Background: As in many other countries, the Dutch emergency healthcare system is under pressure due to increasing numbers of patients, limited budgets, and constrained (human) resources (TraumaNet AMC 19 May, 2016; Int J Emerg Med 6:41, 2013). eHealth, enlarged by the COVID-19 pandemic, has been advocated to substitute face-to-face care to alleviate the pressure of the burden of care (Ministry of Health Welfare and Sport, 2022; Dutch Society of Hospitals, 2022). In order for eHealth solutions to be adopted in daily practice, is it essential to assess healthcare professionals' attitudes toward its usefulness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: General anaesthesia is provided to more than 300 million surgical patients worldwide, every year. It is administered either through total intravenous anaesthesia, using only intravenous agents, or through inhalational anaesthesia, using volatile anaesthetic agents. The debate on how this affects postoperative patient outcome is ongoing, despite an abundance of published trials.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Audit and Feedback (A&F) is a widely used quality improvement (QI) intervention in healthcare. However, not all feedback is accepted by professionals. While claims-based feedback has been previously used for A&F interventions, its acceptance by medical specialists is largely unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: To cope with the rising number of patients with trauma in an already constrained Dutch health care system, Direct Discharge (DD) has been introduced in over 25 hospitals in the Netherlands since 2019. With DD, no routine follow-up appointments are scheduled after the emergency department (ED) visit, and patients are supported through information leaflets, a smartphone app, and a telephone helpline. DD reduces secondary health care use, with comparable patient satisfaction and primary health care use.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: On the basis of previous analyses of the incidence of urinary incontinence (UI) after radical prostatectomy (RP), the hospital RP volume threshold in the Netherlands was gradually increased from 20 per year in 2017, to 50 in 2018 and 100 from 2019 onwards.
Objective: To evaluate the impact of hospital RP volumes on the incidence and risk of UI after RP (RP-UI).
Design Setting And Participants: Patients who underwent RP during 2016-2020 were identified in the claims database of the largest health insurance company in the Netherlands.
Objective: To explore what information sources medical specialists currently use to inform their medical decision-making.
Design: Qualitative, semistructured interviews.
Setting And Participants: A total of 20 semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 surgeons and 10 internal medicine specialists who work in academic and/or regional hospitals in the Netherlands.
When making choices in healthcare, in addition to quality, affordability and accessibility, sustainability (climate and environmental impact) must also be taken into account. Dutch healthcare is responsible for 7% of the entire CO2 footprint, 4% of all waste and 13% of raw material consumption. In addition to the fact that making buildings and processes in healthcare more sustainable is desperately needed, we advocate that we also look at the care provided.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Reuse of health care data for various purposes, such as the care process, for quality measurement, research, and finance, will become increasingly important in the future; therefore, "Collect Once Use Many Times" (COUMT). Clinical information models (CIMs) can be used for content standardization. Data collection for national quality registries (NQRs) often requires manual data entry or batch processing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch Question: What is the risk of hypogonadism in men with obstructive azoospermia, non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA) or Klinefelter syndrome after testicular sperm extraction (TESE)?
Design: This prospective longitudinal cohort study was carried out between 2007 and 2015.
Results: Around 36% of men with Klinefelter syndrome, 4% of men with obstructive azoospermia and 3% of men with NOA needed testosterone replacement therapy (TRT). Klinefelter syndrome was strongly associated with TRT while no association was found between obstructive azoospermia or NOA and TRT.
Study Question: What is the impact of cancer or hematological disorders on germ cells in pediatric male patients?
Summary Answer: Spermatogonial quantity is reduced in testes of prepubertal boys diagnosed with cancer or severe hematological disorder compared to healthy controls and this reduction is disease and age dependent: patients with central nervous system cancer (CNS tumors) and hematological disorders, as well as boys <7 years are the most affected.
What Is Known Already: Fertility preservation in pediatric male patients is considered based on the gonadotoxicity of selected treatments. Although treatment effects on germ cells have been extensively investigated, limited data are available on the effect of the disease on the prepubertal male gonad.
Objectives: To determine whether the statistical fragility of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in high-impact journals has improved in the last decade and to perform an umbrella review of all published data on the Fragility Index (FI) across medical specialties.
Study Design And Setting: The FI was calculated for all eligible RCTs published from 2014-2021 in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the British Medical Journal, and the Annals of Internal Medicine. Trials reporting dichotomous, statistically significant, superiority results were eligible.
