| 1. |
- Brinkman, D. J., et al.
(författare)
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Essential Competencies in Prescribing: A First European Cross-Sectional Study Among 895 Final-Year Medical Students
- 2017
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Ingår i: Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. - : WILEY-BLACKWELL. - 0009-9236 .- 1532-6535. ; 101:2, s. 281-289
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- European medical students should have acquired adequate prescribing competencies before graduation, but it is not known whether this is the case. In this international multicenter study, we evaluated the essential knowledge, skills, and attitudes in clinical pharmacology and therapeutics (CPT) of final-year medical students across Europe. In a cross-sectional design, 26 medical schools from 17 European countries were asked to administer a standardized assessment and questionnaire to 50 final-year students. Although there were differences between schools, our results show an overall lack of essential prescribing competencies among final-year students in Europe. Students had a poor knowledge of drug interactions and contraindications, and chose inappropriate therapies for common diseases or made prescribing errors. Our results suggest that undergraduate teaching in CPT is inadequate in many European schools, leading to incompetent prescribers and potentially unsafe patient care. A European core curriculum with clear learning outcomes and assessments should be urgently developed.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Krulichova, I. S., et al.
(författare)
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Comparison of drug prescribing before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-national European study
- 2022
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Ingår i: Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. - : Wiley. - 1053-8569 .- 1099-1557. ; 31:10, s. 1046-1055
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on health care, with disruption to routine clinical care. Our aim was to describe changes in prescription drugs dispensing in the primary and outpatient sectors during the first year of the pandemic across Europe. Methods We used routine administrative data on dispensed medicines in eight European countries (five whole countries, three represented by one region each) from January 2017 to March 2021 to compare the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic with the preceding 3 years. Results In the 10 therapeutic subgroups with the highest dispensed volumes across all countries/regions the relative changes between the COVID-19 period and the year before were mostly of a magnitude similar to changes between previous periods. However, for drugs for obstructive airway diseases the changes in the COVID-19 period were stronger in several countries/regions. In all countries/regions a decrease in dispensed DDDs of antibiotics for systemic use (from -39.4% in Romagna to -14.2% in Scotland) and nasal preparations (from -34.4% in Lithuania to -5.7% in Sweden) was observed. We observed a stockpiling effect in the total market in March 2020 in six countries/regions. In Czechia the observed increase was not significant and in Slovenia volumes increased only after the end of the first lockdown. We found an increase in average therapeutic quantity per pack dispensed, which, however, exceeded 5% only in Slovenia, Germany, and Czechia. Conclusions The findings from this first European cross-national comparison show a substantial decrease in dispensed volumes of antibiotics for systemic use in all countries/regions. The results also indicate that the provision of medicines for common chronic conditions was mostly resilient to challenges faced during the pandemic. However, there were notable differences between the countries/regions for some therapeutic areas.
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| 5. |
- Vedovato, Laura B., et al.
(författare)
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Ancient fires enhance Amazon forest drought resistance
- 2023
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 2624-893X. ; 6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Drought and fire reduce productivity and increase tree mortality in tropical forests. Fires also produce pyrogenic carbon (PyC), which persists in situ for centuries to millennia, and represents a legacy of past fires, potentially improving soil fertility and water holding capacity and selecting for the survival and recruitment of certain tree life-history (or successional) strategies. We investigated whether PyC is correlated with physicochemical soil properties, wood density, aboveground carbon (AGC) dynamics and forest resistance to severe drought. To achieve our aim, we used an Amazon-wide, long-term plot network, in forests without known recent fires, integrating site-specific measures of forest dynamics, soil properties and a unique soil PyC concentration database. We found that forests with higher concentrations of soil PyC had both higher soil fertility and lower wood density. Soil PyC was not associated with AGC dynamics in non-drought years. However, during extreme drought events (10% driest years), forests with higher concentrations of soil PyC experienced lower reductions in AGC gains (woody growth and recruitment), with this drought-immunizing effect increasing with drought severity. Forests with a legacy of ancient fires are therefore more likely to continue to grow and recruit under increased drought severity. Forests with high soil PyC concentrations (third quartile) had 3.8% greater AGC gains under mean drought, but 33.7% greater under the most extreme drought than forests with low soil PyC concentrations (first quartile), offsetting losses of up to 0.68 Mg C ha–1yr–1 of AGC under extreme drought events. This suggests that ancient fires have legacy effects on current forest dynamics, by altering soil fertility and favoring tree species capable of continued growth and recruitment during droughts. Therefore, mature forest that experienced fires centuries or millennia ago may have greater resistance to current short-term droughts.
