| 31. |
- Ioannidis, John P. A., et al.
(författare)
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Population-level COVID-19 mortality risk for non-elderly individuals overall and for non-elderly individuals without underlying diseases in pandemic epicenters
- 2020
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Ingår i: Environmental Research. - : Elsevier BV. - 0013-9351 .- 1096-0953. ; 188
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objective: To provide estimates of the relative rate of COVID-19 death in people <65 years old versus older individuals in the general population, the absolute risk of COVID-19 death at the population level during the first epidemic wave, and the proportion of COVID-19 deaths in non-elderly people without underlying diseases in epicenters of the pandemic. Eligible data: Cross-sectional survey of countries and US states with at least 800 COVID-19 deaths as of April 24, 2020 and with information on the number of deaths in people with age <65. Data were available for 14 countries (Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK) and 13 US states (California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania). We also examined available data on COVID-19 deaths in people with age <65 and no underlying diseases. Main outcome measures: Proportion of COVID-19 deaths in people <65 years old; relative mortality rate of COVID-19 death in people <65 versus >= 65 years old; absolute risk of COVID-19 death in people <65 and in those >= 80 years old in the general population as of June 17, 2020; absolute COVID-19 mortality rate expressed as equivalent of mortality rate from driving a motor vehicle. Results: Individuals with age <65 account for 4.5-11.2% of all COVID-19 deaths in European countries and Canada, 8.3-22.7% in the US locations, and were the majority in India and Mexico. People <65 years old had 30to 100-fold lower risk of COVID-19 death than those >= 65 years old in 11 European countries and Canada, 16- to 52-fold lower risk in US locations, and less than 10-fold in India and Mexico. The absolute risk of COVID-19 death as of June 17, 2020 for people <65 years old in high-income countries ranged from 10 (Germany) to 349 per million (New Jersey) and it was 5 per million in India and 96 per million in Mexico. The absolute risk of COVID19 death for people >= 80 years old ranged from 0.6 (Florida) to 17.5 per thousand (Connecticut). The COVID-19 mortality rate in people <65 years old during the period of fatalities from the epidemic was equivalent to the mortality rate from driving between 4 and 82 miles per day for 13 countries and 5 states, and was higher (equivalent to the mortality rate from driving 106-483 miles per day) for 8 other states and the UK. People <65 years old without underlying predisposing conditions accounted for only 0.7-3.6% of all COVID-19 deaths in France, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Georgia, and New York City and 17.7% in Mexico. Conclusions: People <65 years old have very small risks of COVID-19 death even in pandemic epicenters and deaths for people <65 years without underlying predisposing conditions are remarkably uncommon. Strategies focusing specifically on protecting high-risk elderly individuals should be considered in managing the pandemic.
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| 32. |
- Ioannidis, John P. A., et al.
(författare)
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Second versus first wave of COVID-19 deaths : Shifts in age distribution and in nursing home fatalities
- 2021
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Ingår i: Environmental Research. - : Elsevier. - 0013-9351 .- 1096-0953. ; 195
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objective: To examine whether the age distribution of COVID-19 deaths and the share of deaths in nursing homes changed in the second versus the first pandemic wave. Eligible data: We considered all countries that had at least 4000 COVID-19 deaths occurring as of January 14, 2021, at least 200 COVID-19 deaths occurring in each of the two epidemic wave periods; and which had sufficiently detailed information available on the age distribution of these deaths. We also considered countries with data available on COVID-19 deaths of nursing home residents for the two waves. Main outcome measures: Change in the second wave versus the first wave in the proportion of COVID-19 deaths occurring in people <50 years ("young deaths") among all COVID-19 deaths and among COVID-19 deaths in people <70 years old; and change in the proportion of COVID-19 deaths in nursing home residents among all COVID-19 deaths. Results: Data on age distribution were available for 14 eligible countries. Individuals <50 years old had small absolute difference in their share of the total COVID-19 deaths in the two waves across 13 high-income countries (absolute differences 0.0-0.4%). Their proportion was higher in Ukraine, but it decreased markedly in the second wave. The proportion of young deaths was lower in the second versus the first wave (summary prevalence ratio 0.81, 95% CI 0.71-0.92) with large between-country heterogeneity. The proportion of young deaths among deaths <70 years did not differ significantly across the two waves (summary prevalence ratio 0.96, 95% CI 0.86-1.06). Eligible data on nursing home COVID-19 deaths were available for 11 countries. The share of COVID-19 deaths that were accounted by nursing home residents decreased in the second wave significantly and substantially in 8 countries (prevalence ratio estimates: 0.36 to 0.78), remained the same in Denmark and Norway and markedly increased in Australia. Conclusions: In the examined countries, age distribution of COVID-19 deaths has been fairly similar in the second versus the first wave, but the contribution of COVID-19 deaths in nursing home residents to total fatalities has decreased in most countries in the second wave.
