Effectiveness of Synchronous Postdischarge Contacts on Health Care Use and Patient Satisfaction : A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.

Background: Postdischarge contacts (PDCs) after hospitalization are common practice, but their effectiveness in reducing use of acute care after discharge remains unclear.

Purpose: To assess the effects of PDC on 30-day emergency department (ED) visits, 30-day hospital readmissions, and patient satisfaction.

Data Sources: MEDLINE, Embase, and CINAHL searched from 2012 to 25 May 2023.

Optimizing nurse practitioner productivity within the Veterans Health Administration.

Background: Nurse practitioners (NPs) provide high-quality, comprehensive health care at Veterans Health Administration (VHA) medical centers in various practice settings. Accurately determining the productivity of NPs is essential to understanding their overall contribution to veteran care. There is a lack of understanding of the contributors to the variability among VHA medical centers regarding their processes for capturing these data.

Phosphorous Utilization in Microalgae: Physiological Aspects and Applied Implications.

Phosphorus (P) is a fundamental element for life, playing an integral role in cellular metabolism including energy transfer, nucleic acid synthesis, and membrane structure. This nutrient is critical to the physiological ecology in all photosynthetic organisms including eukaryotic microalgae and cyanobacteria. The review, here presented, delves into the intricate mechanisms governing phosphorus acquisition from the environment, its utilization in plant metabolism, and regulation in these photosynthetic microorganisms.

Prostate-Specific Membrane Antigen-Targeted Therapy in Prostate Cancer: History, Combination Therapies, Trials, and Future Perspective.

In the last decades, the development of PET/CT radiopharmaceuticals, targeting the Prostate-Specific Membrane Antigen (PSMA), changed the management of prostate cancer (PCa) patients thanks to its higher diagnostic accuracy in comparison with conventional imaging both in staging and in recurrence. Alongside molecular imaging, PSMA was studied as a therapeutic agent targeted with various isotopes. In 2021, results from the VISION trial led to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of [Lu]Lu-PSMA-617 as a novel therapy for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) and set the basis for a radical change in the future perspectives of PCa treatment and the history of Nuclear Medicine.

SARS-CoV-2 Affects Thyroid and Adrenal Glands: An F-FDG PET/CT Study.

Background: Since most endocrine glands express ACE-2 receptors and can be infected by SARS-CoV-2 virus, this retrospective multicentre observational study aims to assess the metabolic activity of thyroid and adrenal glands of COVID-19 patients by F-FDG PET/CT.

Methods: We retrospectively evaluated the F-FDG PET/CT scans of COVID-19 patients admitted by three different centres, either in a low-intensity department or in the intensive care unit (ICU). A visual assessment and a semi-quantitative evaluation of areas of interest in thyroid and adrenal glands were performed by recording SUVmax and SUVmean.