Medical humanization

The burden of chronic kidney disease is increasing throughout New Zealand, resulting in growing strain on patients, families and the healthcare system. The population of South Auckland is the most diverse in New Zealand and it is particularly vulnerable to the effects of chronic kidney disease due its demography and its many communities that endure significant hardships. This article explores the prevailing challenges identified by renal physicians and nurse specialists over 35 years of caring for patients with chronic kidney disease in South Auckland...

AIMS: The kaupapa of the Caring for Australians and New Zealanders with Kidney Impairment (CARI) Clinical practice guidelines for management of chronic kidney disease for Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand is to provide whānau-centred and evidence-based recommendations to healthcare systems, healthcare providers and healthcare workers. The guidelines include screening, identification, management and system-level responses to chronic kidney disease (CKD) to deliver best practice care to Māori affected by CKD across community, primary and secondary services...

AIM: Armed conflict remains a tragic feature of the modern world and so it is necessary to continue to study its health impacts. Even the study of historical conflicts is relevant given that certain health impacts are common to most wars e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). METHODS: This study built on a previous quantitative analysis of a randomly selected group of 200 New Zealand veterans from the First World War (WWI). From this sample we selected 10 cases that illustrated particular themes around morbidity impacts...

AIM: Bariatric surgery is an effective tool for weight loss and for improving weight related co-morbidities. Changes in medication usage after a silastic ring laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (SR-LRYGB) compared with laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG) are unknown. METHODS: This was a single-centre, double-blind, randomised controlled trial. Patients were randomised to either SR-LRYGB or LSG. A medication history was obtained at regular follow-up intervals, and mean numbers of prescribed medications were analysed over 5 years...

AIM: Our antimicrobial guidelines (AGs) were changed in 2021 to recommend once-daily ceftriaxone in place of three-times-daily cefuroxime as preferred cephalosporin. This analysis sought to assess the effects of this on incidence of Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI), third-generation cephalosporin-resistant Enterobacterales (3GCR-E) and resource utilisation. METHOD: Before and after analysis of 30-day CDI and 3GCR-E incidence following receipt of cefuroxime/ceftriaxone pre- and post-AG change...

AIM: To report dispensing trends for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in Aotearoa New Zealand, focussing on adults in order to highlight increasing demand for ADHD treatment by adults and to prompt discussion. METHOD: Demographic and dispensing data for ADHD were obtained from the Pharmaceutical Collection between the years 2006 and 2022. This was stratified according to child (<18 years) and adult (≥18 years) populations. Population dispensing rates for methylphenidate and atomoxetine were calculated...

AIM: To better understand the reasons for reduced hospital admissions to a hospital general medicine service during COVID-19 lockdowns. METHODS: A statistical model for admission rates to the General Medicine Service at Wellington Hospital, Aotearoa New Zealand, since 2015 was constructed. This model was used to estimate changes in admission rates for transmissible and non-transmissible diagnoses during and following COVID-19 lockdowns for total admissions and various sub-groups...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The number of papers presenting machine learning (ML) models that are being submitted to and published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research and other JMIR Publications journals has steadily increased. Editors and peer reviewers involved in the review process for such manuscripts often go through multiple review cycles to enhance the quality and completeness of reporting. The use of reporting guidelines or checklists can help ensure consistency in the quality of submitted (and published) scientific manuscripts and, for example, avoid instances of missing information...

