Aims: Risk assessment is essential in the prevention of cardiovascular disease. In patients with recent acute coronary syndrome (ACS) or coronary revascularization, risk prediction tools, like the European Society of Cardiology guideline recommended SMART-REACH risk score, are increasingly used to predict the risk of recurrent cardiovascular events enabling risk-based personalized prevention. However, little is known about the association between risk stratification and the social and healthcare costs at a population level.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs is the case in other situations of deep uncertainty, the unknowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic have aroused a great deal of attention in the media. Drawing insights both from mediatization theory and ignorance studies, we discuss the coverage of the AstraZeneca vaccine controversies to develop a new concept that we call the mediatization of ignorance. In doing so, we conceptualize the procedure through which unknowns become mediatized as a three-step process that results from a combination of logics from the areas of politics, health, and science/industry.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEthical Theory Moral Pract
October 2021
The idea of the right to mobility has been fundamental to modern Western citizenship and is expressed in many legal and government documents. Although there is widespread acceptance regarding the importance of mobility in older adults, there have been few attempts to develop ethical and theoretical tools to portray mobility (in)equalities in old age. This paper develops a novel conceptualisation of kinetic values focusing on older adults whose ability to move has been restricted for internal and external reasons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMed Health Care Philos
March 2022
Many experts have emphasised that chatbots are not sufficiently mature to be able to technically diagnose patient conditions or replace the judgements of health professionals. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has significantly increased the utilisation of health-oriented chatbots, for instance, as a conversational interface to answer questions, recommend care options, check symptoms and complete tasks such as booking appointments. In this paper, we take a proactive approach and consider how the emergence of task-oriented chatbots as partially automated consulting systems can influence clinical practices and expert-client relationships.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Qual Stud Health Well-being
December 2021
Patient and public involvement is widely thought to be important in the improvement of health care delivery and in health equity. The article examines the role of experiential knowledge in service co-production in order to develop opiate substitution treatment services (OST) for high-risk opioid users. Drawing on social representations theory and the concept of social identity, we explore how experts' by experience and registered nurses' understandings of OST contain discourses about the social representations, identity, and citizenship of the participants and the effects these may have on developing or hindering inclusive and bottom-up forms of patient and public involvement.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this paper, an adaptive activity and environment recognition algorithm running on a mobile phone is presented. The algorithm makes inferences based on sensor and radio receiver data provided by the phone. A wide set of features that can be extracted from these data sources were investigated, and a Bayesian maximum a posteriori classifier was used for classifying between several user activities and environments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRadiation-induced genomic instability has been well documented, particularly in vitro. However, the understanding of its mechanisms and their consequences in vivo is still limited. In this study, Caenorhabditis elegans (C.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGene expression responses of paper birch (Betula papyrifera) leaves to elevated concentrations of CO(2) and O(3) were studied with microarray analyses from three time points during the summer of 2004 at Aspen FACE. Microarray data were analyzed with clustering techniques, self-organizing maps, K-means clustering and Sammon's mappings, to detect similar gene expression patterns within sampling times and treatments. Most of the alterations in gene expression were caused by O(3), alone or in combination with CO(2).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDevelopmental disorders of teeth are among the most sensitive targets of polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxin and -furan (PCDD/F) exposure. In rats, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) reduces dose-dependently the size of molars, most severely the third lower molars. Dioxins also have effects on developing bone, including altered bone mineral density as well as reduced bending breaking force and stiffness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComparison of forest protection between regions in Europe is extremely difficult, because there is such wide variation of strategies, procedures and constraints; the way forests have been used historically and their present closeness to nature also varies, and furthermore so does the definition of what constitutes a forest. For the European Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe (MCPFE) in 2003, forest protection has been harmonised into three categories for the sake of comparison: protection to safeguard biodiversity, protection of landscape and specific natural features, and protective forest functions. There is no single, uniform and universal model and no internationally agreed target with respect to the percentage of forests which should be protected.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Treatment of reactive arthritis (ReA) with antibiotics has so far remained controversial. Eradication of the causative microbe appears logical, but short term antibiotic treatment has no beneficial effect on the outcome of ReA.
Objective: To evaluate the effect of a three month course of ciprofloxacin on ReA.