Publications by authors named "Bernd Kowall"

Objective: The performance of injury severity scores, used widely to quantify injury severity and predict outcomes, has not been investigated in German pediatric cases. This study aims to identify the most feasible and accurate injury score predictor of mortality in German children with trauma using International Classification of Diseases 10 (ICD-10).

Study Design And Setting: Between 2014 and 2020, a retrospective observational cohort study of hospital admissions cases aged < 18 years with injury-related ICD-10 codes using the German hospital database (GHD) was conducted.

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[Cause of death statistics-how to avoid misinterpretation of mortality data].

Bundesgesundheitsblatt Gesundheitsforschung Gesundheitsschutz

December 2024

National mortality registers provide important data for monitoring population health. Analyses of cardiovascular mortality in particular-and especially mortality from coronary heart disease-are frequently the basis for conclusions about the quality of healthcare and prevention. To be able to interpret disease-specific mortality differences between countries and changes in mortality over time, it is necessary to know the basics of monocausal cause-of-death statistics and the associated limitations in comparative statements.

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Deviations in serum creatinine (SCr), due to its determination using a Jaffe or an enzymatic method, have an effect on kidney disease detection and staging. It is not yet clear how large this effect is in kidney transplant recipients (KTRs). SCr measurement differences are of particular importance here to evaluate the graft function.

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Our rationale was to investigate whether F-FDG PET/MRI in addition to (guideline-recommended) conventional staging leads to changes in therapeutic management in patients with newly diagnosed breast cancer and compare the diagnostic accuracy of F-FDG PET/MRI with that of conventional staging for determining the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) stage. In this prospective, double-center study, 208 women with newly diagnosed, therapy-naïve invasive breast cancer were enrolled in accordance with the inclusion criteria. All patients underwent guideline-recommended conventional staging and whole-body F-FDG PET/MRI with a dedicated breast examination.

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Recently, a health-care database study showed that persons with type 2 diabetes taking GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RA) had a significantly lower risk of 10 out of 13 obesity-related cancers than patients taking insulin (Wang L, et al. JAMA Netw Open. 2024 7: e2421305).

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Article Synopsis
  • Researchers studied patients with advanced skin cancer (melanoma) to see how well they responded to a special treatment called immune checkpoint inhibition (ICI).
  • They found that only about 8% of patients responded quickly to the treatment, while others had slower responses or did not respond at all.
  • Despite the quick responders showing some improvement, they didn’t live longer or have better outcomes than those who responded later to the treatment.
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Background: Observational epidemiologic studies often yield different results on the same question. In this article, we explain how this comes about.

Methods: In this review, which is based on publications retrieved by a selective search in PubMed and the Web of Science, we use information from international publications, simulation studies on sampling error, and a quantitative bias analysis on fictitious data to demonstrate why the results of epidemiologic studies are often uncertain, and why it is, therefore, generally necessary to perform more than one study on any particular question.

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Importance: In neonates with birth asphyxia (BA) and hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, therapeutic hypothermia (TH), initiated within six hours, is the only safe and established neuroprotective measure to prevent secondary brain injury. Infants born outside of TH centers have delayed access to cooling.

Objective: To compare in-hospital mortality, occurrence of seizures, and functional status at discharge in newborns with BA depending on postnatal transfer for treatment to another hospital within 24 h of admission (transferred (TN) versus non-transferred neonates (NTN)).

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Background: The major heatwave in Europe in August 2003 resulted in 70,000 excess deaths. In Frankfurt am Main, a city with 767,000 inhabitants in the south-west of Germany, around 200 more people died in August 2003 than expected. Soon afterwards, the city introduced adaptation measures to prevent heat-related health problems and subsequently established further mitigation measures to limit climate change.

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The aim of this publication is to demonstrate similarities and differences in the association of risk factors with the prevalence of different manifestations of chronic venous disease (CVD), like varicose veins (VV), venous oedema (C3) and severe chronic venous insufficiency (CVI) in the population-based cross-sectional Bonn Vein Study 1 (BVS). In the BVS 1 between 13.11.

