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Objectives: Interception therapy requires an individual to take a treatment today to prevent a future medical event. Patients must trade off treatment burdens incurred today against future benefits. We examined the preferences of high-risk lung cancer (LC) individuals for potential interception therapies that reduce the risk of developing lung cancer. Method(s): An online discrete-choice experiment (DCE) was developed for hypothetical LC interception treatments with four attributes: reduction in risk of LC over 3 years, injection site reaction severity, nonfatal serious infection risk, and death from serious infection risk. Respondents chose between two alternative treatments or a no-treatment option. The DCE was analyzed using random-parameters logit, and maximum acceptable risk for an LC risk reduction was calculated. Logit analysis explored characteristics of respondents who always selected no treatment. Result(s): The sample included 803 adults aged 50-80 years with at least a 20 pack-year smoking history. Respondents had an average willingness to accept interception therapy (alternative-specific constant=1.30, 95% CI: 0.91-1.69). Respondents viewed larger reductions in the risk of LC as most important. Respondents were willing to accept increases in risk of nonfatal serious infection up to 15% for a 15% improvement in relative LC risk reduction and increases in risk of death from serious infection up to 1.5% for a 23% improvement in relative LC risk reduction. However, 16% of respondents selected 'no treatment' for all DCE questions. Older respondents, current smokers who have never tried to quit, and those who did not get regular skin exams for cancer and/or COVID-19 vaccine were more likely to opt out of interception therapy. Conclusion(s): Generally, individuals at high risk of LC are willing to consider interception therapy. Study results can support benefit-risk assessments for future systemic LC interception treatments, and the results may have implications for other therapeutic areas.Copyright © 2023
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With the extensive implementation of the strong public health interventions in China, many models proposed to predict COVID-19 epidemic are no longer applicable to the current epidemic development. In this paper, a COVID-19 prediction method is proposed based on a staging SEITR model with consideration of strong public health interventions in China. The method simulates preventive and control measures such as mass nucleic acid testing and quarantine of close contacts by introducing the role of Isolates and the transformation of Exposed to Isolated. The experimental evaluation uses real epidemic data from six cities including Nanjing, Yangzhou, and etc. The accuracy of prediction for total number of infections reaches 95.8% with the data of the first 15 days of the outbreak. In addition, the prediction accuracy of the end of the pandemic is 95.07%. These show that the proposed method can effectively predict the course of the epidemic and it is practical for relevant departments to formulate reasonable prevention and control measures. © 2022 IEEE.
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Due to the high incidence of kidney disease, there is an urgent need to develop wearable artificial kidneys. This need is further exacerbated by the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. However, the dialysate regeneration system of the wearable artificial kidney has a low adsorption capacity for urea, which severely limits its application. Therefore, nanomaterials that can effectively remove uremic toxins, especially urea, to regenerate dialysate are required and should be further investigated and developed. Herein, flower-like molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) nanosheets decorated with highly dispersed cerium oxide (CeO2) were prepared (MoS2/CeO2), and their adsorption performances for urea, creatinine, and uric acid were studied in detail. Due to the open interlayer structures and the combination of MoS2 and CeO2, which can provide abundant adsorption active sites, the MoS2/CeO2 nanomaterials present excellent uremic toxin adsorption activities. Further, uremic toxin adsorption capacities were also assessed using a self-made fixed bed device under dynamic conditions, with the aim of developing MoS2/CeO2 for the practical adsorption of uremic toxins. In addition, the biocompatibility of MoS2/CeO2 was systematically analyzed using hemocompatibility and cytotoxicity assays. Our data suggest that MoS2/CeO2 can be safely used for applications requiring close contact with blood. Our findings confirm that novel 2-dimensional nanomaterial adsorbents have significant potential for dialysis fluid regeneration. © 2022
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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted the instructional delivery of higher education institutions, with online teaching being implemented suddenly and unprecedentedly. Recent evidence suggests that this urgent move to distance education presents considerable challenges to students, leading to increasing concern over their academic resilience, and physical and mental well-being during the crisis. This chapter aims to investigate how Chinese college students cope with online teaching, focusing on the essential resilience strategies they adopt to overcome the academic difficulties. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 college students from mainland China, who had enrolled in an ESP (English for Specific Purposes) course and had attended over 30 online sessions in 2020. The data were analyzed using grounded theory building and constant comparison method. This study contributes to the understanding of students' resilience in achieving academic success in times of crisis. Drawing on students' perspective, the findings are expected to invite new thinking on support services aimed at helping students tackling unique challenges and enhancing resilience, and to respond to calls for fostering future online pedagogical development. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Nucleic acid vaccine based on messenger RNA (mRNA) is a kind of mRNA technology emerging in recent years. mRNA vaccines have many advantages over traditional vaccines, which can be manufactured in a cell-free manner, enabling rapid, economical and efficient production. In addition, single mRNA vaccines can encode multiple antigens, enhance the immune response against certain pathogens, improve the efficiency of treatment process of diseases, and can target multiple microbial or viral variants in a single formulation. mRNA is seen as a revolutionary vaccine technology in COVID-19 prevention and control, which has been developed and successfully applied in record time. The mRNA vaccine is with poor stability, so the development and applications of novel delivery systems are essential. With the intensive study of pharmacology of mRNA vaccines, the clinical applications of mRNA vaccines enter into a new stage. Recently, mRNA technologies were used in the prevention and therapies of diseases, and some results were published. Here, the output of mRNA vaccines used in prevention and therapies of diseases was summarized, and the development of mRNA vaccines was also discussed. © 2022, China Biotechnology Press. All rights reserved.
