Publications by authors named "R Weger"

Background: Harm reduction, when applied to drug use, prioritizes improving patient-centered health outcomes and reducing drug-related harm. In order for harm reduction strategies to be adopted by people who inject drugs (PWID), they need to be promoted, accessible, and accepted in that population and the community-at-large. While PWID face stigma at multiple levels, less is known about how stigma influences uptake and acceptance of harm reduction services and strategies among PWID.

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Background: Health care providers and health-related researchers face significant challenges when applying sentiment analysis tools to health-related free-text survey data. Most state-of-the-art applications were developed in domains such as social media, and their performance in the health care context remains relatively unknown. Moreover, existing studies indicate that these tools often lack accuracy and produce inconsistent results.

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Background: The use of software to monitor patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) can improve outcomes for patients with cancer receiving anticancer therapy; however, evidence from applications used in routine clinical practice is lacking.

Objective: We aimed to investigate adherence to and patient perceptions of a weekly, web-based PROM symptom monitoring program in routine clinical practice for patients with Multiple Myeloma. Moreover, we aimed to capture how clinical alerts prompted by the system influenced clinical care.

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Article Synopsis
  • Multiple myeloma (MM) is a complex cancer that requires multiple treatment lines due to frequent relapses, with varying attrition rates reported.
  • A study of 571 patients from the Austrian Myeloma Registry found that around 43.6% underwent stem cell transplantation and that appropriate frontline treatment significantly reduced attrition rates.
  • Factors such as younger age and achieving deep remission after treatment correlated with better long-term outcomes, suggesting that access to effective medications plays a crucial role in managing MM.
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Cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV) and antibody-mediated rejection are immune-mediated, long-term complications that jeopardize graft survival after heart transplantation (HTx). Interestingly, increased plasma levels of immunoglobulins have been found in end-stage heart failure (HF) patients prior to HTx. In this study, we aimed to determine whether increased circulating immunoglobulin levels prior to transplantation are associated with poor post-HTx survival.

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