In the last few decades, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk has decreased dramatically among individuals affected by familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) as a result of the early initiation of statin treatment in childhood. Contemporaneously important improvements in care for people with diabetes have also been made, such as the prevention of mortality from acute diabetic complications. However, individuals with type 1 diabetes still have a two to eight times higher risk of death than the general population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProspects (Paris)
December 2022
The Strategic Approach to Girls' Education (STAGE) project developed and implemented an intervention that helped marginalized out-of-school girls in the northern regions of Ghana enter and be successful in primary school. STAGE builds on the Government of Ghana's Complementary Basic Education policy, which supports an accelerated learning program that provides literacy and numeracy classes in mother tongue to out-of-school girls between 8 and 14 years of age. This article reviews the literature that informed the design of STAGE, describes the intervention, reports on the impact on its participants, and suggests a model for replicating this intervention in Ghana and adapting it for implementation in other countries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The ability to accurately distinguish bacterial from viral infection would help clinicians better target antimicrobial therapy during suspected lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI). Although technological developments make it feasible to rapidly generate patient-specific microbiota profiles, evidence is required to show the clinical value of using microbiota data for infection diagnosis. In this study, we investigated whether adding nasal cavity microbiota profiles to readily available clinical information could improve machine learning classifiers to distinguish bacterial from viral infection in patients with LRTI.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBroad-spectrum antibiotics for suspected early-onset neonatal sepsis (sEONS) may have pronounced effects on gut microbiome development and selection of antimicrobial resistance when administered in the first week of life, during the assembly phase of the neonatal microbiome. Here, 147 infants born at ≥36 weeks of gestational age, requiring broad-spectrum antibiotics for treatment of sEONS in their first week of life were randomized 1:1:1 to receive three commonly prescribed intravenous antibiotic combinations, namely penicillin + gentamicin, co-amoxiclav + gentamicin or amoxicillin + cefotaxime (ZEBRA study, Trial Register NL4882). Average antibiotic treatment duration was 48 hours.
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