THE IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON A MULTI-CENTER CLINICAL - ADAPTING IN REAL-TIME TO MAINTAIN TRIAL INTEGRITY
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Dasa O
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8091290 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:BackgroundSeveral gastroenterology societies have created recommendations in order to reduce nonessential exposure to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus. Our aim is to evaluate the national gastroenterologists' perspective on the impact of COVID-19 and the impact of reorganization of a gastroenterology department during the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsFor the first purpose, an online survey was distributed to gastroenterologists nationwide. For the second purpose, the authors conducted an analysis of some endoscopic procedures performed at the Gastroenterology Department of the Centro Hospitalar Vila Nova de Gaia/Espinho (CHVNG/E) between March 16 and May 8 during the years 2019 and 2020.ResultsSixty-seven gastroenterologists answered our survey. Only 14.9% were residents and 86.6% worked in a hospital with COVID-19 patients, with 16.4% assigned to assist those patients. All of the departments suffered modifications. Ninety percent of the residents affirmed that their activity had changed. Ninety-four percent declared having nonessential endoscopic procedures postponed, and 85.1% maintained in-person medical visits, 88.1% were already having remote consultations, and 11.9% did not have any clinical visit. In our gastroenterology unit, the number of endoscopic procedures decreased by 73.1% from 2019 to 2020. In 2020, the proportion of urgent procedures was higher compared to 2019.ConclusionThe advent of COVID-19 has led to important changes in gastroenterology activities in Portugal, and national gastroenterology units are complying with the recommendations. Furthermore, Portuguese gastroenterologists believed that the decrease in endoscopic activity can compromise residents' education and training. The gastroenterology department at CHVNG/E has shown a significant reduction in the number of endoscopic procedures.
| S-EPMC8339048 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundCollege students' mental health may be disproportionally affected by the COVID-19 pandemic because of the abrupt shift off campus and subsequent loss of a social network and potential long-term impact on job prospects.ObjectiveWe sought to assess the nature of COVID-19's mental health impact among a sample of undergraduates who were experiencing the pandemic as it occurred in real time.MethodsIn total, 140 college students completed smartphone-based ecological momentary assessments of anxiety and optimism related to COVID-19 and other generic mental health variables 6 times daily.ResultsParticipants completed >23,750 surveys. Overall, >75% of these surveys indicated at least some level of anxiety about COVID-19. On average, the proportion of responses each day at the highest levels of anxiety about COVID-19 was 7 times greater than the proportion of responses at the highest levels of non-COVID-19-specific anxiety. Structural change analyses indicated a significant downward trend in COVID-19 anxiety after the first week of June, but even at the lowest point, >15% of the participants in the sample still reported high levels of COVID-19 anxiety each day. Participants felt more anxious about COVID-19 on days when the number of new cases and deaths due to COVID-19 were higher. When participants felt anxious about COVID-19, they also felt sad, anxious (in general), and had a greater desire to drink and use drugs. Participants felt more optimistic about COVID-19 when they received more support from others and from their university.ConclusionsThis study demonstrated the widespread mental health impact that COVID-19 has had on college students.
| S-EPMC7744138 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Primary outcome(s): To evaluate the number of surgeries and short-term outcomes as well as change in time to treatment initiation (TTI) for two years COVID-19 spread period compared with the same two years before the pandemic.
