Longitudinal dynamics of depression in risk groups of older individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Older individuals are most at risk of severe COVID-19 and particularly require protection causing (self)restriction of psychosocial interaction in daily living. So far, the impact of psychosocial withdrawal on mental health seems less pronounced in community-dwelling older individuals compared to younger individuals. However, dynamics and adverse long-term effects of the pandemic, such as increases in depression, are still mostly unclear, especially for vulnerable subgroups.

Older adults' coping strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic - a longitudinal mixed-methods study.

Introduction: Older age is a main risk factor for severe COVID-19. In 2020, a broad political debate was initiated as to what extent older adults need special protection and isolation to minimize their risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, isolation might also have indirect negative (e.

A novel biomarker-based prognostic score in acute ischemic stroke: The CoRisk score.

Objectives: To derive and externally validate a copeptin-based parsimonious score to predict unfavorable outcome 3 months after an acute ischemic stroke (AIS).

Methods: The derivation cohort consisted of patients with AIS enrolled prospectively at the University Hospital Basel, Switzerland. The validation cohort was prospectively enrolled after the derivation cohort at the University Hospital of Bern and University Hospital Basel, Switzerland, as well as Frankfurt a.

Treatment choices and neuropsychological symptoms of a large cohort of early MS.

Objective: To assess clinical characteristics, distribution of disease-modifying treatments (DMTs), and neuropsychological symptoms in a large cohort of patients with early-stage MS.

Methods: The German National MS Cohort is a multicenter prospective longitudinal cohort study that has recruited DMT-naive patients with clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) and relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) since 2010. We evaluated their baseline characteristics and the prevalence of neuropsychological symptoms.

Unbiased split variable selection for random survival forests using maximally selected rank statistics.

The most popular approach for analyzing survival data is the Cox regression model. The Cox model may, however, be misspecified, and its proportionality assumption may not always be fulfilled. An alternative approach for survival prediction is random forests for survival outcomes.

Male-specific association between MT-ND4 11719 A/G polymorphism and ulcerative colitis: a mitochondria-wide genetic association study.

Background: Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a chronic inflammatory disorder of still unknown pathogenesis. Increasing evidence indicates that alterations in mitochondrial respiration and thus adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production are involved. This may contribute to mucosal energy deficiency and subsequently intestinal barrier malfunction, which is accepted to be a major hallmark of UC.

Novel multiple sclerosis susceptibility loci implicated in epigenetic regulation.

We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on multiple sclerosis (MS) susceptibility in German cohorts with 4888 cases and 10,395 controls. In addition to associations within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) region, 15 non-MHC loci reached genome-wide significance. Four of these loci are novel MS susceptibility loci.

Calibrating random forests for probability estimation.

Probabilities can be consistently estimated using random forests. It is, however, unclear how random forests should be updated to make predictions for other centers or at different time points. In this work, we present two approaches for updating random forests for probability estimation.

Successful Replication of GWAS Hits for Multiple Sclerosis in 10,000 Germans Using the Exome Array.

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) successfully identified various chromosomal regions to be associated with multiple sclerosis (MS). The primary aim of this study was to replicate reported associations from GWAS using an exome array in a large German study. German MS cases (n = 4,476) and German controls (n = 5,714) were genotyped using the Illumina HumanExome v1-Chip.