Predicting malnutrition from longitudinal patient trajectories with deep learning.

Malnutrition is common, morbid, and often correctable, but subject to missed and delayed diagnosis. Better screening and prediction could improve clinical, functional, and economic outcomes. This study aimed to assess the predictability of malnutrition from longitudinal patient records, and the external generalizability of a predictive model.

A body bag can save your life: a novel method of cold water immersion for heat stroke treatment.

Non-exertional heat stroke is a life-threatening condition characterized by passive exposure to high ambient heat, a core body temperature of 40°C (104°F) or greater, and central nervous system dysfunction. Rapid cooling is imperative to minimize mortality and morbidity. Although evaporative and convective measures are often used for cooling heat stroke patients, cold water immersion produces the fastest cooling.

Social Determinants of Hallway Bed Use.

Introduction: Hallway beds in the emergency department (ED) produce lower patient satisfaction and inferior care. We sought to determine whether socioeconomic factors influence which visits are assigned to hallway beds, independent of clinical characteristics at triage.

Methods: We studied 332,919 visits, across 189,326 patients, to two academic EDs from 2013-2016.

Exposure, hazard, and survival analysis of diffusion on social networks.

Sociologists, economists, epidemiologists, and others recognize the importance of social networks in the diffusion of ideas and behaviors through human societies. To measure the flow of information on real-world networks, researchers often conduct comprehensive sociometric mapping of social links between individuals and then follow the spread of an "innovation" from reports of adoption or change in behavior over time. The innovation is introduced to a small number of individuals who may also be encouraged to spread it to their network contacts.

Social connectedness is associated with fibrinogen level in a human social network.

Socially isolated individuals face elevated rates of illness and death. Conventional measures of social connectedness reflect an individual's perceived network and can be subject to bias and variation in reporting. In this study of a large human social network, we find that greater indegree, a sociocentric measure of friendship and familial ties identified by a subject's social connections rather than by the subject, predicts significantly lower concentrations of fibrinogen (a biomarker of inflammation and cardiac risk), after adjusting for demographics, education, medical history and known predictors of cardiac risk.

Social network targeting to maximise population behaviour change: a cluster randomised controlled trial.

Background: Information and behaviour can spread through interpersonal ties. By targeting influential individuals, health interventions that harness the distributive properties of social networks could be made more effective and efficient than those that do not. Our aim was to assess which targeting methods produce the greatest cascades or spillover effects and hence maximise population-level behaviour change.