1,720,988 research outputs found
Chronic disease in the eldery: back to the future of internal medicine
No full textElderly people are often affected by two or more chronic diseases, more frequently cardiovascular
diseases, chronic respiratory diseases, metabolic syndrome and cancer. These
most frequent chronic diseases share largely preventable risk factors, the most important
being smoking and obesity, and may be linked to chronic systemic inflammation. Coexisting
chronic diseases affect the course of the primary disease and alter the efficacy
and safety of its management. Current clinical practice is dominated by the "singledisease"
approach, which has major limitations, and there is increasing evidence that a
patient-oriented approach that takes into account the several co-existing components of
chronic disease is required. This "change of concept" implies the need for medical specialists
to extend their expertise to broader diagnostic and treatment approaches that
are traditionally the purview of internal medicine. This new approach also requires a different
approach to clinical research and teaching, followed by extensive rewriting of
medical textbooks and remodelling of teaching curricula to reflect the complexity of the
patient affected by chronic diseases
Endogenous blood maximal interferon-gamma production may predict response to interferon-gamma 1beta treatment in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
No full textBACKGROUND:Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is an untreatable lung disorder with a mean survival of 3 years after diagnosis. Treatment with interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) 1beta has been reported to significantly improve lung function and arterial oxygen saturation in a first randomized controlled trial; unexpectedly, these findings have not been confirmed in a subsequent large placebo-controlled randomized study. Another larger placebo-controlled randomized trial has been stopped because data analyzed at interim analysis excluded the possibility that treatment with IFN-gamma 1beta would cause a significant reduction in the risk of death.METHODS:Seven Italian male patients diagnosed with IPF were treated with IFN-gamma 1beta (200 microg/die subcutaneously three times a week), accordingly to the indications of the Italian Drug Agency. Based on available studies the response to treatment was pre-defined as changes in either lung function (FVC and DLCO) or oxygen arterial saturation. All patients consented to provide a peripheral blood sample for endogenous IFN-gamma production measurement with the ELISpot assay before treatment and 6 months thereafter.RESULTS:Four of 7 patients improved or stabilized their lung function after 6 months treatment. Using the ELISpot assay to quantify the maximal production of endogenous IFN-gamma on peripheral blood samples, these 4 patients had a significantly higher endogenous IFN-gamma production before therapy, as compared to the 3 patients who deteriorated (91.3 +/- 49.6 vs. 277.8 +/- 34.2 spot forming cells, p = 0.023). No significant differences were observed after 6 months of treatment.DISCUSSION:These preliminary results suggest that some IPF patients might benefit from treatment with IFN-gamma 1beta and may help to interpret the results of large randomized trials, suggesting that individual susceptibility could determine clinical response to treatment
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
Late asthmatic reactions to toluene-diisocyanate are associated wlth airway inflammation.
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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
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