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| 6. |
- Lecuona, O., et al.
(författare)
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A Network Analysis of the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale–Short-Form (IGDS9-SF) : An Intercontinental Large-Scale Study
- 2024
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Ingår i: International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. - : Springer. - 1557-1874 .- 1557-1882.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The present study aimed to use a novel method (i.e., network analysis) to examine if the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale–Short-Form (IGDS9-SF) has its unidimensional structure supported across different subgroups, including gender groups, continent groups, and age groups. Participants from five continents (n = 545 in Africa; n = 27,910 in Americas; n = 4640 in Asia; n = 88,835 in Europe; and n = 1633 in Oceania) completed the IGDS9-SF. The IGDS9-SF items showed a positively correlated network with moderate-to-high predictability (mean of R2 = 0.338, SD = 0.068). Moreover, the network analysis results suggested that the IGDS9-SF is very likely to have a one-factor model. This one-factor model was further found to be invariant across gender groups (men vs. women), continent groups (Africa, Americas, Asian, Europe, and Oceania), and age groups (minor aged under 18 years, young adults aged between 18 and 30 years, and adults aged 30 years or above).
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| 7. |
- Oldeman, Arthur M., et al.
(författare)
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Reduced El Niño variability in the mid-Pliocene according to the PlioMIP2 ensemble
- 2021
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Ingår i: Climate of the Past. - : Copernicus GmbH. - 1814-9324 .- 1814-9332. ; 17:6, s. 2427-2450
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The mid-Pliocene warm period (3.264–3.025 Ma) is the most recent geological period during which atmospheric CO2 levels were similar to recent historical values (∼400 ppm). Several proxy reconstructions for the mid-Pliocene show highly reduced zonal sea surface temperature (SST) gradients in the tropical Pacific Ocean, indicating an El Niño-like mean state. However, past modelling studies do not show these highly reduced gradients. Efforts to understand mid-Pliocene climate dynamics have led to the Pliocene Model Intercomparison Project (PlioMIP). Results from the first phase (PlioMIP1) showed clear El Niño variability (albeit significantly reduced) and did not show the greatly reduced time-mean zonal SST gradient suggested by some of the proxies.In this work, we study El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability in the PlioMIP2 ensemble, which consists of additional global coupled climate models and updated boundary conditions compared to PlioMIP1. We quantify ENSO amplitude, period, spatial structure and “flavour”, as well as the tropical Pacific annual mean state in mid-Pliocene and pre-industrial simulations. Results show a reduced ENSO amplitude in the model-ensemble mean (−24 %) with respect to the pre-industrial, with 15 out of 17 individual models showing such a reduction. Furthermore, the spectral power of this variability considerably decreases in the 3–4-year band. The spatial structure of the dominant empirical orthogonal function shows no particular change in the patterns of tropical Pacific variability in the model-ensemble mean, compared to the pre-industrial. Although the time-mean zonal SST gradient in the equatorial Pacific decreases for 14 out of 17 models (0.2 ∘C reduction in the ensemble mean), there does not seem to be a correlation with the decrease in ENSO amplitude. The models showing the most “El Niño-like” mean state changes show a similar ENSO amplitude to that in the pre-industrial reference, while models showing more “La Niña-like” mean state changes generally show a large reduction in ENSO variability. The PlioMIP2 results show a reasonable agreement with both time-mean proxies indicating a reduced zonal SST gradient and reconstructions indicating a reduced, or similar, ENSO variability.
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| 8. |
- Pontes, Gabriel M., et al.
