ABSTRACT
Background The Indian state of Jharkhand has the highest rate of wasting (29%) among young children. Mobile audio call follow-up can be used to assess such children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM). Aim This study evaluated SAM children during the COVID-19 outbreak and learn more about the status of their home/community care, and caregivers' awareness of integrated child development services (ICDS) and COVID-19 prevention. Methods Contact numbers of caregivers for discharged children were obtained from 54 malnutrition treatment centers (MTCs). In April and June 2020, mentors conducted follow-up interviews using mobile phone calls. Results Seven children (1.72%) were reported dead and 400 were alive, mostly girls (59.5%). Only a few caregivers observed post-discharge ailments (15.4%) and weight loss (7.7%) in their children. Children aged six to 24 months were characterized by continued breastfeeding (88.0%) at most five to six times a day (45.8%). Most of the children were not fed as per maternal infant and young child feeding protocols. Age in months with an adjusted odds ratio (OR) of 0.55 (1.00-1.11) as a 95% confidence interval (CI), age category, with an adjusted OR of 4.32 (1.71- 10.94) as 95% CI, and breastfeeding with adjusted OR 1.85 (1.07- 3.21) as 95% CI were three major predictors for a well-fed child. Conclusion Community involvement is crucial in the follow-up of children with SAM for effective rehabilitation. Mobile phone audio call follow-up is a relatively cost-effective approach to tackle geographic barriers and COVID-19 lockdown-induced situations. There are major gaps mainly in informing caregivers on how to manage COVID-19 with breastfeeding.
ABSTRACT
An effective healthcare system should embrace practices that enhance overall quality and productivity. Training primary care physicians in Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS) has become part of the processes that improve the quality of patient care and serve to guide the diagnostic impression quickly and effectively. With the purpose of highlighting the applications and challenges of POCUS use in US primary health care, we conducted a narrative review based on PubMed-indexed and Cochrane Library English text publications searched in May-July 2022 using a combination of key terms including point of care ultrasound, primary care, and US healthcare. Many studies have shown that POCUS has a positive impact on fostering medical attention and reducing morbidity, mortality, and healthcare costs. Besides assisting in procedures, POCUS has a head-to-toe application in evaluating inflammatory and infectious conditions, acute abdomen, cardiopulmonary function, musculoskeletal and vascular pathologies. However, its uniform implementation is limited across the US healthcare system due to multitudes of barriers such as lack of training, resource scarcity, and low reimbursement. Training primary care physicians in general and emergency care providers, in particular, is key to scaleup POCUS use. Large size studies are paramount to further explore the effectiveness of POCUS and identify key challenges to its implementation.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 mainly causes pulmonary manifestation;nonetheless, its systemic inflammatory response involves multiple organs, including the heart. We aimed to evaluate the prevalence, predictors, and outcomes of myocardial injury in hospitalized patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Methods and Results: We performed an observational retrospective analysis on patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in a moderate-sized community hospital system. Myocardial injury was defined as highly sensitive troponin T levels in the 99th percentile above the normal upper limit for the respective biological sex. Multivariable logistic regression models were fitted to assess the association between the myocardial-injury and the no-myocardial-injury groups for primary and secondary outcomes. A total of 1632 (49.3% male, 41.7% aged 60–79 years) patients with COVID-19 were included, out of which 312 (19.1%) had a myocardial injury. Patients with myocardial injury were older (36.9% > 80 years) and had higher cardiovascular-related comorbidities than those without. The prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors (78.5% vs. 52.0%) and cardiovascular diseases (78.2% vs. 56.1%) was much higher in the myocardial-injury group. Older age (50–64 years vs. <49 years;OR, 3.67 [1.99–6.74]), Angiotensin Receptor Blockers (ARBs) (OR, 1.44 [1.01–2.05]), Beta-blockers (OR, 2.37 [1.80–3.13]), and cardiovascular comorbidities (OR, 1.49 [1.09–2.05]) were strong predictors of cardiac injury after multivariable adjustment. Myocardial injury was strongly associated with ICU admission (adjusted OR, 1.68 [1.29–2.19]) and longer length of hospital stay (median days, 5 (3, 9) vs. 4 (2, 7)). The results do not show a significant difference in the use of mechanical ventilation (OR, 1.29 [0.87–1.89]) or in-hospital mortality (OR, 1.37 [0.98–1.91]) with respect to myocardial injury. Conclusion: This multicenter retrospective study of nearly 1600 patients revealed the following findings: Myocardial injury was observed in 1 out of 5 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 but was more often clinically insignificant. Patients of age > 65 had very high odds of having elevated troponin levels after adjusting for sex and other illnesses. Pre-existing cardiac diseases and risk factors were robust predictors of cardiac injury after adjusting for age and sex. In the adjusted model, myocardial injury was not associated with the requirement of mechanical ventilation or change in in-hospital mortality.
ABSTRACT
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is claiming millions of lives and creating an additional burden on health care, which is already affected by the rise of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The scientific community, on the other side, is enormously engaged with studies to best identify the characteristics of the virus and minimize its effect while supporting the fight to contain NCDs, mainly cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), which are contributing hugely to the global death toll. Hence, the roles of vitamin D in COVID-19 immunity and cardiovascular health are gaining traction recently. This literature review will mainly focus on summarizing pertinent studies and scientific publications which highlight the association of vitamin D levels with the various outcomes of COVID-19 and CVDs. It will also address how low vitamin D correlates with the epidemiology of CVDs and the inflammatory mechanisms attributed to COVID-19 severity. We believe that our review may open up hindsight perspectives and further discussions among the physicians in tapping the potential of vitamin D supplementation to tackle the morbidity, mortality, and health care cost of the two deadly diseases, COVID-19 and CVDs.