Organoids as a biomarker for personalized treatment in metastatic colorectal cancer: drug screen optimization and correlation with patient response.

Background: The inability to predict treatment response of colorectal cancer patients results in unnecessary toxicity, decreased efficacy and survival. Response testing on patient-derived organoids (PDOs) is a promising biomarker for treatment efficacy. The aim of this study is to optimize PDO drug screening methods for correlation with patient response and explore the potential to predict responses to standard chemotherapies.

Smoking and colorectal neoplasia in patients with inflammatory bowel disease: Dose-effect relationship.

Background And Aims: Prior studies on the effect of smoking on the risk of colitis-associated colorectal neoplasia (CRN) have reported conflicting results. We aimed to further elucidate the association between smoking, including possible dose-effects, and the development of colorectal neoplasia in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Methods: We performed a prospective multicenter cohort study including patients with colonic IBD enrolled in a surveillance program in four academic hospitals between 2011 and 2021.

Negative controls: Concepts and caveats.

Unmeasured confounding is a well-known obstacle in causal inference. In recent years, negative controls have received increasing attention as a important tool to address concerns about the problem. The literature on the topic has expanded rapidly and several authors have advocated the more routine use of negative controls in epidemiological practice.

Patient-derived head and neck cancer organoids allow treatment stratification and serve as a tool for biomarker validation and identification.

Background: Organoids are in vitro three-dimensional structures that can be grown from patient tissue. Head and neck cancer (HNC) is a collective term used for multiple tumor types including squamous cell carcinomas and salivary gland adenocarcinomas.

Methods: Organoids were established from HNC patient tumor tissue and characterized using immunohistochemistry and DNA sequencing.

Mobile health vs. standard care after cardiac surgery: results of The Box 2.0 study.

Aims: Postoperative atrial fibrillation (POAF) is a common complication of cardiac surgery, yet difficult to detect in ambulatory patients. The primary aim of this study is to investigate the effect of a mobile health (mHealth) intervention on POAF detection after cardiac surgery.

Methods And Results: We performed an observational cohort study among 730 adult patients who underwent cardiac surgery at a tertiary care hospital in The Netherlands.

Comprehensive comparison of stroke risk score performance: a systematic review and meta-analysis among 6 267 728 patients with atrial fibrillation.

Aims: Multiple risk scores to predict ischaemic stroke (IS) in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) have been developed. This study aims to systematically review these scores, their validations and updates, assess their methodological quality, and calculate pooled estimates of the predictive performance.

Methods And Results: We searched PubMed and Web of Science for studies developing, validating, or updating risk scores for IS in AF patients.

Bias of time-varying exposure effects due to time-varying covariate measurement strategies.

Purpose: In studies of effects of time-varying drug exposures, adequate adjustment for time-varying covariates is often necessary to properly control for confounding. However, the granularity of the available covariate data may not be sufficiently fine, for example when covariates are measured for participants only when their exposure levels change.

Methods: To illustrate the impact of choices regarding the frequency of measuring time-varying covariates, we simulated data for a large target trial and for large observational studies, varying in covariate measurement design.

Approaches to addressing missing values, measurement error, and confounding in epidemiologic studies.

Objectives: Epidemiologic studies often suffer from incomplete data, measurement error (or misclassification), and confounding. Each of these can cause bias and imprecision in estimates of exposure-outcome relations. We describe and compare statistical approaches that aim to control all three sources of bias simultaneously.

A weighting method for simultaneous adjustment for confounding and joint exposure-outcome misclassifications.

Joint misclassification of exposure and outcome variables can lead to considerable bias in epidemiological studies of causal exposure-outcome effects. In this paper, we present a new maximum likelihood based estimator for marginal causal effects that simultaneously adjusts for confounding and several forms of joint misclassification of the exposure and outcome variables. The proposed method relies on validation data for the construction of weights that account for both sources of bias.

Title, abstract, and keyword searching resulted in poor recovery of articles in systematic reviews of epidemiologic practice.

Objective: Article full texts are often inaccessible via the standard search engines of biomedical literature, such as PubMed and Embase, which are commonly used for systematic reviews. Excluding the full-text bodies from a literature search may result in a small or selective subset of articles being included in the review because of the limited information that is available in only title, abstract, and keywords. This article describes a comparison of search strategies based on a systematic literature review of all articles published in 5 top-ranked epidemiology journals between 2000 and 2017.

Cautionary note: propensity score matching does not account for bias due to censoring.

This article gives a review of the limitations of propensity score matching as a tool for confounding control in the presence of censoring. Using an illustrative simulation study, we emphasize the importance of explicit adjustment for selective loss to follow-up and explain how this may be achieved.

Atmospheric Pressure and Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Rupture: Results From a Time Series Analysis and Case-Crossover Study.

Background: Associations between atmospheric pressure and abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) rupture risk have been reported, but empirical evidence is inconclusive and largely derived from studies that did not account for possible nonlinearity, seasonality, and confounding by temperature.

Methods: Associations between atmospheric pressure and AAA rupture risk were investigated using local meteorological data and a case series of 358 patients admitted to hospital for ruptured AAA during the study period, January 2002 to December 2012. Two analyses were performed-a time series analysis and a case-crossover study.

Does cervical lordosis change after spinal manipulation for non-specific neck pain? A prospective cohort study.

Background: The association between cervical lordosis (sagittal alignment) and neck pain is controversial. Further, it is unclear whether spinal manipulative therapy can change cervical lordosis. This study aimed to determine whether cervical lordosis changes after a course of spinal manipulation for non-specific neck pain.