Early use of tocilizumab in patients with severe pneumonia secondary to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection and poor prognostic criteria: Impact on mortality rate and intensive care unit admission.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, keeps spreading globally. Evidence suggests that a subgroup of patients with severe symptomatology might have cytokine storms, which increases mortality. The use of interleukin-6 (IL-6) inhibitors may help in controlling the pathological immune response to the virus.

Monophonic and Polyphonic Wheezing Classification Based on Constrained Low-Rank Non-Negative Matrix Factorization.

The appearance of wheezing sounds is widely considered by physicians as a key indicator to detect early pulmonary disorders or even the severity associated with respiratory diseases, as occurs in the case of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. From a physician's point of view, monophonic and polyphonic wheezing classification is still a challenging topic in biomedical signal processing since both types of wheezes are sinusoidal in nature. Unlike most of the classification algorithms in which interference caused by normal respiratory sounds is not addressed in depth, our first contribution proposes a novel Constrained Low-Rank Non-negative Matrix Factorization (CL-RNMF) approach, never applied to classification of wheezing as far as the authors' knowledge, which incorporates several constraints (sparseness and smoothness) and a low-rank configuration to extract the wheezing spectral content, minimizing the acoustic interference from normal respiratory sounds.

Economic Impact and Clinical Outcomes of Omalizumab Add-On Therapy for Patients with Severe Persistent Asthma: A Real-World Study.

Background: Omalizumab is a fully humanized monoclonal antibody indicated as add-on therapy to improve asthma control in patients with severe persistent allergic asthma.

Aims: The aim of this study was to evaluate social, healthcare expenditure and clinical outcomes changes after incorporating omalizumab into standard treatment in the control of severe asthma.

Methods: In this multicentre retrospective study, a total of 220 patients were included from 15 respiratory medicine departments in the regions of Andalusia and Extremadura (Spain).