Purpose: The value of integrating clinical variables, radiomics, and tumor-derived cell-free DNA (cfDNA) for the prediction of survival and response to chemoradiation of patients with resectable esophageal adenocarcinoma is not yet known. Our aim was to investigate if radiomics and cfDNA metrics combined with clinical variables can improve personalized predictions.
Methods And Materials: A cohort of 111 patients with resectable esophageal adenocarcinoma from 2 centers treated with neoadjuvant chemoradiation therapy was used for exploratory retrospective analyses.
Nursing shortages in the global north are soaring. Of particular concern is the high turnover among bachelor-trained nurses. Nurses tend to leave the profession shortly after graduating, often citing a lack of appreciation and voice in clinical and organisational decision-making.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article draws on ethnographic research investigating experimental reform projects in local nursing practices. These are aimed at strengthening nursing work and fostering nurses' position within healthcare through bottom-up nurse-driven innovations. Based on literature on epistemic politics and critical nursing studies, the study examines and conceptualizes how these nurses promote professional and organizational change.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth care systems are facing soaring workforce shortages, challenging their ability to secure timely access to good-quality care. In this context, nurses make difficult decisions about which patients to deliver care to, transfer to other providers, or strategically ignore. Yet, we still know little about how nurses engage in situated practices of bedside rationing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: This study aimed to explore the real-world representativeness of a prospective registry cohort with active accrual in oncology, applying a representativeness metric that is novel to health care.
Study Design And Setting: We used data from the Prospective Observational Cohort Study of Esophageal-Gastric Cancer Patients (POCOP) registry and from the population-based Netherlands Cancer Registry (NCR). We used Representativeness-indicators (R-indicators) and overall survival to investigate the degree to which the POCOP cohort and clinically relevant subgroups were a representative sample compared to the NCR database.
Background: For cancer patients to effectively engage in decision making, they require comprehensive and understandable information regarding treatment options and their associated outcomes. We developed an online prediction tool and supporting communication skills training to assist healthcare providers (HCPs) in this complex task. This study aims to assess the impact of this combined intervention (prediction tool and training) on the communication practices of HCPs when discussing treatment options.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Definitive chemoradiotherapy (dCRT) is a treatment option with curative intent for patients with esophageal cancer that could result in late toxicities and affect health-related quality of life (HRQoL). This study aimed to review the literature and perform a meta-analysis to investigate the effect of dCRT on late toxicities and HRQoL in esophageal cancer.
Methods And Materials: A systematic search was performed in MEDLINE, EMBASE, and PsychINFO.
New treatment options and centralization of surgery have improved survival for patients with non-metastatic esophageal or gastric cancer. It is unknown, however, which patients benefitted the most from treatment advances. The aim of this study was to identify best-case, typical and worst-case scenarios in terms of survival time, and to assess if survival associated with these scenarios changed over time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConditional relative survival (CRS) is useful for communicating prognosis to patients as it provides an estimate of the life expectancy after having survived a certain time after treatment. Our study estimates the 3-year relative survival conditional on having survived a certain period for patients with esophageal or gastric cancer. Patients with nonmetastatic esophageal or gastric cancer diagnosed between 2006 and 2020 treated with curative intent (resection with or without [neo]adjuvant therapy, or chemoradiotherapy) were selected from the Netherlands Cancer Registry.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In recent years, clinical trials have shown improved survival of patients with metastatic esophageal or gastric cancer. The number of patients participating in clinical trials is limited, and survival improvements observed from clinical trials are unrepresentative for the full population. The aim of our study was to assess trends in survival for the best-case, typical, and worst-case scenarios in patients with metastatic esophageal or gastric cancer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrior models have been developed to predict survival for patients with esophagogastric cancer undergoing curative treatment or first-line chemotherapy (SOURCE models). Comprehensive clinical prediction models for patients with esophagogastric cancer who will receive second-line chemotherapy or best supportive care are currently lacking. The aim of our study was to develop and internally validate a new clinical prediction model, called SOURCE beyond first-line, for survival of patients with metastatic esophagogastric adenocarcinoma after failure of first-line palliative systemic therapy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: When deliberating palliative cancer treatment, insight into patients' attitudes toward striving for quality of life (QL) and length of life (LL) may facilitate goal-concordant care. We investigated the (1) attitudes of patients with advanced cancer toward striving for QL and/or LL and whether these change over time, and (2) characteristics associated with these attitudes (over time).