| 112151 | ecrin-mdr-crc
Project description:Drone autopilots are naturally suited for real-time iceberg tracking as they measure position and orientation (pitch, roll, and heading) and they transmit these data to a ground station. We powered an ArduPilot Mega (APM) 2.6 with a 5V 11 Ah lithium ion battery (a smartphone power bank), placed the APM and battery in a waterproof sportsman's box, and tossed the box and its contents by hand onto an 80 m-long iceberg from an 8 m boat. The data stream could be viewed on a laptop, which greatly enhanced safety while collecting conductivity/temperature/depth (CTD) profiles from the small boat in the iceberg's vicinity. The 10 s position data allowed us to compute the distance of each CTD profile to the iceberg, which is necessary to determine if a given CTD profile was collected within the iceberg's meltwater plume. The APM position data greatly reduced position uncertainty when compared to 5 min position data obtained from a Spot Trace unit. The APM functioned for over 10 h without depleting the battery. We describe the specific hardware used and the software settings necessary to use the APM as a real-time iceberg tracker. Furthermore, the methods described here apply to all Ardupilot-compatible autopilots. Given the low cost ($90) and ease of use, drone autopilots like the APM should be included as another tool for studying iceberg motion and for enhancing safety of marine operations. •Commercial off-the-shelf iceberg trackers are typically configured to record positions over relatively long intervals (months to years) and are not well-suited for short-term (hours to few days), high-frequency monitoring•Drone autopilots are cheap and provide high-frequency (>1 Hz) and real-time information about iceberg drift and orientation•Drone autopilots and ground control software can be easily adapted to studies of iceberg-ocean interactions and operational iceberg management.
| S-EPMC6139390 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Mobility restrictions have been identified as key non-pharmaceutical interventions to limit the spread of the SARS-COV-2 epidemics. However, these interventions present significant drawbacks to the social fabric and negative outcomes for the real economy. In this paper we propose a real-time monitoring framework for tracking the economic consequences of various forms of mobility reductions involving European countries. We adopt a granular representation of mobility patterns during both the first and second waves of SARS-COV-2 in Italy, Germany, France and Spain to provide an analytical characterization of the rate of losses of industrial production by means of a nowcasting methodology. Our approach exploits the information encoded in massive datasets of human mobility provided by Facebook and Google, which are published at higher frequencies than the target economic variables, in order to obtain an early estimate before the official data becomes available. Our results show, in first place, the ability of mobility-related policies to induce a contraction of mobility patterns across jurisdictions. Besides this contraction, we observe a substitution effect which increases mobility within jurisdictions. Secondly, we show how industrial production strictly follows the dynamics of population commuting patterns and of human mobility trends, which thus provide information on the day-by-day variations in countries' economic activities. Our work, besides shedding light on how policy interventions targeted to induce a mobility contraction impact the real economy, constitutes a practical toolbox for helping governments to design appropriate and balanced policy actions aimed at containing the SARS-COV-2 spread, while mitigating the detrimental effect on the economy. Our study reveals how complex mobility patterns can have unequal consequences to economic losses across countries and call for a more tailored implementation of restrictions to balance the containment of contagion with the need to sustain economic activities.
| S-EPMC8219782 | biostudies-literature
Project description:With the Covid-19 pandemic, many governments introduced nationwide lockdowns that disrupted people's daily routines and promoted social isolation. We applied a longitudinal online survey to investigate the mid-term effects of the mandated restrictions on the perceived passage of time (PPT) and boredom during and after a strict lockdown in Germany. One week after the beginning of the lockdown in March 2020, respondents reported a slower PPT and increased boredom compared to the pre-pandemic level. However, in the course of the lockdown, PPT accelerated and boredom decreased again until August 2020. Then, in October 2020, when incidence rates sharply rose and new restrictions were introduced, we again observed a slight trend toward a slowing of PPT and an increase of boredom. Our data also show that as the pandemic progressed, respondents adjusted their predictions about the pandemic's duration substantially upward. In sum, our findings suggest that respondents adapted to the pandemic situation and anticipated it as the new "normal". Furthermore, we determined perceived boredom and the general emotional state to be predictive of PPT, while depressive symptoms played a minor role.