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We aimed to examine the concordance of type-2 diabetes, prediabetes and the metabolic syndrome in couples. In cross-sectional analyses, we used data from 1173 couples with index persons from the Heinz Nixdorf Recall Study (2011-2015), a population-based cohort study in Western Germany, and partners from the associated Heinz Nixdorf Multigeneration Study (2013-2016). Mean age (standard deviation) was 67.

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Objectives:  To demonstrate the safety of direct oral anticoagulants in relation to intracranial bleeding (ICB), we compared the number of patients taking anticoagulants in all cases of hospitalization and cases of hospitalization for ICB over time in Germany. We analyzed the intrahospital mortality of ICB cases in relation to long-term use of anticoagulants (LUAs).We performed a retrospective registry analysis of nationwide German hospitalizations including all hospital admissions and admission for ICB in patients aged ≥60 years in the period from 2006 to 2020 and separated for LUAs.

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Article Synopsis
  • * It analyzed data from 578 treatment-naïve melanoma patients receiving anti-PD-1 therapy, distinguishing between those who took antibiotics before or during treatment.
  • * Results indicate that antibiotic use within 60 days before starting ICB is linked to poorer progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS), while antibiotics taken after treatment initiation do not significantly impact these outcomes.
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Background: The validity of self-reported chronic conditions has been assessed by comparing them with medical records or register data in several studies. However, the reliability of self-reports of chronic diseases has less often been examined. Our aim was to assess the proportion and determinants of inconsistent self-reports of diabetes in a long panel study.

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The aim was to investigate prevalence of dry eye syndrome (DES) in a population-based sample in Germany. The association between coexisting eye diseases and DES was also of interest. We recontacted participants of the Heinz Nixdorf Recall study between 2018 and 2021 by postal questionnaire that included the Women's Health Study questionnaire on DES.

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Background: In former studies, parity was associated with adverse cardiovascular outcomes in parents. This study aims to extend the limited existing data regarding the association between the number of children and heart disease and/or stroke in a large longitudinal study in different European countries in both men and women.

Methods: For 42 075 subjects (18 080 men, 23 995 women; median age 58 years (interquartile range: 53 to 65)) from 19 European countries and Israel in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), odds ratios (OR) for the association between number of children and incident self-reported heart disease and/or stroke (HDS) were estimated using logistic regression analyses.

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Background: Serum creatinine (SCr), mainly determined by the Jaffe or an enzymatic method, is the central marker to assess kidney function. Deviations between these two methods may affect the diagnosis and staging of acute kidney injury (AKI) and chronic kidney disease (CKD).

Methods: The results of the first parallel SCr measurement (Jaffe and enzymatic method) of adult in- and outpatients in the same serum sample at the University Hospital Essen (Essen, Germany) between 2020-2022 were retrospectively evaluated.

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Personalized time-to-event or survival prediction with right-censored outcomes is a pervasive challenge in healthcare research. Although various supervised machine learning methods, such as random survival forests or neural networks, have been adapted to handle such outcomes effectively, they do not provide explanations for their predictions, lacking interpretability. In this paper, an alternative method for survival prediction by weighted nearest neighbors is proposed.

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Many publications dealt with the monitoring of heat-related mortality. Fewer analyses referred to indicators of heat-related morbidity. The aim of this work was to describe the heat-related morbidity using rescue service data from the city of Frankfurt/Main, Germany for the time period 2014-2022, with regard to the questions: 1) How do rescue service deployments develop over the years? Is there a trend identifiable towards a decrease in deployments over the years, e.

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Background: Hospital mortality after acute myocardial infarction (AMI, ICD-10: I21-I22) is used as OECD indicator of the quality of acute care. The reported AMI hospital mortality in Germany is more than twice as high as in the Netherlands or Scandinavia. Yet, in Europe, Germany ranks high in health spending and availability of cardiac procedures.

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