Essential requirements for the governance and management of data trusts, data repositories, and other data collaborations.

Introduction: Around the world, many organisations are working on ways to increase the use, sharing, and reuse of person-level data for research, evaluation, planning, and innovation while ensuring that data are secure and privacy is protected. As a contribution to broader efforts to improve data governance and management, in 2020 members of our team published 12 minimum specification essential requirements (min specs) to provide practical guidance for organisations establishing or operating data trusts and other forms of data infrastructure.

Approach And Aims: We convened an international team, consisting mostly of participants from Canada and the United States of America, to test and refine the original 12 min specs.

Pivoting data and analytic capacity to support Ontario's COVID-19 response.

Introduction: Health care systems have faced unprecedented challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Access to timely population-based data has been vital to informing public health policy and practice.

Methods: We describe how ICES, an independent not-for-profit research and analytic institute in Ontario, Canada, pivoted existing research infrastructure and engaged health system stakeholders to provide near real-time population-based data and analytics to support Ontario's COVID-19 pandemic response.

Training During the COVID-19 Lockdown: Knowledge, Beliefs, and Practices of 12,526 Athletes from 142 Countries and Six Continents.

Objective: Our objective was to explore the training-related knowledge, beliefs, and practices of athletes and the influence of lockdowns in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

Methods: Athletes (n = 12,526, comprising 13% world class, 21% international, 36% national, 24% state, and 6% recreational) completed an online survey that was available from 17 May to 5 July 2020 and explored their training behaviors (training knowledge, beliefs/attitudes, and practices), including specific questions on their training intensity, frequency, and session duration before and during lockdown (March-June 2020).

Results: Overall, 85% of athletes wanted to "maintain training," and 79% disagreed with the statement that it is "okay to not train during lockdown," with a greater prevalence for both in higher-level athletes.

Essential requirements for establishing and operating data trusts: practical guidance co-developed by representatives from fifteen canadian organizations and initiatives.

Introduction: Increasingly, the label "data trust" is being applied to repeatable mechanisms or approaches to sharing data in a timely, fair, safe, and equitable way. However, there is an absence of practical guidance regarding how to establish and operate a data trust.

Aim And Approach: In December 2019, the Canadian Institute for Health Information and the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence convened a working meeting of 19 people representing 15 Canadian organizations/initiatives involved in data sharing, most of which focus on public sector health data.

A growing need - HIV education in long-term care.

As people living with HIV (PLHIV) age, knowledge of HIV and the associated care of those aging with HIV will become an increasingly important component of education for long-term care (LTC) providers. This descriptive study piloted two different approaches to distribute narrative-based HIV educational videos. Four LTC facilities were assigned to receive the videos to implement 'as usual' or to receive the videos in addition to blended learning sessions where the videos were shown with facilitated discussion with a nurse educator and a PLHIV.

Strategic analytics: towards fully embedding evidence in healthcare decision-making.

Cancer Care Ontario (CCO) has implemented multiple information technology solutions and collected health-system data to support its programs. There is now an opportunity to leverage these data and perform advanced end-to-end analytics that inform decisions around improving health-system performance. In 2014, CCO engaged in an extensive assessment of its current data capacity and capability, with the intent to drive increased use of data for evidence-based decision-making.

Regulation and oversight of independent health facilities in Canada.

Independent health facilities ("IHFs") are an important part of Canada's health care system existing at the interface of public and private care. They offer benefits to individual patients and the public at large, such as improved access to care, reduced wait times, improved choice in the delivery of care, and more efficient use of health care resources. They can also provide physicians greater autonomy, control of resources, and opportunity for profit compared to other practice settings, particularly because IHFs can deliver services outside of publicly-funded health care plans.

Radical prostatectomy versus observation for localized prostate cancer.

Background: The effectiveness of surgery versus observation for men with localized prostate cancer detected by means of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing is not known.

Methods: From November 1994 through January 2002, we randomly assigned 731 men with localized prostate cancer (mean age, 67 years; median PSA value, 7.8 ng per milliliter) to radical prostatectomy or observation and followed them through January 2010.

The Prostate cancer Intervention Versus Observation Trial:VA/NCI/AHRQ Cooperative Studies Program #407 (PIVOT): design and baseline results of a randomized controlled trial comparing radical prostatectomy to watchful waiting for men with clinically localized prostate cancer.

Background: Prostate cancer is the most common noncutaneous malignancy and the second leading cause of cancer death in men. Ninety percent of men with prostate cancer are over aged 60 years, diagnosed by early detection with the prostate specific antigen (PSA) blood test and have disease believed confined to the prostate gland (clinically localized). Common treatments for clinically localized prostate cancer include watchful waiting surgery to remove the prostate gland (radical prostatectomy), external beam radiation therapy and interstitial radiation therapy (brachytherapy) and androgen deprivation.

Effectiveness of an HIV prevention program for secondary school students in Mongolia.

Purpose: To evaluate the effectiveness of a 3-year human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention program for adolescents attending secondary school in Mongolia.

Methods: Comparisons of knowledge, attitudes, self-efficacy and safe sex practices of grade 10 students from schools with a peer education prevention program to grade 10 students from schools without the intervention. Peer education programs were launched in 2000 across Mongolia.

Advancing an epidural catheter 10 cm then retracting it 5 cm is no more effective than advancing it 5 cm.

Study Objective: To determine whether threading an epidural catheter 10 cm then retracting it 5 cm affects its intravascular placement and paresthesias.

Design: Prospective randomized study.

Setting: Labor and Delivery Unit, University Medical Center.

Preoperative evaluation of patients with obesity and obstructive sleep apnea.

Obesity and obstructive sleep apnea are conditions frequently encountered by the anesthesiologist and may have a significant impact on perioperative outcomes. This article discusses the preoperative evaluation of patients with one or both of these conditions. The goals of the preoperative assessment are to identify issues that can adversely affect the patient.

Basal growth hormone concentrations in blood and the risk for prostate cancer: a case-control study.

Objective: To assess the relationship between basal serum growth hormone (GH) levels and prostate cancer risk.

Methods: We conducted a population-based case-control study; cases included 68 men, aged 45-85 years, diagnosed with incident, primary, histologically confirmed, and clinically apparent (stage B and higher) prostate cancer. Controls included 240 men, frequency matched on age and residential area.

Two-year follow-up of noncontact holmium laser thermokeratoplasty for the correction of low hyperopia.

Purpose: To summarize the 2-year results of laser thermal keratoplasty with a holmium:yttrium-aluminum-garnet (Ho:YAG) laser and the Sunrise Corneal Shaping System and assess the procedure's safety, efficacy and predictability in correcting hyperopia in a phase III clinical intervention case series.

Methods: The Ho:YAG laser was used to correct low hyperopia (manifest spherical equivalent of +0.75 to +2.

Eosinophilic cystitis: a therapeutic challenge.

Eosinophilic cystitis is a rare disease with only 42 cases reported since first described in 1960. We report a case in a twenty-four-year-old woman and present the different therapeutic alternatives. A review of all reported cases shows that except for children and male adults with benign prostatic hypertrophy, this is a chronic inflammatory process of unknown causation for which no specific therapy is available.

Interaction of prolactin and testosterone in the human prostate.

Three experiments were performed to determine whether human prolactin (hPr) affects prostatic uptake and metabolism of testosterone (T). 1) Patients with prostatic cancer were infused twice with radio-labelled androgens, the first time with basal hPR, the second time with oral thyrotrophin-releasing hormone (TRH)-elevated hPr. In 5/7, significant increases in metabolic clearance of dihydrotestosterone (DHT) and in conversion of T to DHT accompanied increased hPR.