| S-EPMC8814006 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveA national lockdown was implemented in Israel to slow the viral spread of COVID-19. We assessed the real-time effects of the lockdown on disease expression and lifestyle modifications in pediatric patients with chronic respiratory disorders.MethodsAn anonymous electronic questionnaire was distributed during lockdown (March-May 2020) to caregivers of patients with chronic respiratory disorders. The primary outcome was change in disease expression and the secondary outcomes were changes in lifestyle and caregivers' emotional status.ResultsThe clinical status of one-third of the 445 participating patients (age 0-18 years) reportedly improved, including decreased respiratory symptoms (n = 133, 33%), exacerbation frequency (n = 147, 35%), and use of reliever medications (n = 101, 27.4%). The condition of ~10% of the patients worsened. Clinical improvement was noted mostly in young patients <5 years (p = .001), asthmatic patients (p = .033), and patients with multiple underlying respiratory disorders (p = .015). Patients whose condition significantly worsened were more likely to be >5 years (p < .001), had increased screen time, decreased physical activity, and shorter sleep duration compared to their younger counterparts (p = .008, <.001, and .001, respectively). Caregivers' reports (n = 236 [58%]) of their own anxiety levels and perceptions of the patients' elevated health risk were increased, regardless of the children's actual clinical status.ConclusionCOVID-19 lockdown was associated with clinical improvement/stability for most of the surveyed children; however, their caregivers' anxiety level was heightened. An increased sedentary lifestyle was reported mostly in older children.
| S-EPMC8250588 | biostudies-literature
Project description:UnlabelledIn light-sheet microscopy, overall image content and resolution are improved by acquiring and fusing multiple views of the sample from different directions. State-of-the-art multi-view (MV) deconvolution simultaneously fuses and deconvolves the images in 3D, but processing takes a multiple of the acquisition time and constitutes the bottleneck in the imaging pipeline. Here, we show that MV deconvolution in 3D can finally be achieved in real-time by processing cross-sectional planes individually on the massively parallel architecture of a graphics processing unit (GPU). Our approximation is valid in the typical case where the rotation axis lies in the imaging plane.Availability and implementationSource code and binaries are available on github (https://github.com/bene51/), native code under the repository 'gpu_deconvolution', Java wrappers implementing Fiji plugins under 'SPIM_Reconstruction_Cuda'.Contactbschmid@mpi-cbg.de or huisken@mpi-cbg.deSupplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
| S-EPMC4595906 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The pandemic of new coronavirus disease COVID-19 is threatening our health, economy and life style. Collaborations across countries and sectors as a One Health World could be a milestone. We propose a general protocol, for setting timely active random surveillance of COVID-19, at the human community level, with systematic repeated detection efforts. Strengths and limitations are discussed. If considered applicable by public health, the protocol could evaluate the status of COVID-19 epidemics consistently and objectively.
| S-EPMC7102574 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted routine cardiovascular care, with unclear impact on procedural deferrals and associated outcomes across diverse patient populations.MethodsCardiovascular procedures performed at 30 hospitals across 6 Western states in 2 large, non-profit healthcare systems (Providence St. Joseph Health and Stanford Healthcare) from December 2018-June 2020 were analyzed for changes over time. Risk-adjusted in-hospital mortality was compared across pandemic phases with multivariate logistic regression.ResultsAmong 36,125 procedures (69% percutaneous coronary intervention, 13% coronary artery bypass graft surgery, 10% transcatheter aortic valve replacement, and 8% surgical aortic valve replacement), weekly volumes changed in 2 distinct phases after the initial inflection point on February 23, 2020: an initial period of significant deferral (COVID I: March 15-April 11) followed by recovery (COVID II: April 12 onwards). Compared to pre-COVID, COVID I patients were less likely to be female (P = .0003), older (P < .0001), Asian or Black (P = .02), or Medicare insured (P < .0001), and COVID I procedures were higher acuity (P < .0001), but not higher complexity. In COVID II, there was a trend toward more procedural deferral in regions with a higher COVID-19 burden (P = .05). Compared to pre-COVID, there were no differences in risk-adjusted in-hospital mortality during both COVID phases.ConclusionsSignificant decreases in cardiovascular procedural volumes occurred early in the COVID-19 pandemic, with disproportionate impacts by race, gender, and age. These findings should inform our approach to future healthcare disruptions.
| S-EPMC8233406 | biostudies-literature