Purpose: Implicit, unconscious biases in medicine are personal attitudes about race, ethnicity, gender, and other characteristics that may lead to discriminatory patterns of care. However, there is no consensus on whether implicit bias represents a true predictor of differential care given an absence of real-world studies. We conducted the first real-world pilot study of provider implicit bias by evaluating treatment parity in prostate cancer using unstructured data-the most common way providers document granular details of the patient encounter.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPercutaneous image-guided ablation techniques are a consolidated therapeutic alternative for patients with high preoperative surgical risk for the management of oncological diseases in multiple body districts. Each technique has both pros and cons according to the type of energy delivered, mechanism of action, and site of application. The present article reviews the most recent literature results on ablation techniques applied in the field of genitourinary diseases (kidney, adrenal glands, prostate, and uterus), describing the advantages of the use of each technique and their technical limitations and summarizing the major recommendations from an international consensus meeting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInfect Control Hosp Epidemiol
October 2024
Introduction: Special Operations Forces (SOF) often conduct operations in physiologically stressful environments such as severe heat, cold, or hypoxia, which can induce decreases in a variety of cognitive abilities. Given the promising empirical demonstration of the efficacy of exogenous ketone monoester (KME) supplementation in attenuating cognitive performance decrease during hypoxia at rest in a laboratory setting, we conducted a real-world, field experiment examining KME's efficacy during high-altitude mountaineering, an austere environment in which US SOF have conducted increasing numbers of operations over the past two decades.
Methods: Specifically, 34 students and cadre at the US Army 10th Special Forces Group Special Operations Advanced Mountaineering School (SOAMS) participated in a randomized, double-blind, placebo (PLA)-controlled crossover trial (KME vs.
Purpose: To evaluate the safety and effectiveness of large-bore percutaneous biliary access techniques for cholangioscopy-assisted gallstone extraction in patients with a history of acute calculous cholecystitis who are poor surgical candidates.
Materials And Methods: A retrospective analysis was conducted on patients who underwent percutaneous cholangioscopy for gallstone extraction using large-bore access (24 or 30 F) at 2 large academic centers from September 2020 and August 2022. Technical success, procedure duration, fluoroscopy time, immediate postprocedural symptom reduction, 3-month symptom-free outcomes, and adverse events (AEs) were assessed.