Clinical officers in Uganda: Training and workforce role.

The clinical role of a clinical officer in Uganda is very similar to that of a physician associate/assistant in the United States. This article describes the qualifications and workforce role of clinical officers in Uganda, as well as their use in two primary care programs that provide effective, low-cost medical care to a growing population with an increasing burden of chronic disease.

An educational intervention in rural Uganda: Risk-targeted home talks by village health workers.

Objective: Evaluate the effectiveness of home talks (HTs), a novel model of health education delivered by village health workers (VHWs) with primary-level education to rural African mothers. Talk recipients were assessed by health census to be at risk for ill-health in one of 5 ways: malnutrition, diarrhea, respiratory disease, HIV, and poverty due to family size.

Methods: Each participant received a pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test on their assigned HT topic and a pre-test and delayed post-test on a randomly assigned control topic.

Hepatic dysfunction and survival after orthotopic heart transplantation: application of the MELD scoring system for outcome prediction.

Background: The prevalence of heart failure (HF) is rising and the only corrective treatment is cardiac transplantation. Advanced HF is associated with congestive hepatopathy and progressive functional and ultrastructural changes of the liver. We hypothesized that hepatic dysfunction is associated with impaired clinical outcome after heart transplantation.

Epicardial fat volume in patients with left ventricular systolic dysfunction.

Epicardial adipose tissue has been linked to cardiovascular metabolism and inflammation and has been shown to predict prevalence and progression of coronary artery disease. Only limited data are available on the role of epicardial fat in patients with heart failure (HF). We analyzed cardiac adiposity and its relation to markers of morbidity and clinical outcome in patients with normal and impaired left ventricular (LV) function.