The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed substantial coverage and quality gaps in existing international and national statistical monitoring systems. It is striking that obtaining timely, accurate, and comparable across countries data in order to adequately respond to unexpected epidemiological threats is very challenging. The most robust and reliable ap...
Background Regularly updated data on stroke and its pathological types, including data on their incidence, prevalence, mortality, disability, risk factors, and epidemiological trends, are important for evidence-based stroke care planning and resource allocation. The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) aims to provide a...
Published in Genus
The COVID-19 outbreak has called for renewed attention to the need for sound statistical analyses to monitor mortality patterns and trends over time. Excess mortality has been suggested as the most appropriate indicator to measure the overall burden of the pandemic in terms of mortality. As such, excess mortality has received considerable interest ...
Background Providing sufficient numbers of human resources for health is essential for effective and accessible health services. Between 2013 and 2018, the Brazilian Ministry of Health implemented the Programa Mais Médicos (PMM) (More Doctors Programme) to increase the supply of primary care doctors in underserved areas of the country. This study i...
BACKGROUND: There are many clinical prediction models (CPMs) available to inform treatment decisions for patients with cardiovascular disease. However, the extent to which they have been externally tested, and how well they generally perform has not been broadly evaluated. METHODS: A SCOPUS citation search was run on March 22, 2017 to identify exte...
Published in Journal of critical care
The characteristics and impact of bacteremia have not been widely investigated in immunocompromised patients with acute respiratory failure (ARF). We performed a secondary analysis of a prospective cohort of immunocompromised patients with ARF (EFRAIM study). After exclusion of blood cultures positive for coagulase negative Staphylococci, we compar...
Background: Infective endocarditis (IE) is challenging to manage in the COVID-19 lockdown climate, in part given its reliance on echocardiography for diagnosis and management, and the associated virus transmission risks to patients and healthcare workers. This study assesses utilisation of the endocarditis team (ET) in limiting routine echocardiogr...
The interaction between eating disorders and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) remains unexplored, especially with regards to binge-eating disorder (BED). Our team conducted a service evaluation project in order to assess risk factors for the presence of BED among patients with NAFLD and the impact of BED on body mass composition. The overa...
Observational studies report a reduction of COPD exacerbations in patients treated with beta-blockers. In contrast, the Beta-Blockers for the Prevention of Acute Exacerbations of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (BLOCK COPD) randomised controlled trial which excluded COPD patients with cardiovascular conditions showed an increase in COPD exace...
Published in BMC Geriatrics
BackgroundOlder adults at a higher risk of adverse outcomes and mortality if they get infected with Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS- CoV-2). These undesired outcomes are because ageing is associated with other conditions like multimorbidity, frailty and disability. This paper describes the impact of frailty on coronavirus dise...
