MedicalResearch.com Interview with: [caption id="attachment_47495" align="alignleft" width="133"] Prof. Carrat,[/caption] Prof. Fabrice Carrat, MD, PhD Institut Pierre Louis d'Épidémiologie et de Santé Publique, Paris, France MedicalResearch.com:...
Ms Jenny García, PhD candidate
Institut National d’Études Démographiques INED
Institut de Démographie de l'université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne IDUP
Paris, France
Prof Gerardo Correa, MSc
Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales IIES
Universidad Católica Andrés Bello UCAB
Caracas, Venezuela
Prof Brenda Rousset, PhD
Departamento de Estadística, Escuela de Sociología (FaCES)
Universidad Central de Venezuela UCV
Caracas, Venezuela
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Venezuela, as many countries in Latin America, showed substantial improvements in infant mortality rates during the last 60 years. However, the decreasing pattern might be reversing. Recent socioeconomic and political events have led to a collapse in living standards, along with a breakdown of the health system. At the same time, a strict secrecy policy has ruled public institutions, and since 2013 the Venezuelan government stopped publishing mortality statistics.
This study attempts to fill this gap and estimate infant mortality using hospital and census data after 2013.
The main finding is that infant mortality rates in Venezuela may have stopped decreasing and started increasing in 2009 – around the time funding for the Venezuelan health system started to be substantially reduced. By 2016, the infant mortality rate was 21.1 deaths per 1000 live births, which is 1.4 times the rate in 2008 (15.0 deaths per 1000 live births), and equivalent to the rate recorded in the late 1990s, meaning 18 years of progress may have been lost. (more…)
Dr Alessandro Cassini MD
Epidemiologist, European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
Solna, Sweden
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: We published an ECDC study estimating attributable deaths and disability-adjusted life-years caused by infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the European Union and the European Economic Area (EU/EEA). This study is based on 2015 data from the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network (EARS-Net).
The study was developed by experts at ECDC and the Burden of AMR Collaborative Group, and published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
(more…)
Simon Portsmouth, MD
Senior Medical Director
Shionogi Inc.
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Antibiotics for multidrug resistant Gram-negative infections are desperately needed. Cefiderocol is the first siderophore antibiotic to reach patients.
Siderophore antibiotics bind to free iron and use the bacterial active iron transport channels to cross the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria. Laboratory studies have shown that cefiderocol is active against multi-drug resistant Gram-negative bacteria, often where no other antibiotics are active. It is able to overcome most types of antibiotic resistance due to its active transport into cells and stability against all carbapenemases.
The need for antibiotics for carbapenem resistant Gram-negative infections is described as a critical need by the WHO. This trial was the first in humans with serious infections and demonstrated excellent efficacy in a complicated patient population where almost ¼ were over 75 years of age. Additionally cefiderocol did not appear to have any safety problems, and was well tolerated.
(more…)
Sasank Chilamkurthy
AI Scientist,
Qure.ai
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Head CT scan is one of the most commonly used imaging protocols besides chest x-ray. They are used for patients with symptoms suggesting stroke, rise in intracranial pressure or head trauma. These manifest in findings like intracranial haemorrhage, midline shift or fracture.
Scans with these critical findings need to be read immediately. But radiologists evaluate the scans on first-come-first-serve basis or based on stat/routine markers set by clinicians. If the scans with critical findings are somehow pushed to the top of radiologists’ work list, it could substantially decrease time to diagnosis and therefore decrease mortality and morbidity associated with stroke/head trauma.
(more…)
Knud Josefsen, senior researcher
Bartholin Institute, Rigshospitalet,
Copenhagen K, Denmark
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: In a large population of pregnant women, we found that the risk of the offspring being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes before the age of 15.6 years (the follow up period) was doubled in the group of women ingesting the highest amounts of gluten (20-66 g/day) versus the group of women ingesting the lowest amounts of gluten (0-7 g/day). For every additional 10 grams of gluten ingested, the risk for type 1 diabetes in the child increased by a factor of 1.31.
It the sense that it was a hypothesis that we specifically tested, we were not surprised. We had seen in animal experiments that a gluten-free diet during pregnancy protected the offspring from diabetes, and we wanted to see if we could prove the same pattern in humans. There could be many reasons why we would not be able to show the association, even if it was there (sample size, low quality data, covariates we could not correct for and so on), but we were off course pleasantly surprised that we found the association that we were looking for, in particular because it is quite robust (more…)
Michaël Schwarzinger, MD, PhD
Translational Health Economics Network (THEN)
Paris
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: The association of heavy drinking with dementia has been known for decades. For instance, there is about no Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome without heavy drinking and the syndrome was described in 1890. But this type of dementia is very rare. Also, heavy drinking is knowingly associated with multiple risk factors for dementia onset such as hypertension or diabetes. But heavy drinkers generally refuse to participate to cohort studies and declaration of alcohol use among participants is generally biased downward... So the study rationale is very strong, but supporting empirical evidence is quite scarce.
This nationwide study included all 31+ million adults discharged from hospitals over 6 years, i.e., 50% of the French population before 65 years old and 80% above that age. Of 1.1+ million adults diagnosed with dementia, one in twenty had an early-onset (before 65 years old). Heavy drinking was recorded in most (56%) early-onset dementia cases: two-third in men; one-third in women. In addition, the association of heavy drinking with dementia goes far beyond 65 years old, both directly (>3 times higher risk for dementia onset after controlling for more than 30 known risk factors for dementia) and indirectly as heavy drinking was associated with all other independent risk factors for dementia onset. Accordingly, heavy drinking had the largest effect on dementia risk of all independent modifiable risk factors such as hypertension or diabetes.
The effects were found whatever dementia case definition or population studies.
(more…)