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| 33. |
- Janiaud, Perrine, et al.
(författare)
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Association of Convalescent Plasma Treatment With Clinical Outcomes in Patients With COVID-19 : A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). - : American Medical Association (AMA). - 0098-7484 .- 1538-3598. ; 325:12, s. 1185-1195
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- IMPORTANCE Convalescent plasma is a proposed treatment for COVID-19. OBJECTIVE To assess clinical outcomes with convalescent plasma treatment vs placebo or standard of care in peer-reviewed and preprint publications or press releases of randomized clinical trials (RCTs). DATA SOURCES PubMed, the Cochrane COVID-19 trial registry, and the Living Overview of Evidence platform were searched until January 29, 2021. STUDY SELECTION The RCTs selected compared any type of convalescent plasma vs placebo or standard of care for patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 in any treatment setting. DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS Two reviewers independently extracted data on relevant clinical outcomes, trial characteristics, and patient characteristics and used the Cochrane Risk of Bias Assessment Tool. The primary analysis included peer-reviewed publications of RCTs only, whereas the secondary analysis included all publicly available RCT data (peer-reviewed publications, preprints, and press releases). Inverse variance-weighted meta-analyses were conducted to summarize the treatment effects. The certainty of the evidence was assessed using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES All-cause mortality, length of hospital stay, clinical improvement, clinical deterioration, mechanical ventilation use, and serious adverse events. RESULTS A total of 1060 patients from 4 peer-reviewed RCTs and 10 722 patients from 6 other publicly available RCTs were included. The summary risk ratio (RR) for all-cause mortality with convalescent plasma in the 4 peer-reviewed RCTs was 0.93 (95% CI, 0.63 to 1.38), the absolute risk difference was -1.21% (95% CI, -5.29% to 2.88%), and there was low certainty of the evidence due to imprecision. Across all 10 RCTs, the summary RR was 1.02 (95% CI, 0.92 to 1.12) and there was moderate certainty of the evidence due to inclusion of unpublished data. Among the peer-reviewed RCTs, the summary hazard ratio was 1.17 (95% CI, 0.07 to 20.34) for length of hospital stay, the summary RR was 0.76 (95% CI, 0.20 to 2.87) for mechanical ventilation use (the absolute risk difference for mechanical ventilation use was -2.56%[95% CI, -13.16% to 8.05%]), and there was low certainty of the evidence due to imprecision for both outcomes. Limited data on clinical improvement, clinical deterioration, and serious adverse events showed no significant differences. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Treatment with convalescent plasma compared with placebo or standard of care was not significantly associated with a decrease in all-cause mortality or with any benefit for other clinical outcomes. The certainty of the evidence was low to moderate for all-cause mortality and low for other outcomes.
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| 34. |
- van t Hooft, Janneke, et al.
(författare)
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Few randomized trials in preterm birth prevention meet predefined usefulness criteria
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. - : Elsevier. - 0895-4356 .- 1878-5921. ; 162, s. 107-117
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objectives: We operationalized a research usefulness tool identified through literature searches and consensus and examined if randomized controlled trials (RCTs) addressing preterm birth prevention met predefined criteria for usefulness. Study Design and Setting: The usefulness tool included eight criteria combining 13 items. RCTs were evaluated for compliance with each item by multiple assessors (reviewer agreement 95-98%). Proportions of compliances with 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated and change over time was assessed using S 2010 as a cutoff. Results: Among 347 selected RCTs, published within 56 preterm birth Cochrane reviews, only 36 (10%, 95% CI = 7-14%) met more than half of the usefulness criteria. Compared to trials before 2010, recent trials used composite or surrogate (less informative) outcomes more often (13% vs. 25%, relative risk 1.91, 95% CI = 1.21-3.00). Only 16 trials reflected real practice (pragmatism) in design (5%, 95% CI = 3-7%), with no improvements over time. No trials reported involvement of mothers to reflect patients' research priorities and outcomes selection. Recent trials were more transparent. Conclusion: Few preterm birth prevention RCTs met more than half of the usefulness criteria but most of usefulness criteria are improving after 2010. Use of informative outcomes, patient centeredness, pragmatism and transparency should be key targets for future research planning.
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| 35. |
- Vineis, Paolo, et al.