Loss-of-function mutations in the X-linked immunoglobulin superfamily, member 1 () gene result in central hypothyroidism, often associated with macroorchidism. Testicular enlargement in these patients might be caused by increases in follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) levels, as IGSF1 has been proposed to function as an inhibin B receptor or as an inhibitor of activin type I receptor (ALK4) activity in pituitary gonadotrope cells. If true, loss of IGSF1 should lead to reduced inhibin B action or disinhibition of activin signaling, thereby increasing FSH synthesis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Question: Can the priorities for future research in infertility be identified?
Summary Answer: The top 10 research priorities for the four areas of male infertility, female and unexplained infertility, medically assisted reproduction and ethics, access and organization of care for people with fertility problems were identified.
What Is Known Already: Many fundamental questions regarding the prevention, management and consequences of infertility remain unanswered. This is a barrier to improving the care received by those people with fertility problems.
Autologous spermatogonial stem cell transplantation is an experimental technique aimed at restoring fertility in infertile men. Although effective in animal models, in vitro propagation of human spermatogonia prior to transplantation has proven to be difficult. A major limiting factor is endogenous somatic testicular cell overgrowth during long-term culture.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Question: How do high-quality human preimplantation embryos influence the endometrium to promote their own implantation?
Summary Answer: High-quality human preimplantation embryos secrete a specific microRNA (miRNA), hsa-miR-320a, which promotes migration of human endometrial stromal cells (hESCs).
What Is Known Already: We have previously shown that high-quality human preimplantation embryos excrete unknown factors that influence migration of hESCs.
Study Design, Size, Duration: Embryo excreted miRNAs, specifically those excreted by high-quality embryos, were identified and their effect on hESCs was determined by measuring the migration capacity and gene expression patterns of primary isolated hESCs.
Background: Origin of human adult Leydig cells (ALCs) is not well understood. This might be partly due to limited data available on the identification and location of human precursor and stem Leydig cells (SLCs) which hampers the study on the development of ALCs.
Objectives: The aim of the present study was to investigate whether described human (PDGFRα, NGFR) and rodent (NES, PDGFRα, THY1, NR2F2) SLC markers are expressed by a common cell population within human adult testicular interstitial cells in vivo and before and after in vitro propagation.
Study Question: Is there a difference in DNA methylation status of imprinted genes in placentas derived from IVF conceptions where embryo culture was performed in human tubal fluid (HTF) versus G5 culture medium?
Summary Answer: We found no statistically significant differences in the mean DNA methylation status of differentially methylated regions (DMRs) associated with parentally imprinted genes in placentas derived from IVF conceptions cultured in HTF versus G5 culture medium.
What Is Known Already: Animal studies indicate that the embryo culture environment affects the DNA methylation status of the embryo. In humans, birthweight is known to be affected by the type of embryo culture medium used.
Autologous transplantation of spermatogonial stem cells is a promising new avenue to restore fertility in infertile recipients. Expansion of the initial spermatogonial stem cell pool through cell culturing is a necessary step to obtain enough cells for effective repopulation of the testis after transplantation. Since in vitro propagation can lead to (epi-)genetic mutations and possibly malignant transformation of the starting cell population, we set out to investigate genome-wide DNA methylation status in uncultured and cultured primary testicular ITGA6+ sorted cells and compare them with germ cell tumor samples of the seminoma subtype.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch Question: What is the cost-effectiveness of gonadotrophins compared with clomiphene citrate in couples with unexplained subfertility undergoing intrauterine insemination (IUI) with ovarian stimulation under strict cancellation criteria?
Design: A cost-effectiveness analysis alongside a randomized controlled trial (RCT). Between July 2013 and March 2016, 738 couples were randomized to gonadotrophins (369) or clomiphene citrate (369) in a multicentre RCT in the Netherlands. The direct medical costs of both strategies were compared.
Aligning innovation processes in healthcare with health system demands is a societal objective, not always achieved. In line with earlier contributions, Lehoux et al outline priorities for research, public communication, and policy action to achieve this objective. We endorse setting these priorities, while also highlighting a 'commitment gap' in collectively addressing system-level challenges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe current strategy to preserve fertility of male prepubertal cancer patients consists of cryopreservation of a testicular tissue biopsy containing spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs). While in humans, fertility restoration strategies from prepubertal testicular tissues are still under investigation and have not yet resulted in complete germ cell differentiation, in mice various studies have described production of sperm and offspring through testicular organ culture and transplantation of in vitro propagated SSCs. Organ culture has shown to be successful in generating mature spermatozoa when using testicular fragments from various mouse strains, including CD1 and C57BL/6 J.
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