Awareness, anxiety, compliance: community perceptions and response to the threat and reality of an influenza pandemic

This study compared community response prior to and during the H1N1 2009 influenza pandemic using a cross-sectional phone survey of rural and metropolitan South Australia, conducted in 2007 and 2009. Awareness of pandemic influenza was significantly higher and anxiety lower in 2009 than in 2007. Reported seasonal influenza vaccine uptake increased from 51.7% in 2007 to 61.4% in 2009, but there was more interest in receiving pandemic vaccine in 2007 (87.5%) than in 2009 (57%).     

A controlled greedy supervised approach for co-reference resolution on clinical text

Identification of co-referent entity mentions inside text has significant importance for other natural language processing (NLP) tasks (e.g. event linking). However, this task, known as co-reference resolution, remains a complex problem, partly because of the confusion over different evaluation metrics and partly because the well-researched existing methodologies do not perform well on new domains such as clinical records. This paper presents a variant of the influential mention-pair model for co-reference resolution. Using a series of linguistically and semantically motivated constraints, the proposed approach controls generation of less-informative/sub-optimal training and test instances. Additionally, the approach also introduces some aggressive greedy strategies in chain clustering. The proposed approach has been tested on the official test corpus of the recently held i2b2/VA 2011 challenge. It achieves an unweighted average F₁ score of 0.895, calculated from multiple evaluation metrics (MUC, B³ and CEAF scores). These results are comparable to the best systems of the challenge. What makes our proposed system distinct is that it also achieves high average F₁ scores for each individual chain type (Test: 0.897, Person: 0.852, Problem: 0.855, Treatment: 0.884). Unlike other works, it obtains good scores for each of the individual metrics rather than being biased towards a particular metric.     

Knowledge of TIA among general practitioners and emergency department physicians. A questionnaire survey in a French semi-rural area

Background and objective

Management of transient ischemic attacks (TIAs) is of vital importance in an attempt to prevent stroke. However, suboptimal management still raise concern among general practitioners (GPs) and emergency department (ED) physicians—the first medical contact of most TIA patients. This may relate to their poorly updated knowledge about TIA. The study was designed to assess knowledge of TIA among these non-neurologists.

Methods

The study was a post-mailed questionnaire survey among GPs and ED physicians. The questionnaire related to selective clinical aspects on TIA.

Results

There were a total of 85 respondents for analysis, mostly GPs (n = 64; 75.3%), out of 177 mailed physicians. Response rate was 52.7%. Many of these respondents were unaware of the newly proposed TIA definition (59%), unfamiliar with TIA mimics and predictors of post-TIA early stroke recurrence and therefore with the rationales underlying the need of emergency management of TIA. More than one third (39%) were unaware of the relevant national guidelines. Guidelines-aware respondents performed better in most part of the mailed questionnaire.

Conclusion

Our results show that poorly updated knowledge about TIA among non-neurologists represents a potential contributing factor to the persisting sub-optimal management of the disorder. Although further studies are needed to confirm this, improved continuous medical education of this group of health care professionals appears warranted.     

A picture tells a thousand words: A content analysis of concussion-related images online

Background and aimRecently image-sharing social media platforms have become a popular medium for sharing health-related images and associated information. However within the field of sports medicine, and more specifically sports related concussion, the content of images and meta-data shared through these popular platforms have not been investigated. The aim of this study was to analyse the content of concussion-related images and its accompanying meta-data on image-sharing social media platforms.MethodsWe retrieved 300 images from Pinterest, Instagram and Flickr by using a standardised search strategy. All images were screened and duplicate images were removed. We excluded images if they were: non-static images; illustrations; animations; or screenshots. The content and characteristics of each image was evaluated using a customised coding scheme to determine major content themes, and images were referenced to the current international concussion management guidelines.ResultsFrom 300 potentially relevant images, 176 images were included for analysis; 70 from Pinterest, 63 from Flickr, and 43 from Instagram. Most images were of another person or a scene (64%), with the primary content depicting injured individuals (39%). The primary purposes of the images were to share a concussion-related incident (33%) and to dispense education (19%). For those images where it could be evaluated, the majority (91%) were found to reflect the Sports Concussion Assessment Tool 3 (SCAT3) guidelines.ConclusionsThe ability to rapidly disseminate rich information though photos, images, and infographics to a wide-reaching audience suggests that image-sharing social media platforms could be used as an effective communication tool for sports concussion. Public health strategies could direct educative content to targeted populations via the use of image-sharing platforms. Further research is required to understand how image-sharing platforms can be used to effectively relay evidence-based information to patients and sports medicine clinicians.     

Knowledge of osteoporosis correlated with hormone therapy use and health status

OBJECTIVES: The study objectives were: (a) to evaluate knowledge about osteoporosis and to identify its correlates among women > or =40 years of age attending outpatient centers; (b) to compare the level of knowledge between women already receiving treatment for osteoporosis and first-time attendees. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was conducted with women recruited from nine outpatient centres in the Czech Republic. The women were divided into two subgroups: patients who have already been diagnosed with osteoporosis (osteopenia) and who are receiving treatment for the disease (OS group); first-time attendees who have been referred for the assessment of osteoporosis (comparison group). The patient's knowledge of osteoporosis was assessed using the Osteoporosis Questionnaire (OPQ) developed by Pande et al. [Pande KC, Takats D, Kanis JA, Edwards V, Slade P, McCloskey EV. Development of a questionnaire (OPQ) to assess patient's knowledge about osteoporosis. Maturitas 2000;37:75-81]. RESULTS: A total of 474 women (median age 63 years) were studied (306 in the OS group, 168 in the comparison group). Knowledge scores based on OPQ (median) were 7 and 6 points in the OS and comparison groups, respectively. When adjusted for age, the statistics showed better knowledge patients in the OS group (P=0.019). In both the OS and comparison groups, knowledge was found to be correlated positively with education (P<0.001) and experience of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) (P<0.001) and negatively with age (P<0.001). Knowledge was higher among women with better health status in the OS group. CONCLUSION: Knowledge about osteoporosis among Czech women aged > or =40 years and attending outpatient centers is relatively poor. To improve it, special attention should be paid to elderly women, those who have not used HRT, poorly educated women and those treated with several drugs.     

综合医院糖尿病患者及其家属糖尿病相关知识掌握现状调查

目的了解石家庄三甲医院内分泌科糖尿病患者及家属关于糖尿病的知、信、行情况;了解患者接受糖尿病健康教育的现状;为下一步对糖尿病患者开展健康教育,建立有效的糖尿病防治模式提供依据。方法自行设计糖尿病患者及家属糖尿病知信行调查问卷,于石家庄三甲医院中随机抽样492例患者及其418名亲属进行问卷调查。结果糖尿病患者对糖尿病基本常识、控制饮食、运动治疗、并发症等较亲属认识程度要高,糖尿病患者的知识态度得分与其家属知识态度得分成正比,糖尿病患者的糖尿病防治态度较家属更积极,血糖监测、体育锻炼等健康行为形成率比较低。结论多数糖尿病患者及家属对糖尿病基本知识掌握情况不足,态度和行为有待于改进,糖尿病防治工作依然比较严峻。