1,720,960 research outputs found
Chronic Refractory Cough: A Disorder of the Brain and the Respiratory System (Editorial)
No full textChronic refractory cough (CRC) increasingly is recognised as a distinct clinical entity; cough that persists despite addressing potential aggravating factors (eg, asthma, acid reflux, angiotensin-converting enzyme medication).1 CRC is associated with considerable physical and psychosocial morbidity, and its underlying mechanisms remain enigmatic.1,2 Peripheral hypersensitivity of airway nerves is very likely of key importance, but the failure of central-located mechanisms, which normally act to regulate the cough reflex, may also have an important role in CRC.3,4No Full Tex
Cough and Pain: More Similar Than at First Glance (Editorial)
No full textCough and pain appear at first glance to be two common, yet very distinct, symptoms. However, further consideration and a review of the current literature rapidly reveals analogies and deeper similarities between the two. At a basic level, both symptoms represent physiologic responses that are protective and adaptive, but in chronic pathologic states, they can become maladaptive.1,2 Chronic pain and chronic cough are both associated with substantial impacts on quality of life and are challenging to manage.2No Full Tex
Chronic cough: is the end nigh?
No full textChronic cough (lasting more than 8 weeks) is a common condition with substantial psychosocial impact. Despite huge efforts following robust guidelines, chronic cough in many patients remains refractory or unexplained (RU-CC). Recent insights support a significant role for cough hypersensitivity in RU-CC, including neuropathophysiological evidence from inhalational cough challenge testing, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and airway nerve biopsy. Along with improved approaches to measuring cough, this knowledge has developed in tandem with repurposing neuromodulator medications, including gabapentin, and evidence for non-pharmacological treatments. Most significantly, there is now a pipeline for novel classes of drugs specifically for chronic cough. The P2X3 receptor antagonist gefapixant is the first such drug to be approved in Europe. However, challenges persist. The field of chronic cough needs more robust epidemiological data, enhanced diagnostic tools, further well-designed clinical trials accounting for the effects of placebo, and treatments with minimal side-effects. Addressing these challenges are novel chronic cough registries, improved International Classification of Diseases (10th revision) coding, genetic testing options and further mechanistic studies. This Viewpoint article discusses these facets and considers how, whilst the end of chronic cough may not be imminent for all patients, the evolving landscape looks increasingly optimistic.Full Tex
Patient-reported assessments of chronic cough in clinical trials: accessory or primary endpoints?
No full textChronic cough is a complex disorder that affects up to 5-10% of the general population. It can be challenging to manage as there are few effective treatments, although several novel antitussives are in clinical development. The endpoints used to assess their efficacy in clinical trials should be optimal; most large clinical trials currently use objective measures as the primary outcome, especially cough frequency. There are strengths in this approach, although taking the view that other measures of chronic cough are less important, including patient-rated cough severity, psychosocial impact and other associated symptoms. Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) explore patients' personal experiences of health and disease, and the effects of particular conditions on their lives. Numerous validated PROMs exist for chronic cough, from simple visual analogue scales, to those that focus on cough hypersensitivity and cough-specific quality of life. Medicine regulators in the European Union (EU) and United States of America (USA) encourage the use of PROMs in clinical trials but have voiced concerns over their content validity, clinically meaningful thresholds for change, and discordance with objective measures. There are recent and ongoing studies to address these limitations. This review discusses currently available PROMs used to assess chronic cough and discusses their potential role as primary outcome measures in clinical trials.Full Tex
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
