Use of Late-Life Expectancy for Assessing the Long-Term Benefit of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors.

To grade the long-term benefit of anticancer agents, the American Society of Clinical Oncology Value Framework (ASCO-VF) awards tail-of-the-curve bonus points by using milestone survival at twice the median control survival. Here, we propose an alternative, late-life expectancy that we defined as the area under the Kaplan-Meier curve from median control survival to the end of follow-up. We analyzed all indications of immune checkpoint inhibitors with survival data and found that 9 indications out of 13 (69.

Donor Lung Sequence Number and Survival after Lung Transplantation in the United States.

Rationale: In the United States, an algorithm known as the "match-run" creates an ordered ranking of potential recipients for available lung allografts. A potential recipient's match-run position, or "sequence number," is available to the transplant center when contacted with a lung offer. Lung offers with higher sequence numbers may be interpreted as a crowd-sourced evaluation of poor organ quality, though the association between the sequence number at which a lung is accepted and its recipient's post-transplant outcomes is unclear.

Living network meta-analysis was feasible when considering the pace of evidence generation.

Objectives: The aim of the study was to assess the feasibility of living network meta-analysis (NMA) taking into account the pace of evidence generation across different medical areas.

Study Design And Setting: We performed a systematic review to identify published NMAs. For each NMA, we calculated the cumulative number of new trials.

Variation in severe postpartum hemorrhage management: A national vignette-based study.

Objectives: To assess variations in management of severe postpartum hemorrhage: 1) between obstetricians in the same situation 2) by the same obstetrician in different situations.

Study Design: A link to a vignette-based survey was emailed to obstetricians of 215 maternity units; the questionnaire asked them to report how they would manage the PPH described in 2 previously validated case-vignettes of different scenarios of severe PPH. Vignette 1 described a typical immediate, severe PPH, and vignette 2 a less typical case of severe but gradual PPH.

Automatic screening using word embeddings achieved high sensitivity and workload reduction for updating living network meta-analyses.

Objectives: We aimed to develop and evaluate an algorithm for automatically screening citations when updating living network meta-analysis (NMA).

Study Design And Setting: Our algorithm learns from the initial screening of citations conducted when creating an NMA to automatically identify eligible citations (i.e.

Impact of post-warming culture duration on clinical outcomes of vitrified good-quality blastocyst transfers: a prospective randomized study.

Objective: To determine whether post-warming culture duration (1 hour vs. 18 hours) influences implantation rates (IRs) of good-quality blastocysts (GQB) in a good-prognosis population.

Design: Prospective interventional randomized study.

Host-pathogen interactions and prognosis of critically ill immunocompetent patients with pneumococcal pneumonia: the nationwide prospective observational STREPTOGENE study.

Purpose: To assess the relative importance of host and bacterial factors associated with hospital mortality in patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) for pneumococcal community-acquired pneumonia (PCAP).

Methods: Immunocompetent Caucasian ICU patients with PCAP documented by cultures and/or pneumococcal urinary antigen (UAg Sp) test were included in this multicenter prospective study between 2008 and 2012. All pneumococcal strains were serotyped.

Designs of trials assessing interventions to improve the peer review process: a vignette-based survey.

Background: We aimed to determine the best study designs for assessing interventions to improve the peer review process according to experts' opinions. Furthermore, for interventions previously evaluated, we determined whether the study designs actually used were rated as the best study designs.

Methods: Study design: A series of six vignette-based surveys exploring the best study designs for six different interventions (training peer reviewers, adding an expert to the peer review process, use of reporting guidelines checklists, blinding peer reviewers to the results (i.

Identifying treatment responders using counterfactual modeling and potential outcomes.

Individualizing treatment according to patients' characteristics is central for personalized or precision medicine. There has been considerable recent research in developing statistical methods to determine optimal personalized treatment strategies by modeling the outcome of patients according to relevant covariates under each of the alternative treatments, and then relying on so-called predicted individual treatment effects. In this paper, we use potential outcomes and principal stratification frameworks and develop a multinomial model for left and right-censored data to estimate the probability that a patient is a responder given a set of baseline covariates.

Making protocols available with the article improved evaluation of selective outcome reporting.

Objective: To compare primary outcomes reported in publications, protocols and registries and to evaluate the contribution of available protocols to assess selective outcome reporting (SOR) as compared with registration alone.

Study Design And Setting: We included all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published in 2015 and 2016 in the five leading general medical journals. For each RCT, we evaluated whether the protocol was available and searched for registration.

HLA-Mismatched Donors in Patients with Myelodysplastic Syndrome: An EBMT Registry Analysis.

