Transition to home after very preterm birth: improving outcomes of children and their families-a systematic review protocol.

Introduction: Medical progress has significantly improved the survival rates of very preterm-born infants in recent decades. Nevertheless, these infants are still at increased risk for long-term impairments as compared with term-born infants. While the homecoming of a preterm-born infant is long-awaited and brings relief to families, it also marks the end of intensive monitoring and highly specialised professional care.

On the relevance of prognostic information for clinical trials: A theoretical quantification.

The question of how individual patient data from cohort studies or historical clinical trials can be leveraged for designing more powerful, or smaller yet equally powerful, clinical trials becomes increasingly important in the era of digitalization. Today, the traditional statistical analyses approaches may seem questionable to practitioners in light of ubiquitous historical prognostic information. Several methodological developments aim at incorporating historical information in the design and analysis of future clinical trials, most importantly Bayesian information borrowing, propensity score methods, stratification, and covariate adjustment.

Assessing relative COVID-19 mortality during the second wave: a prospective Swiss population-based study.

Objective: During the first COVID-19 wave in Switzerland, relative mortality was at least eight times higher compared with the uninfected general population. We aimed to assess sex-specific and age-specific relative mortality associated with a SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis during the second wave.

Design: Prospective population-based study.

Efficacy and safety of tafenoquine for malaria chemoprophylaxis (1998-2020): A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: In 2018, tafenoquine was approved for malaria chemoprophylaxis. We evaluated all available data on the safety and efficacy of tafenoquine chemoprophylaxis.

Methods: This systematic review followed the PRISMA guidelines and was registered on PROSPERO (CRD42019123839).

Obstructive sleep apnoea and the progression of thoracic aortic aneurysm: a prospective cohort study.

Background: Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is associated with an increased prevalence of aortic aneurysms and it has also been suggested that severe OSA furthers aneurysm expansion in the abdomen. We evaluated whether OSA is a risk factor for the progression of ascending thoracic aortic aneurysm (TAA).

Methods: Patients with TAA underwent yearly standardised echocardiographic measurements of the ascending aorta over 3 years and two level III sleep studies.

The Accuracy of Repeated Sleep Studies in OSA: A Longitudinal Observational Study With 14 Nights of Oxygen Saturation Monitoring.

Background: Strong evidence exists for clinically relevant night-to-night variability of respiratory events in patients with suspected OSA.

Research Question: How many sleep study nights are required to diagnose OSA accurately?

Study Design And Methods: Patients with suspected OSA underwent up to 14 nights of pulse oximetry (PO) at home and one night of in-hospital respiratory polygraphy (RP). The accuracy of each of the 13 sleep study nights was analyzed using the mean oxygen desaturation index 3% (ODI) of all 14 nights as a reference.

Antimicrobial and Insecticidal: Cyclic Lipopeptides and Hydrogen Cyanide Produced by Plant-Beneficial Strains CHA0, CMR12a, and PCL1391 Contribute to Insect Killing.

Particular groups of plant-beneficial fluorescent pseudomonads are not only root colonizers that provide plant disease suppression, but in addition are able to infect and kill insect larvae. The mechanisms by which the bacteria manage to infest this alternative host, to overcome its immune system, and to ultimately kill the insect are still largely unknown. However, the investigation of the few virulence factors discovered so far, points to a highly multifactorial nature of insecticidal activity.