economic theory suggests that introduction of derivative contracts can improve the informational efficiency of the underlying asset prices (Danthine, 1978). In this study, we examine the impact of the introduction of Bitcoin futures on price clustering in Bitcoin. Our findings suggest that price clustering in Bitcoin meaningfully decreases post the introduction of its futures contracts

Designing Comprehensive Partnering Agreements

Agreements are a key mechanism of partnerships because their role is to govern interactions. They help partnerships become more effective by allowing partners to cope with relational, performance and situational risks that characterise inter-organisational relationships. The Partnerships Resource Centre and The Partnering Initiative have developed a Partnering Agreement Scorecard based on insights from practice and grounded on theory. The tool will be of value to any organisation that contemplates setting up a new or reviewing an existing partnership. It offers a structure for generating and assessing an agreement which should fit the initial needs of most partnerships. It is our experience that addressing a number of questions in a more systematic manner seriously increases the chances of success – by ensuring all partners are on the same page, that the partnership has been set up correctly, by helping to keep a partnership on track and by providing guidance also in difficult times. As accompaniment the publication Designing Comprehensive Partnering Agreements: An Introduction to the Partnering Agreements Scorecard, provides shorthand of the most critical questions that should be addressed when developing a partnership agreement. This guide includes both an overview of the nature and value of agreements and a new tool for their construction and review

Alexa as an Active Listener: How Backchanneling Can Elicit Self-Disclosure and Promote User Experience

Active listening is a well-known skill applied in human communication to build intimacy and elicit self-disclosure to support a wide variety of cooperative tasks. When applied to conversational UIs, active listening from machines can also elicit greater self-disclosure by signaling to the users that they are being heard, which can have positive outcomes. However, it takes considerable engineering effort and training to embed active listening skills in machines at scale, given the need to personalize active-listening cues to individual users and their specific utterances. A more generic solution is needed given the increasing use of conversational agents, especially by the growing number of socially isolated individuals. With this in mind, we developed an Amazon Alexa skill that provides privacy-preserving and pseudo-random backchanneling to indicate active listening. User study (N = 40) data show that backchanneling improves perceived degree of active listening by smart speakers. It also results in more emotional disclosure, with participants using more positive words. Perception of smart speakers as active listeners is positively associated with perceived emotional support. Interview data corroborate the feasibility of using smart speakers to provide emotional support. These findings have important implications for smart speaker interaction design in several domains of cooperative work and social computing.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACM HCI). The paper will be presented in CSCW 2022 (https://cscw.acm.org/2022

Long-term outcomes after using retrievable vena cava filters in major trauma patients with contraindications to prophylactic anticoagulation

Purpose To investigate the long-term outcomes of using vena cava filters to prevent symptomatic pulmonary embolism (PE) in major trauma patients who have contraindications to prophylactic anticoagulation. Methods This was an a priori sub-study of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving long-term outcome data of 223 patients who were enrolled in Western Australia. State-wide clinical information system, radiology database and death registry were used to assess long-term outcomes, including incidences of venous thromboembolism, venous injury and mortality beyond day-90 follow-up. Results The median follow-up time of 198 patients (89%) who survived beyond 90 days was 65 months (interquartile range 59–73). Ten patients (5.1%) died after day-90 follow-up; and four patients developed venous thromboembolism, including two with symptomatic PE, all allocated to the control group (0 vs 4%, p = 0.043). Inferior vena cava injuries were not recorded in any patients. The mean total hospitalization cost, including the costs of the filter and its insertion and removal, to prevent one short- or long-term symptomatic PE was A$284,820 (€193,678) when all enrolled patients were considered. The number of patients needed to treat (NNT = 5) and total hospitalization cost to prevent one symptomatic PE (A$1,205 or €820) were, however, substantially lower when the filter was used only for patients who could not be anticoagulated within seven days of injury. Conclusion Long-term complications related to retrievable filters were rare, and the cost of using filters to prevent symptomatic PE was acceptable when restricted to those who could not be anticoagulated within seven days of severe injury