Methods: We performed a secondary analysis of a randomized controlled trial on improving shared decision making (SDM), without differentiation between intervention arms.
Sociol Health Illn
September 2022
This article draws on ethnographic research to conceptualise how nurses mobilise assemblages of caring to organise and deliver COVID care; particularly so by reorganising organisational infrastructures and practices of safe and good care. Based on participatory observations, interviews and nurse diaries, all collected during the early phase of the pandemic, the research shows how the organising work of nurses unfolds at different health-care layers: in the daily care for patients and their families, in the coordination of care in and between hospitals, and at the level of the health-care system. These findings contrast with the dominant pandemic-image of nurses as 'heroes at the bedside', which fosters the classic and microlevel view of nursing and leaves the broader contribution of nurses to the pandemic unaddressed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe prevalence of bullying worldwide is high (UNESCO, 2018). Over the past decades, many anti-bullying interventions have been developed to remediate this problem. However, we lack insight into for whom these interventions work and what individual intervention components drive the total intervention effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The recent POLDER trial investigated the effects of external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) on dysphagia caused by incurable oesophageal cancer. An estimated life expectancy of minimally three months was required for inclusion. However, nearly one-third of the included patients died within three months.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn several languages, including English and Dutch, children's acquisition of the interpretation of object pronouns (e.g., ) is delayed compared to that of reflexives (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUpon hearing "Some of Michelangelo's sculptures are in Rome," adults can easily generate a scalar implicature and infer that the intended meaning of the utterance corresponds to "Some but not all Michelangelo's sculptures are in Rome." Comprehension experiments show that preschoolers struggle with this kind of inference until at least 5 years of age. Surprisingly, the few studies having investigated children's production of scalar expressions like and suggest that production is adult-like already in their third year of life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Health Policy Manag
September 2021
In this commentary, we reflect on Rinaldi and Bekker's scoping review of the literature on populist radical right (PRR) parties and welfare policies. We argue that their review provides political scientists and healthcare scholars with a firm basis to further explore the relationships between populism and welfare policies in different political systems. In line with the authors, we furthermore (re)emphasize the need for additional empirical inquiries into the relationship between populism and healthcare.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present study focuses on the similarities and differences in language production between children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In addition, we investigated whether Theory of Mind (ToM), working memory, and response inhibition are associated with language production. Narratives, produced by 106 Dutch-speaking children (36 with ASD, 34 with ADHD, and 36 typically developing) aged 6 to 12 during ADOS assessment, were examined on several linguistic measures: verbal productivity, speech fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical semantics, and discourse pragmatics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Chromatogr B Analyt Technol Biomed Life Sci
February 2016
Tuberculosis (TB) remains a worldwide health problem, especially in developing countries. Correct identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) infection is extremely important for providing appropriate treatment and care to patients. Here we describe a solid phase extraction-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry method (SPE-THM-GC-MS) for the detection of five biomarkers for M.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTuberculosis is one of the world's most emerging public health problems, particularly in developing countries. Chromatography based methods have been used to tackle this epidemic by focusing on biomarker detection. Unfortunately, interferences from lipids in the sputum matrix, particularly cholesterol, adversely affect the identification and detection of the marker compounds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring conversation, speakers constantly make choices about how specific they wish to be in their use of referring expressions. In the present study we investigate whether speakers take the listener into account or whether they base their referential choices solely on their own representation of the discourse. We do this by examining the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the choice of referring expression at different discourse moments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Chromatogr B Analyt Technol Biomed Life Sci
April 2015
Recently, thermally-assisted hydrolysis and methylation followed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (THM-GC-MS) in combination with chemometrics has been used to develop a 20-compound model for fast differentiation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) from Non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) in bacterial cultures. This model provided better than 95% accuracy. In our current work a hexane/methanol/water extraction followed by a solid phase extraction (SPE) clean-up procedure was developed for use before THM-GC-MS, to make the test suitable for the identification of mycobacteria in sputum.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF