Search results for " Epidemiologic"

The rapid spread of SARS-COV-2 Omicron variant in Italy reflected early through wastewater surveillance

2022

The SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant emerged in South Africa in November 2021, and has later been identified worldwide, raising serious concerns. A real-time RT-PCR assay was designed for the rapid screening of the Omicron variant, targeting characteristic mutations of the spike gene. The assay was used to test 737 sewage samples collected throughout Italy (19/21 Regions) between 11 November and 25 December 2021, with the aim of assessing the spread of the Omicron variant in the country. Positive samples were also tested with a real-time RT-PCR developed by the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), and through nested RT-PCR followed by Sanger sequencing. Overall, 115 samples tested po…

Exposure to UV radiation and risk of Hodgkin lymphoma: A pooled analysis

2013

Ultraviolet radiation (UVR) exposure has been inversely associated with Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) risk, but only inconsistently, only in a few studies, and without attention to HL heterogeneity. We conducted a pooled analysis of HL risk focusing on type and timing of UVR exposure and on disease subtypes by age, histology, and tumor-cell Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) status. Four case-control studies contributed 1320HLcasesand 6381 controls. We estimated lifetime, adulthood, and childhood UVR exposure and history of sunburn and sunlamp use. We used 2-stage estimation with mixed-effects models and weighted pooled effect estimates by inverse marginal variances. We observed statistically significant inv…

Severity of Covid-19 Clinical Outcomes and Mortality in Multiple Myeloma Patients over Year 1 of the Pandemic

2021

Abstract Introduction In the first weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic when healthcare systems in many areas were overstretched, we documented that hospital mortality in multiple myeloma (MM) patients infected by Sars-Cov-2 was 50% higher than in age matched Covid-19 patients without cancer. In the following months, the pressure on healthcare systems in Spain continued although it did not reach the extreme levels of the first weeks of the pandemic. In this study, we proposed to determine if the severity of Covid-19 outcomes in MM patients has changed over the first year of the pandemic. Patients and methods The Spanish MM Collaborative Group (Pethema-GEM) conducted a survey at national level on …

GRANADA consensus on analytical approaches to assess associations with accelerometer-determined physical behaviours (physical activity, sedentary beh…

2021

This study was conducted under the umbrella of the ActiveBrains and the SmarterMove projects supported by the MINECO/FEDER (DEP2013-47540, DEP2016-79512-R, RYC-2011-09011) and the CoCA project supported by the European Union's 2020 research and innovation programme (667302). JHM is supported by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (FPU15/02645). AR is supported by the NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre, and the Collaboration for leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) East Midlands. SS is supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR-19-CE36-0004-01). RW is supported by a Medical Research Council Industrial Strategy Studentship (MR…

Protective effect of smoking: misleading use of statistics.

2004

Latent structure of the Centre for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) in older adult populations: a systematic review

2019

Objective: The Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) is a 20-item, self-report metric intended to measure depression. Despite being one of the most popular depression scales, the psychometric properties, specifically the underlying factor structure of the scale, have come under scrutiny. The latent structure of a scale is a key indicator of its construct validity, i.e. the degree to which the intended variable is captured. To date, a comprehensive review of the latent structure of the CES-D in older adult populations (≥65 years old) has not been conducted. We aimed to examine the latent structure of the CES-D in samples of older adults to assess its ability to capture de…

Randomized Controlled Trials and real life studies. Approaches and methodologies: a clinical point of view.

2014

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are the "gold standard" for evaluating treatment outcomes providing information on treatments "efficacy". They are designed to test a therapeutic hypothesis under optimal setting in the absence of confounding factors. For this reason they have high internal validity. The strict and controlled conditions in which they are conducted, leads to low generalizability because they are performed in conditions very different from real life usual care. Conversely, real life studies inform on the "effectiveness" of a treatment, that is, the measure of the extent to which an intervention does what is intended to do in routine circumstances. At variance to RCTs, real …

[Rt or RDt, that is the question!]

2021

The article compares two of the most followed indices in the monitoring of COVID-19 epidemic cases: the Rt and the RDt indices. The first was disseminated by the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) and the second, which is more usable due to the lower difficulty of calculation and the availability of data, was adopted by various regional and local institutions. The rationale for the Rt index refers to that for the R0 index, the basic reproduction number, which is used by infectivologists as a measure of contagiousness of a given infectious agent in a completely susceptible population. The RDt index, on the other hand, is borrowed from the techniques of time series analysis for the tr…

Occupational exposure to extremely low frequency electric and magnetic fields and Alzheimer disease: a meta-analysis

2008

Background Among potential environmental risk factors for Alzheimer disease (AD), occupational exposures have received some attention, including extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields (ELF-EMF). A systematic review and meta-analysis of published epidemiological studies on this subject was carried out. Methods The search was concluded in April 2006. Bibliographic databases consulted included PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library and NIOSHTIC2. Pooled estimates were obtained using random-effects meta-analysis. Sources of heterogeneity between studies were explored, as was publication bias. Results Fourteen different studies (nine case-control and five cohort studies) accomplished inclusion…

DEPRESSIONE E RISCHIO DI ISOLAMENTO NELLA POPOLAZIONE SICILIANA ULTRASESSANTACINQUENNE. SISTEMA DI SORVEGLIANZA PASSI D’ARGENTO

2015

L’aumento della vita media, e quindi l’invecchiamento della popolazione, si caratterizza per la presenza di patologie cronico-degenerative che influenzano la qualità di vita. Per tale motivo è fondamentale mettere in atto delle risposte globali ed efficaci incentrate sui bisogni delle persone più anziane, in quanto soggetti non passivi, ma aventi il diritto e la responsabilità di partecipare attivamente alla vita della comunità in ogni fase dell’esistenza. A tal proposito il Ministero della Salute, in collaborazione con la regione Umbria e il Centro Nazionale di Epidemiologia, Sorveglianza e Promozione della Salute (CNESPS), ha dato vita a “PASSI D’ARGENTO”, un sistema di monitoraggio della…