1,721,241 research outputs found
The International Survey of Acute Coronary Syndromes in Transitional Countries (ISACS-TC): 2010–2015
No full textBackground Central and East European (CEE) patients with acute coronary syndromes (ACS) have worse outcomes than US and West European patients, including higher mortality rates. The aim of the International Survey of Acute Coronary Syndrome in Transitional Countries (ISACS-TC) was to define patient and treatment characteristics in order to examine whether differences in clinical and ethnic factors or healthcare organization may mediate the observed disparities in outcomes. Methods and results Between October 2010 and December 2015, 14,326 patients with ACS were prospectively enrolled. Of these patients 8650 (60%) had ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). Patients were enrolled from 41 centers in 12 countries in Europe. Standardized electronic case report forms were completed by trained study coordinators, and included fields relating to demographic factors, medical history and processes of inpatient care, supplemented with a detailed baseline interview on time delays to hospital admission. Blood sampling for genetic data were obtained at hospital discharge. Prospective individual patient follow-up was carried out with a focus on patient health (symptoms) and vital status. Thirty day follow-up was 100% complete. Difficulties were found for recruitment of patients at 6 months. Publications are available at ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT01218776. Conclusions ISACS-TC is a novel ACS registry with detailed information on CEE patients' clinical, demographic, treatment, and metabolic characteristics and health status. The concurrent enrollment of patients from some European Union founding members provides greater generalizability of the data. ISACS-TC may help to make an additional improvement in clinical outcomes of countries with economy in transition
Pathophysiology of acute coronary syndromes in the elderly
No full textElderly patients represent an important proportion of the acute coronary syndrome (ACS) population. Furthermore, this group of ACS patients is continuously growing because of the progressive ageing of the population. The ageing process implies marked changes in patient physiology that directly impact in their risk. However, there is a differential distribution in the risk of elderly patients, revealing the existence of a discrepancy between the chronological and the "biological age". This discrepancy has highlighted the need of performing individual risk assessment in order to identify those patients at higher risk. In addition, the lack of representation of elderly patients in clinical trials leads to the underutilization of evidence-based therapies in this group of patients. All these factors influence not only the high prevalence of ACS presentation in the elderly but also their worse prognosis after suffering an ischaemic event. Herein we will explore the pathophysiological mechanisms behind the age-related changes at the vascular and the cardiac level that explain the high risk of elderly subjects of suffering ACS and their worse prognosis
Bioinformatic platforms for clinical stratification of natural history of atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases
No full textAlthough bioinformatic methods gained a lot of attention in the latest years, their use in real-world studies for primary and secondary prevention of atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases (ASCVD) is still lacking. Bioinformatic resources have been applied to thousands of individuals from the Framingham Heart Study as well as health care-associated biobanks such as the UK Biobank, the Million Veteran Program, and the CARDIoGRAMplusC4D Consortium and randomized controlled trials (i.e. ODYSSEY, FOURIER, ASPREE, and PREDIMED). These studies contributed to the development of polygenic risk scores (PRS), which emerged as novel potent genetic-oriented tools, able to calculate the individual risk of ASCVD and to predict the individual response to therapies such as statins and proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 inhibitor. ASCVD are the first cause of death around the world including coronary heart disease (CHD), peripheral artery disease, and stroke. To achieve the goal of precision medicine and personalized therapy, advanced bioinformatic platforms are set to link clinically useful indices to heterogeneous molecular data, mainly epigenomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and proteomics. The DIANA study found that differential methylation of ABCA1, TCF7, PDGFA, and PRKCZ significantly discriminated patients with acute coronary syndrome from healthy subjects and their expression levels positively associated with CK-MB serum concentrations. The ARIC Study revealed several plasma proteins, acting or not in lipid metabolism, with a potential role in determining the different pleiotropic effects of statins in each subject. The implementation of molecular high-throughput studies and bioinformatic techniques into traditional cardiovascular risk prediction scores is emerging as a more accurate practice to stratify patients earlier in life and to favour timely and tailored risk reduction strategies. Of note, radiogenomics aims to combine imaging features extracted for instance by coronary computed tomography angiography and molecular biomarkers to create CHD diagnostic algorithms useful to characterize atherosclerotic lesions and myocardial abnormalities. The current view is that such platforms could be of clinical value for prevention, risk stratification, and treatment of ASCVD
Up-regulation of reverse cholesterol transport key players and rescue from global inflammation by ApoA-I Milano
Full text linkManagement of no-reflow
No full textDespite considerable progress in percutaneous coronary interventions, the phenomenon of coronary no-reflow (NR) still represents a serious problem. It occurs when cardiac tissue fails to perfuse normally despite opening of the occluded vessel. The consequences of NR include infarct expansion, early congestive heart failure, ventricular arrhythmias and adverse left ventricular remodeling. All the actions that improve myocardial tissue perfusion should convert into a better prognosis and a better clinical outcome. The pathophysiology of NR is still not fully elucidated, and several mechanisms are proposed, with microvascular obstruction as the leading one. Despite considerable progress in the identification of the risks to NR development, no specific therapies have been developed so far. In this review, pharmacological and nonpharmacological interventions that might improve coronary blood flow are discussed
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
- …
