Affect and post-COVID-19 symptoms in daily life: An exploratory experience sampling study.

Insight into the daily life experiences of patients with post-COVID-19 syndrome is lacking. The current study explored temporal fluctuations of and associations between positive and negative affect and symptoms throughout the day in previously hospitalised post-COVID-19 patients using an experience sampling methodology. Ten participants (age: median = 60, interquartile range = 9 years; 50% women; 80% ≥1 comorbidity; 8-12 months since hospital discharge) filled out brief online questionnaires, six times a day for 14 consecutive days.

Physical and mental fatigue in post-COVID syndrome and their associations over time: A small-sample ESM-study to explore fatigue, quality of sleep and behaviours.

Objective: Post-COVID syndrome leaves millions of people with severe fatigue, yet little is known about its nature in daily life. In this exploratory study, momentary associations between physical and mental fatigue, quality of sleep and behaviours over two weeks in patients with post-COVID syndrome were assessed.

Method: Data on fatigue levels, quality of sleep and behaviours was collected for 14 consecutive days using the experience sampling method in ten ex-hospitalised patients with post-COVID syndrome.

"It Really Is an Elusive Illness"-Post-COVID-19 Illness Perceptions and Recovery Strategies: A Thematic Analysis.

A substantial number of patients report persisting symptoms after a COVID-19 infection: so-called post-COVID-19 syndrome. There is limited research on patients' perspectives on post-COVID-19 symptoms and ways to recover. This qualitative study explored the illness perceptions and recovery strategies of patients who had been hospitalised for COVID-19.

Nervous system drugs taken by future fathers and birth defects in offspring: a prospective registry-based cohort study.

Objectives: To evaluate the association of paternal intake of antipsychotics, anxiolytics, hypnotics and sedatives, antidepressants, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and (benzo)diazepines during the development of fertilising sperm with birth defects in offspring.

Design: Prospective registry-based cohort study.

Setting: Total Danish birth cohort 1997-2016 using Danish national registries.

Preconception Antidiabetic Drugs in Men and Birth Defects in Offspring : A Nationwide Cohort Study.

Background: Diabetes reduces semen quality and increasingly occurs during reproductive years. Diabetes medications, such as metformin, have glucose-independent effects on the male reproductive system. Associations with birth defects in offspring are unknown.

The Danaid Theory of Aging.

The classical evolutionary theories of aging suggest that aging evolves due to insufficient selective pressure against it. In these theories, declining selection pressure with age leads to aging through genes or resource allocations, implying that aging could potentially be stalled were genes, resource allocation, or selection pressure somewhat different. While these classical evolutionary theories are undeniably part of a description of the evolution of aging, they do not explain the diversity of aging patterns, and they do not constitute the only possible evolutionary explanation.

Impaired fecundity as a marker of health and survival: a Danish twin cohort study.

Study Question: Is fecundity, measured as self-reported time to first pregnancy (TTP), a marker for subsequent health and survival?

Summary Answer: Long TTP was a marker for increased mortality among women and higher hospitalization rates for both women and men.

What Is Known Already: Poor semen quality has been linked to increased mortality and morbidity from a wide range of diseases. Associations among fecundity, health and survival among women are still uncertain and studies on actual measures of fecundity and health outcomes are rare.

Paternal prescription medication before conception: A retrospective cohort study of all births in Denmark 1997-2017.

Aim: To study what medication fathers are being prescribed in the months preceding conception.

Methods: A retrospective cohort study of Danish national registries, comprising all births in Denmark 1997-2017 (1.3 million births).

Variability Matters.

Much of science, including public health research, focuses on means (averages). The purpose of the present paper is to reinforce the idea that variability matters just as well. At the hand of four examples, we highlight four classes of situations where the conclusion drawn on the basis of the mean alone is qualitatively altered when variability is also considered.

Risk of pre-term births and major birth defects resulting from paternal intake of COVID-19 medications prior to conception.

Objective: With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, large numbers of people will receive one of the several medications proposed to treat COVID-19, including patients of reproductive age. Given that some medications have shown adverse effects on sperm quality, there might be a transgenerational concern. We aim at examining the association between drugs proposed to treat COVID-19 when taken by the father around conception and any pre-term birth or major birth defects in offspring in a nation-wide cohort study using Danish registry data.

Risk of pre-term births and major birth defects resulting from paternal intake of COVID-19 medications prior to conception.