Recently, haploidentical transplantation (haplo) using post-transplant cyclophosphamide (PTCy) has been reported to give very encouraging results in patients with hematological malignancies. Patients who have no HLA-matched donor currently have the choice between a mismatched unrelated donor, an unrelated cord blood (CB) donor, and a haploidentical related donor. The aim of our study is to compare the outcome of patients with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) who have been transplanted from a haploidentical donor using PTCy, an HLA-mismatched unrelated donor (marrow or peripheral blood stem cells), or an unrelated mismatched CB donor.

Impact of Biomarker-based Design Strategies on the Risk of False-Positive Findings in Targeted Therapy Evaluation.

Purpose: When there is more than one potentially predictive biomarker for a new drug, the drug is often evaluated in different subpopulations defined by different biomarkers. We aim to (i) estimate the risk of false-positive findings with this approach and (ii) evaluate the cross-validated adaptive signature design (CVASD) as a potential alternative.

Experimental Design: By using numerically simulated data, we compare the current approach and the CVASD across different settings and scenarios.

Correction to: Survey indicated that core outcome set development is increasingly including patients, being conducted internationally and using Delphi surveys.

In the original publication [1] the abbreviation for Core outcome sets (COS) was pluralized unnecessarily throughout the next.

A Prospective International Study on Adherence to Treatment in 305 Patients With Flaring SLE: Assessment by Drug Levels and Self-Administered Questionnaires.

Nonadherence to treatment is a major cause of lupus flares. Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a major medication in systemic lupus erythematosus, has a long half-life and can be quantified by high-performance liquid chromatography. This international study evaluated nonadherence in 305 lupus patients with flares using drug levels (HCQ < 200 ng/ml or undetectable desethylchloroquine), and self-administered questionnaires (MASRI < 80%).

The French Emergency National Survey: A description of emergency departments and patients in France.

Introduction: Some major changes have occurred in emergency department (ED) organization since the early 2000s, such as the establishment of triage nurses and short-track systems. The objectives of this study were to describe the characteristics of French EDs organization and users, based on a nationwide cross-sectional survey.

Methods: The French Emergency Survey was a nationwide cross-sectional survey.

Avoidable waste of research related to outcome planning and reporting in clinical trials.

Background: Inadequate planning, selective reporting, and incomplete reporting of outcomes in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) contribute to the problem of waste of research. We aimed to describe such a waste and to examine to what extent this waste could be avoided.

Methods: This research-on-research study was based on RCTs included in Cochrane reviews with a summary of findings (SoF) table.

Mapping of Crowdsourcing in Health: Systematic Review.

Background: Crowdsourcing involves obtaining ideas, needed services, or content by soliciting Web-based contributions from a crowd. The 4 types of crowdsourced tasks (problem solving, data processing, surveillance or monitoring, and surveying) can be applied in the 3 categories of health (promotion, research, and care).

Objective: This study aimed to map the different applications of crowdsourcing in health to assess the fields of health that are using crowdsourcing and the crowdsourced tasks used.

HLA-DRB3/4/5 mismatches are associated with increased risk of acute GVHD in 10/10 matched unrelated donor hematopoietic cell transplantation.

Matching for HLA-A, -B, -C, and -DRB1 loci (8/8 match) is currently the gold standard for unrelated donor hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT). In Europe, patients are also matched at the HLA-DQB1 loci (10/10 match). However, there is increasing evidence that matching at HLA-DRB3/4/5 loci may help to lower transplant-related morbidity and mortality.

Long-term efficacy of remission-maintenance regimens for ANCA-associated vasculitides.

Objective: To compare long-term efficacy of remission-maintenance regimens in patients with newly diagnosed or relapsing antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA)-associated vasculitides.

Methods: The 28-month Maintenance of Remission using Rituximab in Systemic ANCA-associated Vasculitis trial compared rituximab with azathioprine to maintain remission in patients with newly diagnosed or relapsing granulomatosis with polyangiitis, microscopic polyangiitis or renal-limited ANCA-associated vasculitis. Thereafter, prospective patient follow-up lasted until month 60.

Patients' perspectives on how to decrease the burden of treatment: a qualitative study of HIV care in sub-Saharan Africa.

Objective: Patients living with HIV infection (PLWH) in sub-Saharan Africa face an important burden of treatment related to everything they do to take care of their health: doctor visits, tests, regular refills, travels, and so on. In this study, we involved PLWH in proposing ideas on how to decrease their burden of treatment and assessed to what extent these propositions could be implemented in care.

Methods: Adult PLWH recruited in three HIV care centres in Côte d'Ivoire participated in qualitative interviews starting with '' Two independent investigators conducted a thematic analysis to identify and classify patients' propositions to decrease their burden of treatment.