BACKGROUND: Reproductive health literacy and menstrual health awareness play a crucial role in ensuring the health and well-being of women and people who menstruate. Further, awareness of one's own menstrual cycle patterns and associated symptoms can help individuals identify and manage conditions of the menstrual cycle such as premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). Digital health products, and specifically menstrual health apps, have the potential to effect positive change due to their scalability and ease of access...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Among infectious etiologies of encephalitis, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) is most common, accounting for ∼15%-40% of adult encephalitis diagnoses. We aim to investigate the association between immune status and HSV encephalitis (HSVE). Using a US Medicaid database of 75.6 million persons, we evaluated the association between HSVE and autoimmune conditions, exposure to immunosuppressive and immunomodulatory medications, and other medical comorbidities...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The limited elasticity and inadequate bonding of hydrogels made from guar gum (GG) significantly hinder their widespread implementation in personalized wearable flexible electronics. In this study, we devise GG-based self-adhesive hydrogels by creating an interpenetrating network of GG cross-linked with acrylic, 4-vinylphenylboronic acid, and Ca2+ . With the leverage of the dynamic interactions (hydrogen bonds, borate ester bonds, and coordination bonds) between -OH in GG and monomers, the hydrogel exhibits a high stretchability of 700%, superior mechanical stress of 110 kPa, and robust adherence to several substrates...

The concept of referred pain is an integral part of the anatomy didactic content taught and discussed in all medical school curricula.  However, this discussion has excluded the topic of phantom limb pain, despite the existence of parallels in neurophysiological explanations between these conditions. This brief viewpoint attempts to reason why phantom limb paresthesia or pain should be included in the fold of refereed pain discussions.

Shape display devices composed of actuation pixels enable dynamic rendering of surface morphological features, which have important roles in virtual reality and metaverse applications. The traditional pin-array solution produces sidestep-like structures between neighboring pins and normally relies on high-density pins to obtain curved surfaces. It remains a challenge to achieve continuous curved surfaces using a small number of actuated units. To address the challenge, we resort to the concept of surface continuity in computational geometry and develop a C0 -continuity shape display device with trichamber fiber-reinforced soft actuators...

Ion transportation via the mixed mechanisms of hydrogels underpins ultrafast biological signal transmission in nature, and its application to the rapid and sensitive sensing detection of human specific ions is of great interest for the field of medical science. However, current research efforts are still unable to achieve transmission results that are comparable to those of bioelectric signals. Herein, 3D interconnected nanochannels based on poly(pyrrole- co -dopamine)/poly(vinyl alcohol) (P(Py- co -DA)/PVA) supernetwork conductive hydrogels are designed and fabricated as stimuli-responsive structures for K+ ions...

Medical image segmentation is a critical application that plays a significant role in clinical research. Despite the fact that many deep neural networks have achieved quite high accuracy in the field of medical image segmentation, there is still a scarcity of annotated labels, making it difficult to train a robust and generalized model. Few-shot learning has the potential to predict new classes that are unseen in training with a few annotations. In this study, a novel few-shot semantic segmentation framework named prototype-based generative adversarial network (PG-Net) is proposed for medical image segmentation without annotations...

INTRODUCTION: The HIV/AIDS continues being a significant global public health priority in the 21st century with social and economic consequences Mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) occurs when an HIV-infected woman passes the virus to her infant and about 90% of these MTCT infections occurs in Africa where children and infants are still dying of HIV. Early definitive diagnosis using Deoxyribonucleic acid reaction of HIV infection in infants is critical to ensuring that HIV-infected infants receive appropriate and timely care and treatment to reduce HIV related morbidity and mortality...

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate the impacts of continuity of care (COC) between patients and multiple providers, i.e., doctors and community pharmacists, on clinical and economic outcomes. METHODS: This is a retrospective cohort study and analyzed Korean national claims data for ambulatory care setting between 2007 and 2018. Patients with dyslipidemia newly diagnosed in 2008 were identified. COC between providers and patients was computed using the continuity of care index (COCI)...

BACKGROUND: One of the largest problems facing the world today is the morbidity and mortality caused by antibiotic resistance in bacterial infections. A major factor in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the irrational use of antibiotics. The objective of this study was to assess the prescribing pattern and cost of antibiotics in two major governmental hospitals in the West Bank of Palestine. METHODS: A retrospective cohort study was conducted on 428 inpatient prescriptions containing antibiotics from two major governmental hospitals, they were evaluated by some drug use indicators...