SIMpat: A Synthetic Benchmark for Similarity Metrics on Patient Representations.

Similarity and clustering tasks based on data extracted from electronic health records on the patient level suffer from the curse of dimensionality and the lack of inter-patient data comparability. Indeed, for many health institutions, there are many more variables, and ways of expressing those variables to represent patients than patients sharing the same set of data. To lower redundancy and increase interoperability one strategy is to map data to semantic-driven representations through medical knowledge graphs such as SNOMED-CT.

Long term anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody kinetics and correlate of protection against Omicron BA.1/BA.2 infection.

Binding antibody levels against SARS-CoV-2 have shown to be correlates of protection against infection with pre-Omicron lineages. This has been challenged by the emergence of immune-evasive variants, notably the Omicron sublineages, in an evolving immune landscape with high levels of cumulative incidence and vaccination coverage. This in turn limits the use of widely available commercial high-throughput methods to quantify binding antibodies as a tool to monitor protection at the population-level.

Sex-specific modulation of circulating growth differentiation factor-15 in patients with type 2 diabetes and/or obesity.

Objective: Growth differentiation factor-15 (GDF15), a key metabolic regulator, is associated with obesity and diabetes in which sex-specific differences have been reported. Thus, we assessed whether GDF15 could be dependent on sex in diabetes and/or obesity groups.

Methods: We measured serum GDF15 levels by ELISA in eight lean women and men (n = 16), eight women and eight men having obesity (n = 16), eight women and eight men with type 2 diabetes (T2D, n = 16), and seven women and nine men with both diabetes and obesity (n = 16).

Association between SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence in Nursing Home Staff and Resident COVID-19 Cases and Mortality: A Cross-Sectional Study.

The burden of COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted the elderly, who are at increased risk of severe disease, hospitalization, and death. This cross-sectional study aimed to assess the association between SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence among nursing home staff, and cumulative incidence rates of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among residents. Staff seroprevalence was estimated within the SEROCoV-WORK+ study between May and September 2020 across 29 nursing homes in Geneva, Switzerland.

Occupational risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and reinfection during the second pandemic surge: a cohort study.

Objectives: This cohort study including essential workers, assessed the risk and incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection during the second surge of COVID-19 according to baseline serostatus and occupational sector.

Methods: Essential workers were selected from a seroprevalence survey cohort in Geneva, Switzerland and were linked to a state centralised registry compiling SARS-CoV-2 infections. Primary outcome was the incidence of virologically confirmed infections from serological assessment (between May and September 2020) to 25 January 2021, according to baseline antibody status and stratified by three predefined occupational groups (occupations requiring sustained physical proximity, involving brief regular contact or others).