ANZACS-QI Heart Failure Registry: a new approach using age-stratified sampling of hospital discharges to guide quality improvement (ANZACS-QI 79).

Heart failure is a major healthcare problem in New Zealand. The Acute Decompensated Heart Failure (ADHF) Registry was introduced in 2015, and has identified the need for quality improvement strategies to improve care of patients hospitalised with heart failure. In this paper, we describe the implementation of the revised ANZACS-QI Heart Failure Registry, which has a primary aim to support evidence-based management of and quality improvement measures for patients who are hospitalised with heart failure in New Zealand.

Impact of Different Diagnostic Measures on Drug Class Association with Dementia Progression Risk: A Longitudinal Prospective Cohort Study.

Background: The Clinical Dementia Rating Scale Sum of Boxes (CDRSOB) score is known to be highly indicative of cognitive-functional status and is regularly employed for clinical and research purposes.

Objective: Our aim is to determine whether CDRSOB is consistent with clinical diagnosis in evaluating drug class associations with risk of progression to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia.

Methods: We employed weighted Cox regression analysis on longitudinal NACC data, to identify drug classes associated with disease progression risk, using clinical diagnosis and CDRSOB as the outcome.

2023 position statement on improving management for patients with heart failure in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Heart failure affects 1-3% of the population and remains a major public health problem, with high rates of hospitalisation and mortality. Health inequities in the incidence of heart failure have widened over the last 13 years in Aotearoa New Zealand. Urgent action is required to address the inequitable burden of heart failure among Māori and Pasifika.

The impact of hearing impairment and hearing aid use on progression to mild cognitive impairment in cognitively healthy adults: An observational cohort study.

Introduction: We assessed the association of self-reported hearing impairment and hearing aid use with cognitive decline and progression to mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

Methods: We used a large referral-based cohort of 4358 participants obtained from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center. The standard covariate-adjusted Cox proportional hazards model, the marginal structural Cox model with inverse probability weighting, standardized Kaplan-Meier curves, and linear mixed-effects models were applied to test the hypotheses.

An Early Stage Researcher's Primer on Systems Medicine Terminology.

Systems Medicine is a novel approach to medicine, that is, an interdisciplinary field that considers the human body as a system, composed of multiple parts and of complex relationships at multiple levels, and further integrated into an environment. Exploring Systems Medicine implies understanding and combining concepts coming from diametral different fields, including medicine, biology, statistics, modeling and simulation, and data science. Such heterogeneity leads to semantic issues, which may slow down implementation and fruitful interaction between these highly diverse fields.

Shaping a data-driven era in dementia care pathway through computational neurology approaches.

Background: Dementia is caused by a variety of neurodegenerative diseases and is associated with a decline in memory and other cognitive abilities, while inflicting an enormous socioeconomic burden. The complexity of dementia and its associated comorbidities presents immense challenges for dementia research and care, particularly in clinical decision-making.

Main Body: Despite the lack of disease-modifying therapies, there is an increasing and urgent need to make timely and accurate clinical decisions in dementia diagnosis and prognosis to allow appropriate care and treatment.

Multi-time-point data preparation robustly reveals MCI and dementia risk factors.

Introduction: Conflicting results on dementia risk factors have been reported across studies. We hypothesize that variation in data preparation methods may partially contribute to this issue.

Methods: We propose a comprehensive data preparation approach comparing individuals with stable diagnosis over time to those who progress to mild cognitive impairment (MCI)/dementia.