HIV Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Use Among Men Experiencing Incarceration in the United States: A Prospective Cohort Study.

Background: Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an effective approach to preventing HIV acquisition and recommended for populations over-represented in carceral systems, given the overlap with populations disproportionately impacted by HIV. However, few studies have focused on PrEP initiation outcomes in a carceral setting to maximize public health impact.

Setting: This study was conducted in a unified jail/prison system within the state of Rhode Island located in the United States.

Pay-for-Performance Incentives for Home Dialysis Use and Kidney Transplant.

Importance: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' mandatory End-Stage Renal Disease Treatment Choices (ETC) model, launched on January 1, 2021, randomly assigned approximately 30% of US dialysis facilities and managing clinicians to financial incentives to increase the use of home dialysis and kidney transplant.

Objective: To assess the ETC's association with use of home dialysis and kidney transplant during the model's first 2 years and examine changes in these outcomes by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This retrospective cross-sectional study used claims and enrollment data for traditional Medicare beneficiaries with kidney failure from 2017 to 2022 linked to same-period transplant data from the United Network for Organ Sharing.

A comparison of the NIRUDAK models and WHO algorithm for dehydration assessment in older children and adults with acute diarrhoea: a prospective, observational study.

Background: Despite the importance of accurate and rapid assessment of hydration status in patients with acute diarrhoea, no validated tools exist to help clinicians assess dehydration severity in older children and adults. The aim of this study is to validate a clinical decision support tool (CDST) and a simplified score for dehydration severity in older children and adults with acute diarrhoea (both developed during the NIRUDAK study) and compare their accuracy and reliability with current WHO guidelines.

Methods: A random sample of patients aged 5 years or older presenting with diarrhoea to the icddr,b Dhaka Hospital in Bangladesh between Jan 30 and Dec 13, 2022 were included in this prospective cohort study.

PALM: PATIENT-CENTERED TREATMENT RANKING VIA LARGE-SCALE MULTIVARIATE NETWORK META-ANALYSIS.

The growing number of available treatment options has led to urgent needs for reliable answers when choosing the best course of treatment for a patient. As it is often infeasible to compare a large number of treatments in a single randomized controlled trial, multivariate network meta-analyses (NMAs) are used to synthesize evidence from trials of a subset of the treatments, where both efficacy and safety related outcomes are considered simultaneously. However, these large-scale multiple-outcome NMAs have created challenges to existing methods due to the increasing complexity of the unknown correlations between outcomes and treatment comparisons.

Origami plot: a novel multivariate data visualization tool that improves radar chart.

Objectives: We propose the origami plot, which maintains the original functionality of a radar chart and avoids potential misuse of its connected regions, with newly added features to better assist multicriteria decision-making.

Study Design And Setting: Built upon a radar chart, the origami plot adds additional auxiliary axes and points such that the area of the connected region of all dots is invariant to the ordering of axes. As such, it enables ranking different individuals by the overall performance for multicriteria decision-making while maintaining the intuitive visual appeal of the radar chart.

Correction: Derivation of the first clinical diagnostic models for dehydration severity in patients over five years with acute diarrhea.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pntd.

Multivariate meta-analysis of multiple outcomes: characteristics and predictors of borrowing of strength from Cochrane reviews.

Objectives: Multivariate meta-analysis allows the joint synthesis of multiple outcomes accounting for their correlation. This enables borrowing of strength (BoS) across outcomes, which may lead to greater efficiency and even different conclusions compared to separate univariate meta-analyses. However, multivariate meta-analysis is complex to apply, so guidance is needed to flag (in advance of analysis) when the approach is most useful.

Personalized Research on Diet in Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn's Disease: A Series of N-of-1 Diet Trials.

Introduction: Evidence about specific carbohydrate diet (SCD) for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is limited. We conducted 54 single-subject, double-crossover N-of-1 trials comparing SCD with a modified SCD (MSCD) and comparing each with the participant's baseline, usual diet (UD).

Methods: Across 19 sites, we recruited patients aged 7-18 years with IBD and active inflammation.

The effect of race/ethnicity and adversities on smoking cessation among U.S. adult smokers.

Introduction: Black and Hispanic individuals in the US experience more socioeconomic adversities that are associated with disparities in tobacco use and cessation than White individuals. This study examined if racial/ethnic differences in smoking abstinence were mediated by socioeconomic (SES) adversities.

Methods: Data from 7,101 established smokers were identified in Wave 1 (2013-2014) of the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) and followed to Wave 4 (2016-2018).

Designing a Novel Clinician Decision Support Tool for the Management of Acute Diarrhea in Bangladesh: Formative Qualitative Study.

Background: The availability of mobile clinical decision support (CDS) tools has grown substantially with the increased prevalence of smartphone devices and apps. Although health care providers express interest in integrating mobile health (mHealth) technologies into their clinical settings, concerns have been raised, including perceived disagreements between information provided by mobile CDS tools and standard guidelines. Despite their potential to transform health care delivery, there remains limited literature on the provider's perspective on the clinical utility of mobile CDS tools for improving patient outcomes, especially in low- and middle-income countries.