(författare)
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Expectations and challenges stemming from genome-wide association studies
- 2008
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Ingår i: Mutagenesis. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0267-8357 .- 1464-3804. ; 23:6, s. 439-444
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- There are considerable expectations about the ability of genome-wide association (GWA) studies to make exciting discoveries about the role of genes in common diseases. GWA studies may allow researchers to identify causal pathways that have not been unveiled before, thus opening new avenues to disease understanding, prevention and therapy. However, there are still many open challenges. One is how to analyse these studies. The problem of false positives and false negatives provides an interesting methodological stimulus to find optimal solutions. Once main genetic effects have been concretely documented, the next question is how to proceed with the investigation of gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. It is possible that what really counts is not the main effect of genes but complex interactions. Finding and interpreting such interactions is not straightforward. Finally, continuous updated integration of all evidence, from both old studies, current GWA investigations and future replication studies, and careful interpretation of the strength of the evidence are crucial to maximize transparency and lead to informative selection of the next steps of research in this field. The present Commentary is a report of an Environmental Cancer Risk, Nutrition and Individual Susceptibility network Workshop held in Venice in October 2007 and discusses some of the problems outlined above, with examples.
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| 36. |
- Axfors, Cathrine, et al.
(författare)
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Published registry-based pharmacoepidemiologic associations show limited concordance with agnostic medication-wide analyses
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0895-4356 .- 1878-5921. ; 160, s. 33-45
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objectives: To assess how the results of published national registry-based pharmacoepidemiology studies (where select associations are of interest) compare with an agnostic medication-wide approach (where all possible drug associations are tested).Study Design and Setting: We systematically searched for publications that reported drug associations with any, breast, colon/colorectal, or prostate cancer in the Swedish Prescribed Drug Registry. Results were compared against a previously performed agnostic medication-wide study on the same registry. Protocol: https://osf.io/kqj8n.Results: Most published studies (25/32) investigated previously reported associations. 421/913 (46%) associations had statistically significant results. 134 of the 162 unique drug-cancer associations could be paired with 70 associations in the agnostic study (corresponding drug categories and cancer types). Published studies reported smaller effect sizes and absolute effect sizes than the agnostic study, and generally used more adjustments. Agnostic analyses were less likely to report statistically significant protective associations (based on a multiplicity-corrected threshold) than their paired associations in published studies (McNemar odds ratio 0.13, P = 0.0022). Among 162 published associations, 36 (22%) showed increased risk signal and 25 (15%) protective signal at P < 0.05, while for agnostic associations, 237 (11%) showed increased risk signal and 108 (5%) protective signal at a multiplicity-corrected threshold. Associations belonging to drug categories targeted by individual published studies vs. nontargeted had smaller average effect sizes; smaller P values; and more frequent risk signals.Conclusion: Published pharmacoepidemiology studies using a national registry addressed mostly previously proposed associations, were mostly “negative”, and showed only modest concordance with their respective agnostic analyses in the same registry.
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| 37. |
- Belbasis, Lazaros, et al.
(författare)
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Mapping and systematic appraisal of umbrella reviews in epidemiological research : a protocol for a meta-epidemiological study
- 2023
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Ingår i: Systematic Reviews. - : BioMed Central (BMC). - 2046-4053. ; 12
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Introduction: Umbrella review is one of the terms used to describe an overview of systematic reviews. During the last years, a rapid increase in the number of umbrella reviews on epidemiological studies has been observed, but there is no systematic assessment of their methodological and reporting characteristics. Our study aims to fill this gap by performing a systematic mapping of umbrella reviews in epidemiological research.Methods: We will perform a meta-epidemiological study including a systematic review in MEDLINE and EMBASE to identify all the umbrella reviews that focused on systematic reviews of epidemiological studies and were published from inception until December 31, 2022. We will consider eligible any research article which was designed as an umbrella review and summarized systematic reviews and meta-analyses of epidemiological studies. From each eligible article, we will extract information about the research topic, the methodological characteristics, and the reporting characteristics. We will examine whether the umbrella reviews assessed the strength of the available evidence and the rigor of the included systematic reviews. We will also examine whether these characteristics change across time.Discussion: Our study will systematically appraise the methodological and reporting characteristics of published umbrella reviews in epidemiological literature. The findings of our study can be used to improve the design and conduct of future umbrella reviews, to derive a standardized set of reporting and methodological guidelines for umbrella reviews, and to allow further meta-epidemiological work.
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| 38. |
- Dal-Re, Rafael, et al.
