| 1. |
- Bahadoer, Renu R., et al.
(author)
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One-year excess mortality and treatment in surgically treated patients with colorectal cancer : A EURECCA European comparison
- 2021
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In: European Journal of Surgical Oncology. - : Elsevier. - 0748-7983 .- 1532-2157. ; 47:7, s. 1651-1660
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Background: Mortality in the first postoperative year represents an accurate reflection of the perioperative risk after colorectal cancer surgery. This research compares one-year mortality after surgery divided into three age-categories (18-64, 65-74, ≥75 years), focusing on time trends and comparing treatment strategies.Material: Population-based data of all patients diagnosed and treated surgically for stage I-III primary colorectal cancer from 2007 to 2016, were collected from Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Stratified for age-category and stage, treatment was evaluated, and 30-day, one-year and one-year excess mortality were calculated for colon and rectal cancer separately. Results were evaluated over two-year time periods.Results: Data of 206,024 patients were analysed. Postoperative 30-day and one-year mortality reduced significantly over time in all countries and age-categories. Within the oldest age category, in 2015–2016, one-year excess mortality varied from 9% in Belgium to 4% in Sweden for colon cancer and, from 9% in Belgium to 3% in the other countries for rectal cancer. With increasing age, patients were less likely to receive additional therapy besides surgery. In Belgium, colon cancer patients were more often treated with adjuvant chemotherapy (p < 0.001). For neoadjuvant treatment of rectal cancer, patients in Belgium and Norway were mostly treated with chemoradiotherapy. In the Netherlands and Sweden, radiotherapy alone was preferred (p < 0.001).Conclusions: Despite improvement over time in all countries and age-categories, substantial variation exists in one-year postoperative mortality. Differences in one-year excess postoperative mortality could be due to differences in treatment strategies, highlighting the consequences of under- and over-treatment on cancer survival.
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| 2. |
- Brütt, Katharina, et al.
(author)
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Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
- 2023
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In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS. - : National Academy of Sciences. - 1091-6490 .- 0027-8424. ; 120:23
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity-variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity-estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs-indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.
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| 3. |
- Jansen, Iris E, et al.
(author)
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Genome-wide meta-analysis for Alzheimer's disease cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers.
- 2022
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In: Acta neuropathologica. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1432-0533 .- 0001-6322. ; 144:5, s. 821-842
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Amyloid-beta 42 (Aβ42) and phosphorylated tau (pTau) levels in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) reflect core features of the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) more directly than clinical diagnosis. Initiated by the European Alzheimer & Dementia Biobank (EADB), the largest collaborative effort on genetics underlying CSF biomarkers was established, including 31 cohorts with a total of 13,116 individuals (discovery n=8074; replication n=5042 individuals). Besides the APOE locus, novel associations with two other well-established AD risk loci were observed; CR1 was shown a locus for Aβ42 and BIN1 for pTau. GMNC and C16orf95 were further identified as loci for pTau, of which the latter is novel. Clustering methods exploring the influence of all known AD risk loci on the CSF protein levels, revealed 4 biological categories suggesting multiple Aβ42 and pTau related biological pathways involved in the etiology of AD. In functional follow-up analyses, GMNC and C16orf95 both associated with lateral ventricular volume, implying an overlap in genetic etiology for tau levels and brain ventricular volume.
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| 4. |
- Larsen, O. F. A., et al.
(author)
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On the importance of intraindividual variation in nutritional research
- 2020
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In: Beneficial Microbes. - : Wageningen Academic Publishers. - 1876-2883 .- 1876-2891. ; 11:6, s. 511-517
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Nutritional intervention studies, like those with pre- and probiotics, are often hampered by low effect sizes, reducing the power to demonstrate potential efficacy. Here, we perform computer simulations of a hypothetical clinical trial using such an intervention in order to elucidate determining factors that can be influenced in order to optimise the statistical power. Our simulations demonstrate that steering the study population towards a low intraindividual variation dramatically improves statistical power. A more than 10-fold decrease of number-to-treat could be reached. Also, a careful balancing between the number of subjects and measurements per subject, in combination with possible stratification of the subjects into responders and non-responders, based on inherent intraindividual variation, improves the likelihood to reach statistically significant results. Our results also show that traditional dogmas, with respect to clinical trials, i.e. aiming at low interindividual variation and a high number (n) of study participants, should be re-evaluated in favour of reducing intraindividual variation. This reduction in intraindividual variation could be achieved by maintaining a steady lifestyle, including dietary habits among others, within the timeframe of the intervention study.
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