Objective: With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, large numbers of people will receive one of the several medications proposed to treat COVID-19, including patients of reproductive age. Given that some medications have shown adverse effects on sperm quality, there might be a transgenerational concern. We aim at examining the association between drugs proposed to treat COVID-19 when taken by the father around conception and any pre-term birth or major birth defects in offspring in a nation-wide cohort study using Danish registry data.

Heritability of subfertility among Danish twins.

Objective: To investigate the relative contribution of genetic and environmental components to subfertility.

Design: Twin design using a quantitative genetic liability threshold model that splits the variation of subfertility into additive genetic effects, common environmental effects, and unique environmental effects.

Setting: Not applicable.

Age-specific cancer rates: a bird's-eye view on progress.

Purpose: We aim to shed light on progress in cancer medicine through studying time trends in age-specific rates of cancer incidence and mortality over the last quarter century.

Methods: We analyzed age-specific incidence and mortality rates of all cancer sites combined using the high-quality population-based databases of Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands for the period 1990-2016.

Results: Over these 26 years, cancer incidence rates increased in all investigated countries irrespective of age by about 22%.

Progression of the smoking epidemic in high-income regions and its effects on male-female survival differences: a cohort-by-age analysis of 17 countries.

Background: Of all lifestyle behaviours, smoking caused the most deaths in the last century. Because of the time lag between the act of smoking and dying from smoking, and because males generally take up smoking before females do, male and female smoking epidemiology often follows a typical double wave pattern dubbed the 'smoking epidemic'. How are male and female deaths from this epidemic differentially progressing in high-income regions on a cohort-by-age basis? How have they affected male-female survival differences?

Methods: We used data for the period 1950-2015 from the WHO Mortality Database and the Human Mortality Database on three geographic regions that have progressed most into the smoking epidemic: high-income North America, high-income Europe and high-income Oceania.

Understanding Differences in Cancer Survival between Populations: A New Approach and Application to Breast Cancer Survival Differentials between Danish Regions.

Large variations in cancer survival have been recorded between populations, e.g., between countries or between regions in a country.

Potential gains in life expectancy by reducing inequality of lifespans in Denmark: an international comparison and cause-of-death analysis.

Background: Reducing lifespan inequality is increasingly recognized as a health policy objective. Whereas lifespan inequality declined with rising longevity in most developed countries, Danish life expectancy stagnated between 1975 and 1995 for females and progressed slowly for males. It is unknown how Danish lifespan inequality changed, which causes of death drove these developments, and where the opportunities for further improvements lie now.

The Rarity of Survival to Old Age Does Not Drive the Evolution of Senescence.

The evolution of senescence is often explained by arguing that, in nature, few individuals survive to be old and hence it is evolutionarily unimportant what happens to organisms when they are old. A corollary to this idea is that extrinsically imposed mortality, because it reduces the chance of surviving to be old, favors the evolution of senescence. We show that these ideas, although widespread, are incorrect.

Size, longevity and cancer: age structure.

There is significant recent interest in Peto's paradox and the related problem of the evolution of large, long-lived organisms in terms of cancer robustness. Peto's paradox refers to the expectation that large, long-lived organisms have a higher lifetime cancer risk, which is not the case: a paradox. This paradox, however, is circular: large, long-lived organisms are large and long-lived because they are cancer robust.

Intrinsic and extrinsic mortality reunited.

Intrinsic and extrinsic mortality are often separated in order to understand and measure aging. Intrinsic mortality is assumed to be a result of aging and to increase over age, whereas extrinsic mortality is assumed to be a result of environmental hazards and be constant over age. However, allegedly intrinsic and extrinsic mortality have an exponentially increasing age pattern in common.

Interaction mortality: senescence may have evolved because it increases lifespan.

Given an extrinsic challenge, an organism may die or not depending on how the threat interacts with the organism's physiological state. To date, such interaction mortality has been only a minor factor in theoretical modeling of senescence. We describe a model of interaction mortality that does not involve specific functions, making only modest assumptions.

The causal pie model: an epidemiological method applied to evolutionary biology and ecology.

A general concept for thinking about causality facilitates swift comprehension of results, and the vocabulary that belongs to the concept is instrumental in cross-disciplinary communication. The causal pie model has fulfilled this role in epidemiology and could be of similar value in evolutionary biology and ecology. In the causal pie model, outcomes result from sufficient causes.