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- Cachim, Afonso, et al.
(författare)
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Measuring adherence to inhaled control medication in patients with asthma : Comparison among an asthma app, patient self-report and physician assessment
- 2023
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Ingår i: Clinical and Translational Allergy. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 2045-7022. ; 13:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- BackgroundPrevious studies have demonstrated the feasibility of using an asthma app to support medication management and adherence but failed to compare with other measures currently used in clinical practice. However, in a clinical setting, any additional adherence measurement must be evaluated in the context of both the patient and physician perspectives so that it can also help improve the process of shared decision making. Thus, we aimed to compare different measures of adherence to asthma control inhalers in clinical practice, namely through an app, patient self-report and physician assessment.MethodsThis study is a secondary analysis of three prospective multicentre observational studies with patients (≥13 years old) with persistent asthma recruited from 61 primary and secondary care centres in Portugal. Patients were invited to use the InspirerMundi app and register their inhaled medication. Adherence was measured by the app as the number of doses taken divided by the number of doses scheduled each day and two time points were considered for analysis: 1-week and 1-month. At baseline, patients and physicians independently assessed adherence to asthma control inhalers during the previous week using a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS 0–100).ResultsA total of 193 patients (72% female; median [P25–P75] age 28 [19–41] years old) were included in the analysis. Adherence measured by the app was lower (1 week: 31 [0–71]%; 1 month: 18 [0–48]%) than patient self-report (80 [60–95]) and physician assessment (82 [51–94]) (p < 0.001). A negligible non-significant correlation was found between the app and subjective measurements (ρ 0.118–0.156, p > 0.05). There was a moderate correlation between patient self-report and physician assessment (ρ = 0.596, p < 0.001).ConclusionsAdherence measured by the app was lower than that reported by the patient or the physician. This was expected as objective measurements are commonly lower than subjective evaluations, which tend to overestimate adherence. Nevertheless, the low adherence measured by the app may also be influenced by the use of the app itself and this needs to be considered in future studies.
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| 2. |
- Gorasso, Vanessa, et al.
(författare)
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Burden of disease attributable to risk factors in European countries: a scoping literature review
- 2023
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Ingår i: Archives of Public Health. - 0778-7367 .- 2049-3258. ; 81:1
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objectives: Within the framework of the burden of disease (BoD) approach, disease and injury burden estimates attributable to risk factors are a useful guide for policy formulation and priority setting in disease prevention. Considering the important differences in methods, and their impact on burden estimates, we conducted a scoping literature review to: (1) map the BoD assessments including risk factors performed across Europe; and (2) identify the methodological choices in comparative risk assessment (CRA) and risk assessment methods. Methods: We searched multiple literature databases, including grey literature websites and targeted public health agencies websites. Results: A total of 113 studies were included in the synthesis and further divided into independent BoD assessments (54 studies) and studies linked to the Global Burden of Disease (59 papers). Our results showed that the methods used to perform CRA varied substantially across independent European BoD studies. While there were some methodological choices that were more common than others, we did not observe patterns in terms of country, year or risk factor. Each methodological choice can affect the comparability of estimates between and within countries and/or risk factors, since they might significantly influence the quantification of the attributable burden. From our analysis we observed that the use of CRA was less common for some types of risk factors and outcomes. These included environmental and occupational risk factors, which are more likely to use bottom-up approaches for health outcomes where disease envelopes may not be available. Conclusions: Our review also highlighted misreporting, the lack of uncertainty analysis and the under-investigation of causal relationships in BoD studies. Development and use of guidelines for performing and reporting BoD studies will help understand differences, avoid misinterpretations thus improving comparability among estimates.
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| 4. |
- Nunes, Silvia C., et al.
(författare)
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Leaf surfaces and neolithization-the case of Arundo donax L
- 2022
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Plant Science. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 1664-462X. ; 13
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Arundo donax L. (Arundinoideae subfamily, Poaceae family) is a sub-tropical and temperate climate reed that grows in arid and semi-arid environmental conditions, from eastern China to the Mediterranean basin, suggesting potential adaptations at the epicuticular level. A thorough physical-chemical examination of the adaxial and abaxial surfaces of A. donax leaf was performed herein in an attempt to track such chemophenetic adaptations. This sort of approach is of the utmost importance for the current debate about the hypothetical invasiveness of this species in the Mediterranean basin versus its natural colonization along the Plio-Pleistocene period. We concluded that the leaf surfaces contain, apart from stomata, prickles, and long, thin trichomes, and silicon-rich tetralobate phytolits. Chemically, the dominating elements in the leaf ashes are oxygen and potassium; minor amounts of calcium, silicon, magnesium, phosphorous, sulphur, and chlorine were also detected. In both surfaces the epicuticular waxes (whose density is higher in the adaxial surface than in the abaxial surface) form randomly orientated platelets, with irregular shape and variable size, and aggregated rodlets with variable diameter around the stomata. In the case of green mature leaves, the dominating organic compounds of the epicuticular waxes of both surfaces are triterpenoids. Both surfaces feature identical hydrophobic behaviour, and exhibit the same total transmittance, total reflectance, and absorption of incident light. The above findings suggest easy growth of the plant, remarkable epidermic robustness of the leaf, and control of water loss. These chemophenetic characteristics and human influence support a neolithization process of this species along the Mediterranean basin.
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| 5. |
- Vieira, Renan, et al.
(författare)
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Bayesian Analysis of Bug-Fixing Time using Report Data
- 2022
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Ingår i: International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement. - New York, NY, USA : IEEE Computer Society. - 9781450394277 ; , s. 57-68
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Bug-fixing is the crux of software maintenance. It entails tending to heaps of bug reports using limited resources. Using historical data, we can ask questions that contribute to betterinformed allocation heuristics. The caveat here is that often there is not enough data to provide a sound response. This issue is especially prominent for young projects. Also, answers may vary from project to project. Consequently, it is impossible to generalize results without assuming a notion of relatedness between projects.Aims: Evaluate the independent impact of three report features in the bug-fixing time (BFT), generalizing results from many projects: bug priority, code-churn size in bug fixing commits, and existence of links to other reports (e.g., depends on or blocks other bug reports).Method: We analyze 55 projects from the Apache ecosystem using Bayesian statistics. Similar to standard random effects methodology, we assume each project's average BFT is a dispersed version of a global average BFT that we want to assess. We split the data based on feature values/range (e.g., with or without links). For each split, we compute a posterior distribution over its respective global BFT. Finally, we compare the posteriors to establish the feature's effect on the BFT. We run independent analyses for each feature.Results: Our results show that the existence of links and higher code-churn values lead to BFTs that are at least twice as long. On the other hand, considering three levels of priority (low, medium, and high), we observe no difference in the BFT.Conclusion: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study using hierarchical Bayes to extrapolate results from multiple projects and assess the global effect of different attributes on the BFT. We use this methodology to gain insight on how links, priority, and code-churn size impact the BFT. On top of that, our posteriors can be used as a prior to analyze novel projects, potentially young and scarce on data. We also believe our methodology can be reused for other generalization studies in empirical software engineering. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.
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