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This systematic literature review was conducted to provide insights into how online readers' comments have been studied in the context of health over a 10-year span. About 593 studies published between 2010 and 2020;of these, 34 met the research criteria for inclusion. Our findings reveal that 60% of the studies focused on the United States, and a qualitative method was used in 74.3% of these studies. About 23.5% of the studies explored vaccine-related issues. Our results reveal that among the selected studies, 76.5% and 20.6% had female and male first authors, respectively. Textual analysis of s shows that the top five keywords were news, HPV, vaccine, themes, and vaccination. However, 58.8% of the identified studies did not use any theoretical framework. In addition, nine health topics emerged: vaccines;health policies;nutritional and dietary choices;women's health issues;quality of life and wellbeing;smoking;engagement with health-related news content;COVID-19;and suicide and mental health.
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In this paper, we provide an overview of the upcoming ImageCLEF campaign. ImageCLEF is part of the CLEF Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum since 2003. ImageCLEF, the Multimedia Retrieval task in CLEF, is an ongoing evaluation initiative that promotes the evaluation of technologies for annotation, indexing, and retrieval of multimodal data with the aim of providing information access to large collections of data in various usage scenarios and domains. In its 21st edition, ImageCLEF 2023 will have four main tasks: (i) a Medical task addressing automatic image captioning, synthetic medical images created with GANs, Visual Question Answering for colonoscopy images, and medical dialogue summarization;(ii) an Aware task addressing the prediction of real-life consequences of online photo sharing;(iii) a Fusion task addressing late fusion techniques based on the expertise of a pool of classifiers;and (iv) a Recommending task addressing cultural heritage content-recommendation. In 2022, ImageCLEF received the participation of over 25 groups submitting more than 258 runs. These numbers show the impact of the campaign. With the COVID-19 pandemic now over, we expect that the interest in participating, especially at the physical CLEF sessions, will increase significantly in 2023. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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News organizations increasingly use Facebook to expand their reach and foster audience engagement. However, this free platform exposes news audiences to user comments before accessing and reading news articles. This exposure shapes the visible opinion climate and has the potential to influence readers. Through the application of the hostile media bias hypothesis, the influence of Facebook comments on COVID-19 related news articles and a knowledge-based assessment on perceptions of news bias and credibility are tested using a nationwide sample of Facebook users (N = 450). Findings show that user comments enhance negative perceptions of bias and diminish perceptions of favorability. The ability for knowledge-based assessments to alleviate this negative influence may induce reactance and needs further investigation. © The Author(s) 2022.
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Objective: To evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the epidemiological features of substances of abuse poisoning in adolescents. Methods: We performed a comparative analysis of all adolescents diagnosed with substances of abuse poisoning during two periods of 20 months each: one before and the other after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed the medical records (T40 ICD -10-CM code) taking into consideration the following criteria: age, gender, environment, incriminated substance from the case history and urinary toxicological screening tests, route of exposure, hospitalization period, chronic consumption in antecedents. The patients were divided into two samples: Sample 1 patients before the COVID-19 pandemic onset (September 2018-February 2020) and Sample 2 patients after the onset of the pandemic (March 2020-September 2021). Results: The analysis of the two samples revealed that there were significantly fewer patients with substances of abuse acute poisoning admitted after the COVID-19 pandemic onset (56 versus 106). Analyzing the data regarding age, gender, environment, route and length of hospitalization, there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups of patients (Table 1). The percentage for cannabis is quite similar in both categories while for new psychoactive substances and benzodiazepines it is higher in the second sample. The percentage of chronic consumers was significantly higher in sample 2 compared to sample 1 (66.7% versus 50.9%). Conclusion: There were significantly fewer hospitalized adolescents with substances of abuse poisoning during the pandemic period. The percentage of poisoned patients that were chronic consumers of substances of abuse was higher during the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic did not influence the popularity of cannabis which was the most commonly used substance in both sample groups.
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Art influences our lives and society. The forms acquired by art have evolved, making art a part of our everyday life. Before the second half of the 19th century, music and stories could only be heard live and seldom, but today it is difficult to imagine a day without them. With the increasing complexity of art forms, the complexity of artwork acquisition decision-making process has also increased. Personal choice is influenced by factors like the availability of artworks, the relationship between intermediaries and art producers, the economic and cultural contexts. This paper analyses the selection criteria of artworks from the perspective of art consumers. The analysed data were obtained through a survey with two waves carried out in the period preceding the COVID-19 pandemic and during the pandemic. The results show that the most important criterion in choosing an artwork is the subjective connexion that is created between the consumer and the artwork, and that this connexion is defined mainly by the emotions and feelings the artwork generates. © 2021, Bucharest University of Economic Studies. All rights reserved.
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Objective. The access to surgical care has been limited throughout the world due to COVID-19 pandemics. This article aims to study the outcomes in locally advanced rectal cancer in our department, as a result of COVID-19 pandemics restrictions. Materials and methods. We included in the current study all patients who underwent surgery for locally-advanced rectal cancer in our department in 2019 (n=32, Group 1). We compared these patients with the patients operated after the resolution of the COVID-19 restrictions in 2020 (n=16, Group 2). All patients underwent long-course neo-adjuvant chemoradiotherapy. Results. The mean age of the patients was 64.5 years in Group 1 vs 65 years in Group 2 (p=0.99). In Group 1, the majority of the patients were clinically staged as cT3 (68.7%), similar to Group 2 (cT3 stage - 87.5%). The median time between neo-adjuvant treatment and the surgery was 8.4 weeks in Group 1 vs 11.1 weeks in Group 2 (p=0.009). During neoadjuvant treatment, none of the patients in Group 2 were diagnosed with SARS-COV2 infection and none of the surgeries were delayed due to the viral infection. There were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of pathologic staging (p=0.77), but complete pathologic response rate was higher in Group 2 as compared to Group 1 (25% vs. 12%). Conclusion. Neo-adjuvant long-course chemotherapy is a safe treatment option for patients with locally-advanced rectal cancer even during the COVID-19. Increased time to surgery leads to a higher rate of complete pathologic response, but further studies are needed to assess long-term impact of this outcome.
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This edited collection compares and analyses the most prominent political communicative responses to the outbreak and global spread of the COVID-19 strain of coronavirus within 27 nations across five continents and two supranational organisations: the EU and the WHO. The book encompasses the various governments’ communication of the crisis, the role played by opposition and the vibrancy of the information environment within each nation. The chapters analyse the communication drawing on theoretical perspectives drawn from the fields of crisis communication, political communication and political psychology. In doing so the book develops a framework to assess the extent to which state communication followed the key indicators of effective communication encapsulated in the principles of: being first;being right;being credible;expressing empathy;promoting action;and showing respect. The book also examines how communication circulated within the mass and social media environments and what impact differences in spokespersons, messages and the broader context has on the success of implementing measures likely to reduce the spread of the virus. Cumulatively, the authors develop a global analysis of the responses and how these are shaped by their specific contexts and by the flow of information, while offering lessons for future political crisis communication. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of politics, communication and public relations, specifically on courses and modules relating to current affairs, crisis communication and strategic communication, as well as practitioners working in the field of health crisis communication. © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Darren Lilleker, Ioana A. Coman, Miloš Gregor and Edoardo Novelli.