Publications by authors named "Mario Morais-Almeida"

The twenty-first century has seen a fundamental shift in disease epidemiology with anthropogenic environmental change emerging as the likely dominant factor affecting the distribution and severity of current and future human disease. This is especially true of allergic diseases and asthma with their intimate relationship with the natural environment. Climate change-related variables including increased ambient temperature, heat waves, extreme weather events, air pollution, and rainfall distribution, all can affect asthma in children, but each of these variables also affects asthma via alterations in pollen production and release, outdoor allergen exposure or the microbiome.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Precautionary Allergen Labelling (PAL) is used to warn people about possible allergens in food that could affect those with allergies.
  • The World Allergy Organization found that PAL is not consistently regulated, which makes it confusing for people with food allergies.
  • There are discussions among global organizations to create better rules for PAL so that it is clear and helpful for everyone, but there are still some challenges to making these rules work everywhere.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are tools that help assess a patient's health at a specific time and are important for personalized healthcare.
  • - The paper reviews the use of visual analog scales (VAS) for measuring asthma and allergic rhinitis control, particularly focusing on the MASK-air app, which includes electronic VAS forms.
  • - A randomized controlled trial was conducted to validate the electronic VAS, and further evaluations confirmed the effectiveness of VAS questions and additional medication scores for allergic asthma symptoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In 2010, the United States Human and Health Services (US HHS) and the European Union's (EU) Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology signed a memorandum of understanding to stimulate cooperation surrounding health-related information communications technology. The key project that emerged from this agreement is the (IPS), intended to provide succinct clinically relevant patient summaries, which are generalizable and condition-independent, that can be readily used by all clinicians for the care of patients. Although allergies are included in the main information required by the IPS library and framework, it is misrepresented which leads to underdiagnosis or misdiagnosis of patients suffering from allergic and hypersensitivity conditions (A/H).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: The emergence of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the subsequent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has raised questions about its impact on pediatric asthma. This review analyzes the latest research to offer a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics between COVID-19 and pediatric asthma.

Areas Covered: This narrative review examines the effects of COVID-19 on pediatric asthma, exploring clinical outcomes, immune responses, recommended treatments, the impact of SARS-CoV-2 strains, and COVID-19 vaccination.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The traditional healthcare approach often overlooks patients' personal experiences and strengths, focusing mainly on disease treatment. Person-centered care aims to align medical decisions with individual values and preferences, particularly for those with chronic conditions.
  • - This paper seeks to enhance care for rhinitis and asthma by developing digital care pathways and incorporating real-world evidence to create a more patient-centered approach.
  • - Key components of the review include advancements in mHealth, the integration of artificial intelligence, a novel classification system for airway diseases, and proposals for the ARIA 2024 guidelines, all targeting a sustainable and applicable healthcare model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Real-world data on the range and impact of comorbid health conditions that affect pediatric asthma are scant, especially from developing countries. Lack of data hinders effective diagnosis, treatment, and overall management of these complex cases. We, hereby, describe the common pediatric asthma comorbid conditions in terms of evidence for association, potential mechanisms of impact on asthma control, and treatment benefit.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Rationale: It is unclear how each individual asthma symptom is associated with asthma diagnosis or control.

Objectives: To assess the performance of individual asthma symptoms in the identification of patients with asthma and their association with asthma control.

Methods: In this cross-sectional study, we assessed real-world data using the MASK-air app.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Monitoring is a major component of asthma management in children. Regular monitoring allows for diagnosis confirmation, treatment optimization, and natural history review. Numerous factors that may affect disease activity and patient well-being need to be monitored: response and adherence to treatment, disease control, disease progression, comorbidities, quality of life, medication side-effects, allergen and irritant exposures, diet and more.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Allergic rhinitis (AR) and asthma may affect health-related quality of life. However, national estimates on the quality of life of patients with AR or asthma are lacking.

Objective: To provide estimates for utility scores and EuroQoL five-dimension (EQ-5D) visual analog scale (VAS) for patients with AR or asthma.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * The authors of the manuscript suggest modifications to the WAO grading system for SARs, aligning it with a new grading scale from the Consortium for Food Allergy Research (CoFAR) for systemic reactions in food allergies.
  • * The goal of the proposed changes is to create a standard grading system for SARs linked to allergen immunotherapy that is applicable across different allergens and methods of administration in both clinical
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: In allergic rhinitis and asthma, adolescents and young adult patients are likely to differ from older patients. We compared adolescents, young adults and adults on symptoms, control levels, and medication adherence.