(författare)
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Mid-Pliocene El Niño/Southern Oscillation suppressed by Pacific intertropical convergence zone shift
- 2022
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Ingår i: Nature Geoscience. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1752-0894 .- 1752-0908. ; 15:9, s. 726-734
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the dominant driver of year-to-year climate variability in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, impacts climate pattern across the globe. However, the response of the ENSO system to past and potential future temperature increases is not fully understood. Here we investigate ENSO variability in the warmer climate of the mid-Pliocene (~3.0–3.3 Ma), when surface temperatures were ~2–3 °C above modern values, in a large ensemble of climate models—the Pliocene Model Intercomparison Project. We show that the ensemble consistently suggests a weakening of ENSO variability, with a mean reduction of 25% (±16%). We further show that shifts in the equatorial Pacific mean state cannot fully explain these changes. Instead, ENSO was suppressed by a series of off-equatorial processes triggered by a northward displacement of the Pacific intertropical convergence zone: weakened convective feedback and intensified Southern Hemisphere circulation, which inhibit various processes that initiate ENSO. The connection between the climatological intertropical convergence zone position and ENSO we find in the past is expected to operate in our warming world with important ramifications for ENSO variability.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Veljkovic, Milan, et al.
(författare)
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High-strength tower in steel for wind turbines (Histwin) : Final report
- 2012
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Rapport (refereegranskat)abstract
- Innovative solutions for assembling joints of a tubular tower for wind turbines were studied and the project provides a background for design. This solution is simpler to produce and 80 % less expensive than traditional flange connection. Our feasibility study at the production plant indicates that the towers would be easy to assemble in situ. In addition to the direct cost savings due to the technical simplicity of the solution, the higher fatigue endurance than that of the flange connection is experimentally established. Further reduction of costs due to optimal use of higher-strength steel grades, especially in the bottom segments of the tower where the stiffening of the door opening is costly, is shown in the report. The total reduction of the costs for tower is estimated at about 10–15 % compared to the traditional tower. The project objectives are achieved in following sequences. • Experimental activities of the friction connection: small-scale tests to establish resistance of the friction connection for a variety of faying surfaces and bolt types, accompanying testing to ensure realistic input data for FEA, long-term testing to establish loss of pretension forces during the lifetime and fatigue tests.• Bending test of the friction and flange connection in a down-scaled tower. • Feasibility of production of the tower segments in the laboratory and at the production plant. • Monitoring of the existing tower to access a stress variation during the operation. • FEA analysis of experimental results and a complete case study of the monitored tower. Numerical examples for design of the friction connection are given for the sake of illustration and to encourage use of the new connection
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| 15. |
- Lin, C. -Y, et al.
(författare)
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Psychometric properties of the Persian Gaming Disorder Test and relationships with psychological distress and insomnia in adolescents
- 2023
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Ingår i: BMC Psychology. - : BioMed Central (BMC). - 2050-7283. ; 11:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Gaming Disorder (GD) was recently included by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a psychiatric condition in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) and is a concern worldwide, including in Iran. Thus, based on the ICD-11 criteria, a Persian version of the Gaming Disorder Test (GDT) was developed to facilitate assessment of GD. Methods: The present study used classical test theory and Rasch analysis to examine the psychometric properties of the Persian GDT. Iranian adolescents (n = 3837; 2171 [56.6%] males; mean [SD] age = 16.02 [1.4] years) completed the GDT and other instruments assessing disordered gaming, psychological distress, and insomnia. Results: Overall, the psychometric properties of the Persian GDT were satisfactory based on classical test theory (i.e., confirmatory factor analysis corroborated the unidimensional structure of GDT) and Rasch analysis (i.e., fit statistics suggested that all items were embedded in the concept of GD). Moreover, the Persian GDT was found to be sex-invariant, displaying no items with substantial differential item functioning across sexes. Additionally, it was found that GD mediated associations between time spent gaming and measures of psychological distress and insomnia. Conclusion: The Persian GDT is a convenient and short instrument for assessing GD among Iranian adolescents. The mediating roles of GD in the associations between time spent gaming and psychological distress and between time spent gaming and insomnia suggest that targeting features of GD may reduce psychological distress and improve sleep for Iranian adolescents.
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| 16. |
- Pontes, Gina B, et al.