(författare)
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A limited number of medicines pragmatic trials had potential for waived informed consent following the 2016 CIOMS ethical guidelines
- 2019
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Ingår i: Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. - : ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC. - 0895-4356 .- 1878-5921. ; 114, s. 60-71
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objectives: European regulations do not allow modification or waiver of informed consent for medicines randomized controlled trials (RCTs) where the three 2016 Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) provisions are met (consent would be impractical or unfeasible, yet the trial would have high social value and pose no or minimal risk to participants). We aimed to identify whether any such trials of medicines were being conducted in Europe. Study Design and Setting: This is a survey of all phase 4 "ongoing" RCTs on the EU clinical trial register between July 1, 2016 and June 30, 2018, to identify those with potentially high levels of pragmatism. Trials that were excluded were as follows: those conducted on rare diseases; conducted on healthy volunteers (except those assessing vaccines); masked (single-, double-blind) trials; single-center trials; those where one could expect to lead patients to prefer one intervention over the other; and miscellaneous reasons. The degree of pragmatism of the RCTs was self-assessed by trials' investigators by means of the PRECIS-2 tool. Investigators of those trials considered to be highly pragmatic assessed the fulfillment of the three CIOMS provisions. Seven patients assessed the social value of the RCTs. Finally, 33 members of 11 research ethics committees (RECs) assessed the social value of the trials and whether they posed no more than minimal risk to participants. Investigators, patients, and REC members assessed the fulfillment of the CIOMS provisions as "yes," "not sure" or "no." Results: Of the 638 phase 4 trials, 420 were RCTs, and 21 of these (5%) were candidates to be pragmatic. Investigators of 15 of these 21 RCTs self-assessed their trial's degree of pragmatism: 14 were highly pragmatic. Of these 14, eight fulfilled the three CIOMS provisions. Assessments by patients and RECs were inconsistent for several trials. Conclusions: We found few low-risk participant-level pragmatic RCTs that could be suitable for modified or waived participants' informed consent. European regulators should consider amending the current regulation and encouraging the conduct of such trials. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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| 39. |
- Gallo, Valentina, et al.
(författare)
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STrengthening the Reporting of OBservational studies in Epidemiology - Molecular Epidemiology (STROBE-ME): An extension of the STROBE statement
- 2012
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Ingår i: Mutagenesis. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0267-8357 .- 1464-3804. ; 27:1, s. 17-29
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Advances in laboratory techniques have led to a rapidly increasing use of biomarkers in epidemiological studies. Biomarkers of internal dose, early biological change, susceptibility and clinical outcomes are used as proxies for investigating interactions between external and / or endogenous agents and body components or processes. The need for improved reporting of scientific research led to influential statements of recommendations such as the STrengthening Reporting of OBservational studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) statement. The STROBE initiative established in 2004 aimed to provide guidance on how to report observational research. Its guidelines provide a user-friendly checklist of 22 items to be reported in epidemiological studies, with items specific to the three main study designs: cohort studies, case-control studies and cross-sectional studies. The present STrengthening the Reporting of OBservational studies in Epidemiology - Molecular Epidemiology (STROBE-ME) initiative builds on the STROBE statement implementing nine existing items of STROBE and providing 17 additional items to the 22 items of STROBE checklist. The additions relate to the use of biomarkers in epidemiological studies, concerning collection, handling and storage of biological samples; laboratory methods, validity and reliability of biomarkers; specificities of study design; and ethical considerations. The STROBE-ME recommendations are intended to complement the STROBE recommendations.
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| 40. |
- Gallo, Valentina, et al.
(författare)
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STrengthening the Reporting of OBservational studies in Epidemiology: Molecular Epidemiology STROBE-ME. An extension of the STROBE statement
- 2012
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Ingår i: Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. - : BMJ. - 1470-2738 .- 0143-005X. ; 66:9, s. 844-854
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Advances in laboratory techniques have led to a rapidly increasing use of biomarkers in epidemiological studies. Biomarkers of internal dose, early biological change, susceptibility, and clinical outcomes are used as proxies for investigating the interactions between external and/or endogenous agents and the body components or processes. The need for improved reporting of scientific research led to influential statements of recommendations such as STrengthening Reporting of Observational studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) statement. The STROBE initiative established in 2004 aimed to provide guidance on how to report observational research. Its guidelines provide a user-friendly checklist of 22 items to be reported in epidemiological studies, with items specific to the three main study designs: cohort studies, case-control studies and cross-sectional studies. The present STrengthening the Reporting of OBservational studies in Epidemiology - Molecular Epidemiology (STROBE-ME) initiative builds on the STROBE Statement implementing 9 existing items of STROBE and providing 17 additional items to the 22 items of STROBE checklist. The additions relate to the use of biomarkers in epidemiological studies, concerning collection, handling and storage of biological samples; laboratory methods, validity and reliability of biomarkers; specificities of study design; and ethical considerations. The STROBE-ME recommendations are intended to complement the STROBE recommendations.
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