Publications by authors named "Beatriz Nunez Garcia"
Article Synopsis
- The study focuses on assessing the quality of care for patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) using hospital data to enhance continuous quality improvement in cancer care.
- Conducted at a university hospital in Spain, the research utilized a retrospective cohort approach from 2016 to 2020, analyzing 34 quality indicators derived from guidelines and literature.
- Results indicated strong adherence to clinical guidelines and positive survival outcomes, showcasing a methodology that leverages hospital data to track and improve healthcare quality over time.
Article Synopsis
- There is a growing interest in understanding unplanned care utilization among lung cancer patients, focusing on identifying areas for quality improvement in oncology.
- An observational study of 821 lung cancer patients treated at Puerta de Hierro-Majadahonda University Hospital revealed that a significant percentage (82.9%) required emergency department visits and 68% had unplanned hospital admissions, mainly related to their cancer or treatment.
- Factors such as higher tumor stage, poor performance status, male sex, and use of opioids or steroids were linked to increased risks of emergency consultations and unplanned admissions, indicating a critical need for better support and management for these patients.
Article Synopsis
- Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) has high cure rates, but this study shows that long-term survivors experience significant morbidity and mortality, with a median overall survival of 30 years, particularly higher in women.
- Among 383 HL patients studied, many developed late-stage disease and secondary malignancies, with cardiovascular disease being the most common cause of mortality.
- Despite improvements in treatment over time, an alarming number of patients, especially those under 30 and women, still face excess mortality from treatment-related toxicity, urging the need for better monitoring and prevention programs.
Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have revolutionized cancer therapy over the last decade. Pembrolizumab, a humanized monoclonal IgG4 antibody, binds to the programmed death 1 (PD-1) receptor, blocking its interaction with programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) and thereby increasing the anti-tumor activity of the host immune system. These drugs are associated with immune-mediated side effects that can be life threatening, and myocarditis is among the most serious events.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNodular lymphocytic predominance Hodgkin lymphoma (NLPHL) is a very uncommon subtype of Hodgkin lymphoma (HL), representing approximately 5% of all HL cases, with an incidence of 0.3/100,000 cases per year and with unique characteristics which distinguish it from classic Hodgkin lymphoma. Given its low frequency, there is a lack of prospective randomized studies to inform practice, the accumulated experience of academic groups being the main source of relevant information for the management of these patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe automatic extraction of a patient's natural history from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is a critical step towards building intelligent systems that can reason about clinical variables and support decision making. Although EHRs contain a large amount of valuable information about the patient's medical care, this information can only be fully understood when analyzed in a temporal context. Any intelligent system should then be able to extract medical concepts, date expressions, temporal relations and the temporal ordering of medical events from the free texts of EHRs; yet, this task is hard to tackle, due to the domain specific nature of EHRs, writing quality and lack of structure of these texts, and more generally the presence of redundant information.
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