Methods: In a cross-sectional study (2015-2022), we assessed European users of the MASK-air mHealth app of three age groups: adolescents (13-18 years), young adults (18-26 years), and adults (>26 years).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The emergence of biologic therapies for the management of asthma has been a revolutionary change in our capacity to manage this disease. Since the launch of omalizumab, several other biologics have been marketed or are close to being marketed, suggesting that a plethora of monoclonal antibodies can be expected in the coming years. This will facilitate the transition to the paradigm of personalized medicine, but on the other hand will decisively further complicate the choice of the most appropriate treatment, in the absence of reliable enough biological markers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Biomarkers for the diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of patients with rhinitis and/or asthma are urgently needed. Although some biologic biomarkers exist in specialist care for asthma, they cannot be largely used in primary care. There are no validated biomarkers in rhinitis or allergen immunotherapy (AIT) that can be used in clinical practice.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Validated questionnaires are used to assess asthma control over the past 1-4 weeks from reporting. However, they do not adequately capture asthma control in patients with fluctuating symptoms. Using the Mobile Airways Sentinel Network for airway diseases (MASK-air) app, we developed and validated an electronic daily asthma control score (e-DASTHMA).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

MASK-air , a validated mHealth app (Medical Device regulation Class IIa) has enabled large observational implementation studies in over 58,000 people with allergic rhinitis and/or asthma. It can help to address unmet patient needs in rhinitis and asthma care. MASK-air is a Good Practice of DG Santé on digitally-enabled, patient-centred care.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Asthma imposes a heavy morbidity burden during childhood; it affects over 10% of children in Europe and North America and it is estimated to exceed 400 million people worldwide by the year 2025. In clinical practice, diagnosis of asthma in children is mostly based on clinical criteria; nevertheless, assessment of both physiological and pathological processes through biomarkers, support asthma diagnosis, aid monitoring, and further lead to better treatment outcomes and reduced morbidity. Recently, identification and validation of biomarkers in pediatric asthma has emerged as a top priority across leading experts, researchers, and clinicians.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: In clinical and epidemiological studies, cutoffs of patient-reported outcome measures can be used to classify patients into groups of statistical and clinical relevance. However, visual analog scale (VAS) cutoffs in MASK-air have not been tested.

Objective: To calculate cutoffs for VAS global, nasal, ocular, and asthma symptoms.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Digital health is an umbrella term which encompasses eHealth and benefits from areas such as advanced computer sciences. eHealth includes mHealth apps, which offer the potential to redesign aspects of healthcare delivery. The capacity of apps to collect large amounts of longitudinal, real-time, real-world data enables the progression of biomedical knowledge.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Data from mHealth apps can provide valuable information on rhinitis control and treatment patterns. However, in MASK-air®, these data have only been analyzed cross-sectionally, without considering the changes of symptoms over time. We analyzed data from MASK-air® longitudinally, clustering weeks according to reported rhinitis symptoms.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Several studies have suggested an impact of allergic rhinitis on academic productivity. However, large studies with real-world data (RWD) are not available.

Objective: To use RWD to assess the impact of allergic rhinitis on academic performance (measured through a visual analog scale [VAS] education and the Work Productivity and Activity Impairment Questionnaire plus Classroom Impairment Questions: Allergy Specific [WPAI+CIQ:AS] questionnaire), and to identify factors associated with the impact of allergic rhinitis on academic performance.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Drug repurposing is a major field of value-added medicine. It involves investigating and evaluating existing drugs for new therapeutic purposes that address unmet healthcare needs. Several unmet needs in allergic rhinitis could be improved by drug repurposing.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: fopen(/var/lib/php/sessions/ci_session357bhh1bqmne2igeh5t9a33mkdh7gfv1): Failed to open stream: No space left on device

Filename: drivers/Session_files_driver.php

Line Number: 177

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: session_start(): Failed to read session data: user (path: /var/lib/php/sessions)

Filename: Session/Session.php

Line Number: 137

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once