(författare)
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Metasternal gland volatiles and sexual communication in the triatomine bug, Rhodnius prolixus.
- 2008
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Ingår i: Journal of Chemical Ecology. - : Springer. - 0098-0331 .- 1573-1561. ; 34:4, s. 450-457
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Twelve compounds produced by the metasternal glands (MGs) of the triatomine bug Rhodnius prolixus were identified by solid phase microextraction (SPME) combined with coupled gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) using achiral and chiral columns. All substances were ketones or alcohols, and the same compound profile was found in the secretions produced by either sex. The most abundant compounds were 2-methyl-3-buten-2-ol, (2S)-pentanol, (3E)-2-methyl-3-penten-2-ol, and (2R/2S)-4-methyl-3-penten-2-ol. Emission of these compounds was detected more frequently from females than males, and females released them more frequently during the early hours of the scotophase, the period when sexual activity in this species is at its peak. These compounds were also detected in the headspace above mating pairs. Finally, the occlusion of the MG orifices of male or female bugs with paraffin resulted in a significant decrease in copulation frequency compared to sham-operated insects. Together, these data suggest that the MG secretions of R. prolixus may be involved in sexual communication.
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| 17. |
- Pontes, Gabriel M., et al.
(författare)
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Drier tropical and subtropical Southern Hemisphere in the mid-Pliocene Warm Period
- 2020
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Ingår i: Scientific Reports. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2045-2322. ; 10:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Thermodynamic arguments imply that global mean rainfall increases in a warmer atmosphere; however, dynamical effects may result in more significant diversity of regional precipitation change. Here we investigate rainfall changes in the mid-Pliocene Warm Period (similar to 3 Ma), a time when temperatures were 2-3 degrees C warmer than the pre-industrial era, using output from the Pliocene Model Intercomparison Projects phases 1 and 2 and sensitivity climate model experiments. In the Mid-Pliocene simulations, the higher rates of warming in the northern hemisphere create an interhemispheric temperature gradient that enhances the southward cross-equatorial energy flux by up to 48%. This intensified energy flux reorganizes the atmospheric circulation leading to a northward shift of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone and a weakened and poleward displaced Southern Hemisphere Subtropical Convergences Zones. These changes result in drier-than-normal Southern Hemisphere tropics and subtropics. The evaluation of the mid-Pliocene adds a constraint to possible future warmer scenarios associated with differing rates of warming between hemispheres.
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| 18. |
- van der Voort, Tim, et al.
(författare)
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Appropriate antibiotic prescribing among final-year medical students in Europe
- 2019
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Ingår i: International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents. - : ELSEVIER. - 0924-8579 .- 1872-7913. ; 54:3, s. 375-379
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Little is known about undergraduate education on antibiotic prescribing in Europe and even less about the antibiotic prescribing skills of nearly-graduated medical students. This study aimed to evaluate the antibiotic prescribing skills of final-year medical students across Europe and the education they received during medical training. In a cross-sectional study, final-year medical students from 17 medical schools in 15 European countries were asked to prescribe for two written case reports of infectious diseases (acute bronchitis and community-acquired pneumonia). The appropriateness of antimicrobial therapy was determined using a scoring form based on local guidelines. Teachers from each medical school were asked to complete a standardised questionnaire about the teaching and assessment of undergraduate education on antibiotic use. In total, 856 final-year medical students (95.6%) completed the assessment and 16 teachers (94.1%) completed the questionnaire. Overall, 52.7% (range 26-83%) of the 1.683 therapies prescribed were considered appropriate. The mean number of contact hours for undergraduate education on antimicrobials was 25.6 (range 2-90). Differences in education styles were found to have a significant impact on students performance, with a problem-based learning style being associated with more appropriate antimicrobial prescribing than a traditional learning style (46.0% vs. 22.9%; P amp;lt; 0.01). Although there are differences between medical schools, final-year medical students in Europe lack prescribing skills for two common infectious diseases, possibly because of inadequate undergraduate education on antibiotic use and general prescribing. To improve students skills, interactive teaching methods such as prescribing for simulated and real patients should be used. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. and International Society of Chemotherapy. All rights reserved.
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