1,720,994 research outputs found
Echocardiography of the right heart in pulmonary arterial hypertension. Insights from the ULTRA RIGHT VALUE study
Full text linkAims: In pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), outcomes are determined by right ventricular (RV) functional adaption to increased afterload. Echocardiography is readily available for bedside RV evaluation; however, it remains poorly implemented in guideline-directed clinical decision-making due to evidence quality concerns not meeting regulatory standards.
Methods and Results: This multicenter study gathered echocardiographic data with centralized reading from 401 patients with prevalent PAH. Clinical data—including World Health Organization (WHO) functional class (FC), 6-minute walk distance (6MWD), brain natriuretic peptide (BNP)/NT-pro-BNP, invasive hemodynamics, the European Society of Cardiology (ESC)/European Respiratory Society (ERS) guidelines-derived 4-strata score, and the United States REVEAL 2.0 score—were also collected. The primary outcome was a composite of all-cause mortality and heart failure hospitalizations. The secondary outcome was the maintenance or achievement of low-risk status according to ESC/ERS and REVEAL 2.0
at the latest follow-up.
Echocardiographic measurements revealed varying degrees of right heart dilation, assessed through right atrial and RV areas, along with altered indices of systolic function, including tricuspid annular plane systolic excursion (TAPSE), fractional area change, 2D strain, and estimates of RV to pulmonary artery (PA) coupling, obtained by relating RV systolic function metrics to systolic PA pressure (sPAP). All measurements were feasible.
Right heart dimensions and function metrics, particularly the TAPSE/sPAP ratio, correlated with WHO functional class, 6-minute walk distance, BNP/NT-pro-BNP levels, invasive hemodynamics, and both ESC/ERS and REVEAL 2.0 scores. Echocardiographic assessments were significantly associated with the composite endpoint of mortality and heart failure hospitalization and were predictive of maintaining or achieving low-risk status at follow-up. Echocardiography provided additional discriminative power, enhancing both ESC/ERS and REVEAL 2.0 scores, especially when a key risk score variable was missing.
Conclusions: This quality-controlled data from a network of PAH referral centers validates the associations between echocardiographic and pulmonary hemodynamic parameters and offers strong evidence for the prognostic value of morphological and functional echocardiographic variables in PAH. Our findings support the integration of echocardiographic assessments into existing risk stratification models for PAH patients
Role of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance to Assess Cardiovascular Inflammation
No full textCardiovascular inflammatory diseases still represent a challenge for physicians. Inflammatory cardiomyopathy, pericarditis, and large vessels vasculitis can clinically mimic a wide spectrum of diseases. While the underlying etiologies are varied, the common physio-pathological process is characterized by vasodilation, exudation, leukocytes infiltration, cell damage, and fibrosis. Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) allows the visualization of some of these diagnostic targets. CMR provides not only morphological and functional assessment but also tissue catheterization revealing edema, hyperemia, tissue injury, and reparative fibrosis through T2 weighted images, early and late gadolinium enhancement, and parametric mapping techniques. Recent developments showed the role of CMR in the identification of ongoing inflammation also in other CV diseases like myocardial infarction, atherosclerosis, arrhythmogenic and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Future developments of CMR, aiming at the specific assessment of immune cell infiltration, will give deeper insight into cardiovascular inflammatory diseases
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
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
The role of cardiovascular magnetic resonance in the screening before the return-to-play of elite athletes after COVID-19: utility o futility?
No full text: Recent reports based on cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) showed a wide range of prevalence of inflammatory heart diseases in COVID-19 convalescent athletes ranging from 0.4 up to 15%. These observations had an important impact in the field of sport cardiology opening an intense debate around the best possible screening strategy before the return-to-play. The diagnostic yield of CMR for detecting acute inflammatory disease is undebatable. However, the opportunity to use it in the screening protocol after COVID-19 has been questioned. Current evidence does not seem to support the routine use of CMR and the prescription of CMR should be based upon clinical indication
- …