Individualized Studies of Triggers of Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation: The I-STOP-AFib Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common arrhythmia. Although patients have reported that various exposures determine when and if an AF event will occur, a prospective evaluation of patient-selected triggers has not been conducted, and the utility of characterizing presumed AF-related triggers for individual patients remains unknown.

Objective: To test the hypothesis that n-of-1 trials of self-selected AF triggers would enhance AF-related quality of life.

Clinical, Sociodemographic and Environmental Risk Factors for Acute Bacterial Diarrhea among Adults and Children over Five Years in Bangladesh.

In 2016, diarrheal disease was the eighth leading cause of mortality globally accounting for over 1.6 million deaths with the majority of deaths in adults and children over 5 years. This study aims to investigate the clinical, sociodemographic, and environmental risk factors associated with common bacterial acute diarrhea among adults and children over 5.

A Useful and Sustainable Role for N-of-1 Trials in the Healthcare Ecosystem.

Clinicians and patients often try a treatment for an initial period to inform longer-term therapeutic decisions. A more rigorous approach involves N-of-1 trials. In these single-patient crossover trials, typically conducted in patients with chronic conditions, individual patients are given candidate treatments in a double-blinded, random sequence of alternating periods to determine the most effective treatment for that patient.

Continuous diagnostic models for volume deficit in patients with acute diarrhea.

Background: Episodes of acute diarrhea lead to dehydration, and existing care algorithms base treatment around categorical estimates for fluid resuscitation. This study aims to develop models for the percentage dehydration (fluid deficit) in individuals with acute diarrhea, to better target treatment and avoid the potential sequelae of over or under resuscitation.

Methods: This study utilizes data from two prospective cohort studies of patients with acute diarrhea in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Assessing the performance of clinical diagnostic models for dehydration among patients with cholera and undernutrition in Bangladesh.

Objective: Accurately assessing dehydration severity is a critical step in reducing mortality from diarrhoea, but is complicated by cholera and undernutrition. This study seeks to assess the accuracy of two clinical diagnostic models for dehydration among patients over five years with cholera and undernutrition and compare their respective performance to the World Health Organization (WHO) algorithm.

Methods: In this secondary analysis of data collected from the NIRUDAK study, accuracy of the full and simplified NIRUDAK models for predicting severe and any dehydration was measured using the area under the Receiver Operator Characteristic curve (AUC) among patients over five with/without cholera and with/without wasting.

Chronic pain treatment preferences change following participation in N-of-1 trials, but not always in the expected direction.

Objective: To examine pain treatment preferences before and after participation in an N-of-1 trial.

Study Design And Setting: In this observational study nested within a randomized trial, we examined chronic pain patients' preferences before and after treatment in relation to N-of-1 trial results; assessed the influence of different schemes for defining comparative "superiority" on potential conclusions; and generated classification trees illustrating the relationship between pre-treatment preferences, N-of-1 trial results, and post-treatment preferences.

Results: Treatment preferences differed pre- and post-trial for 40% of participants.

Derivation and Internal Validation of a Score to Predict Dehydration Severity in Patients over 5 Years with Acute Diarrhea.

Diarrheal disease accounts for more than one million deaths annually in patients over 5 years of age. Although most patients can be managed with oral rehydration solution, patients with severe dehydration require resuscitation with intravenous fluids. Scoring systems to assess dehydration have been empirically derived and validated in children under 5 years, but none have been validated for patients over 5 years.

Multidrug-resistant enteric pathogens in older children and adults with diarrhea in Bangladesh: epidemiology and risk factors.

Background: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global public health threat and is increasingly prevalent among enteric pathogens in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). However, the burden of multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) in older children, adults, and elderly patients with acute diarrhea in LMICs is poorly understood. This study's aim was to characterize the prevalence of MDR enteric pathogens isolated from patients with acute diarrhea in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and assess a wide range of risk factors associated with MDR.

Study specific prediction intervals for random-effects meta-analysis: A tutorial: Prediction intervals in meta-analysis.

The pooled estimate of the average effect is of primary interest when fitting the random-effects model for meta-analysis. However estimates of study specific effects, for example those displayed on forest plots, are also often of interest. In this tutorial, we present the case, with the accompanying statistical theory, for estimating the study specific true effects using so called 'empirical Bayes estimates' or 'Best Unbiased Linear Predictions' under the random-effects model.

Derivation of the first clinical diagnostic models for dehydration severity in patients over five years with acute diarrhea.

Diarrheal diseases lead to an estimated 1.3 million deaths each year, with the majority of those deaths occurring in patients over five years of age. As the severity of diarrheal disease can vary widely, accurately assessing dehydration status remains the most critical step in acute diarrhea management.

Clinical and socio-environmental determinants of multidrug-resistant vibrio cholerae 01 in older children and adults in Bangladesh.

Objectives: Few studies have evaluated determinants of multidrug-resistant (MDR) Vibrio cholerae O1 in older children and adults. This study aimed to characterize the prevalence of MDR V. cholerae O1 and associated risk factors among patients over five years of age in Bangladesh.