Publications by authors named "D F Smeets"

Background And Purpose: The rapidly evolving landscape of effective treatment options in multiple sclerosis has led to a shift of treatment objectives towards a treat-to-target approach aiming to suppress disease activity below the level of detectability early during the disease. To enable treat-to-target, a thorough reappraisal of available outcome measures with respect to their ability in this regard is required.

Methods: To that end, we conducted a comprehensive systematic literature review of more than 1000 studies using PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) 2020 methodology focusing on underlying evidence as well as utility and implementability in clinical practice.

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Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a devastating immune-mediated disorder of the central nervous system resulting in progressive disability accumulation. As there is no cure available yet for MS, the primary therapeutic objective is to reduce relapses and to slow down disability progression as early as possible during the disease to maintain and/or improve health-related quality of life. However, optimizing treatment for people with MS (pwMS) is complex and challenging due to the many factors involved and in particular, the high degree of clinical and sub-clinical heterogeneity in disease progression among pwMS.

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Background: Current guidelines indicate that patients with extreme oligozoospermia or azoospermia should be tested for chromosomal imbalances, azoospermia factor (AZF) deletions and/or CFTR variants. For other sperm abnormalities, no genetic diagnostics are recommended.

Objectives: To determine whether exome sequencing (ES) with combined copy number variant (CNV) and single nucleotide variant (SNV) analysis is a reliable first-tier method to replace current methods (validation study), and to evaluate the diagnostic yield after 10 months of implementation (evaluation study).

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Article Synopsis
  • A study was done to see if a new method to predict brain age can help understand brain health better and measure how lifestyle changes might help keep our brains in good condition.
  • They looked at data from 742 people, including those with healthy brains and various types of cognitive issues, using special software to analyze brain scans.
  • The results showed that people with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's had older brain ages than their actual ages, and using brain age was better at identifying brain problems than just looking at regular age.
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Importance: Amyloid-related imaging abnormalities (ARIA) are brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings associated with the use of amyloid-β-directed monoclonal antibody therapies in Alzheimer disease (AD). ARIA monitoring is important to inform treatment dosing decisions and might be improved through assistive software.

Objective: To assess the clinical performance of an artificial intelligence (AI)-based software tool for assisting radiological interpretation of brain MRI scans in patients monitored for ARIA.

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