Extraction of Unstructured Electronic Health Records to Evaluate Glioblastoma Treatment Patterns.

Purpose: Data on lines of therapy (LOTs) for cancer treatment are important for clinical oncology research, but LOTs are not explicitly recorded in electronic health records (EHRs). We present an efficient approach for clinical data abstraction and a flexible algorithm to derive LOTs from EHR-based medication data on patients with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM).

Methods: Nonclinicians were trained to abstract the diagnosis of GBM from EHRs, and their accuracy was compared with abstraction performed by clinicians.

Getting what you pay for: impact of copayments on physical therapy and opioid initiation, timing, and continuation for newly diagnosed low back pain.

Background Context: Physical therapy (PT) is an important component of low back pain (LBP) management. Despite established guidelines, heterogeneity in medical management remains common.

Purpose: We sought to understand how copayments impact timing and utilization of PT in newly diagnosed LBP.

Para-infectious brain injury in COVID-19 persists at follow-up despite attenuated cytokine and autoantibody responses.

To understand neurological complications of COVID-19 better both acutely and for recovery, we measured markers of brain injury, inflammatory mediators, and autoantibodies in 203 hospitalised participants; 111 with acute sera (1-11 days post-admission) and 92 convalescent sera (56 with COVID-19-associated neurological diagnoses). Here we show that compared to 60 uninfected controls, tTau, GFAP, NfL, and UCH-L1 are increased with COVID-19 infection at acute timepoints and NfL and GFAP are significantly higher in participants with neurological complications. Inflammatory mediators (IL-6, IL-12p40, HGF, M-CSF, CCL2, and IL-1RA) are associated with both altered consciousness and markers of brain injury.

Selective prediction for extracting unstructured clinical data.

Objective: While there are currently approaches to handle unstructured clinical data, such as manual abstraction and structured proxy variables, these methods may be time-consuming, not scalable, and imprecise. This article aims to determine whether selective prediction, which gives a model the option to abstain from generating a prediction, can improve the accuracy and efficiency of unstructured clinical data abstraction.

Materials And Methods: We trained selective classifiers (logistic regression, random forest, support vector machine) to extract 5 variables from clinical notes: depression (n = 1563), glioblastoma (GBM, n = 659), rectal adenocarcinoma (DRA, n = 601), and abdominoperineal resection (APR, n = 601) and low anterior resection (LAR, n = 601) of adenocarcinoma.

Translational Models in Glioma Immunotherapy Research.

Immunotherapy is a promising therapeutic domain for the treatment of gliomas. However, clinical trials of various immunotherapeutic modalities have not yielded significant improvements in patient survival. Preclinical models for glioma research should faithfully represent clinically observed features regarding glioma behavior, mutational load, tumor interactions with stromal cells, and immunosuppressive mechanisms.

Opioid Usage in Lumbar Disc Herniation Patients with Nonsurgical, Early Surgical, and Late Surgical Treatments.

Objective: To assess opioid usage in surgical and nonsurgical patients with lumbar disc herniation receiving different treatments and timing of treatments.

Methods: Individuals with newly diagnosed lumbar intervertebral disc herniation without myelopathy were queried from a health claims database. Patients were categorized into 3 cohorts: nonsurgical, early surgery, and late surgery.

Immunometabolism, a new therapeutic development for immunotherapies of high-grade gliomas: a narrative review.

Background And Objective: Immunotherapy has yielded significant improvements in survival for many cancer types, but its impact on glioblastoma (GBM) has been relatively muted. There is a growing interest in understanding the role of cancer metabolism and its role in tumor growth and therapeutic response. Thus, it is equally important to consider the clinical implications of immune cell metabolism on cancer progression and implications for therapeutic development.

Brain injury in COVID-19 is associated with dysregulated innate and adaptive immune responses.

COVID-19 is associated with neurological complications including stroke, delirium and encephalitis. Furthermore, a post-viral syndrome dominated by neuropsychiatric symptoms is common, and is seemingly unrelated to COVID-19 severity. The true frequency and underlying mechanisms of neurological injury are unknown, but exaggerated host inflammatory responses appear to be a key driver of COVID-19 severity.

Health Care Resource Utilization in Management of Opioid-Naive Patients With Newly Diagnosed Neck Pain.

Importance: Research has uncovered heterogeneity and inefficiencies in the management of idiopathic low back pain, but few studies have examined longitudinal care patterns following newly diagnosed neck pain.

Objective: To understand health care utilization in patients with new-onset idiopathic neck pain.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cross-sectional study used nationally sourced longitudinal data from the IBM Watson Health MarketScan claims database (2007-2016).

Profiling Real-Time Aroma from Green Tea Infusion during Brewing.

Aroma substances are the most crucial criteria for the sensory evaluation of tea quality, and also key attractors influencing consumers to make the decision for purchasing tea. Understanding the aromatic properties of tea infusion during different brewing time is crucial to control the tea aromatic quality. Here, headspace and direct immersion solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME and DI-SPME), coupled with GC-MS, were employed to investigate the impact of brewing time on the changes of the volatile features of green tea infusion.