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In this article, we searched the research literatures related to clinical investigation of non-invasive positive pressure ventilation (NPPV) in acute respiratory failure(ARF)/chronic respiratory failure(CRF) between 1st October 2021 and 30th September 2022 through Medline, and reviewed the important advances. Three prospective randomized controlled studies related to the efficacy and safety of NPPV and/or high-flow nasal cannula oxygen therapy (HFNC) on patients with COVID-19 with ARF were reported, showing that NPPV (including continuous positive airway pressure and bilevel positive airway pressure) was able to reduce the intubation rate, but the efficacy of HFNC was contradictory. In addition, progress has been made in outcome prediction models for ARF treated with NPPV, NPPV-related cardiac arrest, and the impact of human-machine interface on NPPV treatment outcomes. The effects of NPPV as preoxygenation method before intubation was reported to be able to reduce severe desaturation during intubation, especially in obese population. The use of NPPV in extubated patients resulting in reduced reintubation rate was also studied. With regard to long-term home application of NPPV, five indicators of successful initiation were proposed, but the success rate was low in clinical practice. Some reports showed that psychological support could improve the adherence to NPPV. The results of these studies contributed to the rational selection and optimal application of NPPV in clinical practice.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Noninvasive Ventilation , Respiratory Insufficiency , Humans , Prospective Studies , COVID-19/therapy , Noninvasive Ventilation/methods , Continuous Positive Airway Pressure/adverse effects , Continuous Positive Airway Pressure/methods , Respiratory Insufficiency/therapy , Respiratory Insufficiency/etiology , Intubation, IntratrachealABSTRACT
Background The spreading epidemic of novel coronavirus (corona virus disease 2019, COVID-19) pneumonia poses a serious challenge to global life health and disease control, with significantly higher mortality rates among individuals infected with COVID-19 comorbid underlying disease. Inhibitors of the rennin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAASi), an important class of anti-hypertensive drugs, have been found to increase the morbidity and mortality of COVID-19. This study aimed to clarify the efficacy and safety of RAASi treatment in COVID-19 patients with hypertension. Objective To systematically evaluate the efficacy and safety of RAASi therapy in COVID-19 patients with hypertension. Methods PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) were searched from inception to January 2022. A publicly available case-control studies of COVID-19 patients with hypertension treated with RAASi versus non RAASi therapy were included, and outcome measures were overall mortality, incidence of critical illness, incidence of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), incidence of myocardial injury, and incidence of renal injury, with meta-analysis performed using Revman 5.3. Results Seventeen studies with a total of 5 689 patients were included, of whom 2 168 received RAASi therapy and 3 521 did not. Meta analysis showed that overall mortality was lower in COVID-19 comorbid hypertensive patients treated with RAASi compared with non RAASi treated patients 〔OR=0.54, 95%CI (0.41, 0.72), P<0.000 1〕;Between RAASi treated and non RAASi treated COVID-19 patients associated with hypertension, the incidence of critical illness 〔OR=0. 92, 95%CI (0.79, 1.08), P=0.30〕, the incidence of ARDS 〔OR=0.81, 95%CI (0.57, 1.13, P=0.22〕, the incidence of myocardial injury 〔OR=1.03, 95%CI (0.83, 1.27), P=0.82〕, and the incidence of kidney injury 〔OR=1.13, 95%CI (0.78, 1.66), P=0.52〕, differences were not statistically significant. Conclusion Treatment with RAASi in COVID-19 patients with hypertension reduced the overall mortality rate, and did not increase the incidence of critical illness, ARDS, myocardial injury, and renal injury in COVID-19 patients with hypertension. RAASi therapy is effective and safe in treating patients with COVID-19 combined with hypertension. © 2022 Chinese General Practice. All rights reserved.
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As the COVID-19 pandemic scattered businesses and their workforces into new scales of remote work, vital security concerns arose surrounding remote access. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) also plays a growing role in the ability of companies to support remote workforces. As more enterprises embrace concepts of zero trust in their network security posture, access control policy management problems become a more significant concern as it relates to BYOD security enforcement. This BYOD security policy must enable work from home, but enterprises have a vested interest in maintaining the security of their assets. Therefore, the BYOD security policy must strike a balance between access, security, and privacy, given the personal device use. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities of enabling zero trust in BYOD use cases. We present a BYOD policy specification to enable the zero trust access control known as BYOZ. Accompanying this policy specification, we have designed a network architecture to support enterprise zero trust BYOD use cases through the novel incorporation of continuous authentication & authorization enforcement. We evaluate our architecture through a demo implementation of BYOZ and demonstrate how it can meet the needs of existing enterprise networks using BYOD. © 2022 IEEE.
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“Mutual assistance” with profound moral significance, is a traditional social moral code and way of life, inherits the essence of ancient philosophers, is gradually regarded as a principle of dealing with neighborhood and social relations, which embodies the organic unity of social value and individual value. Actively carrying forward the ethical idea of “mutual assistance” is of great practical significance for preventing and controlling COVID-1 9, winning the prevention and control war, and promoting the construct ion of community of human health. Therefore, it is necessary to cultivate and practice “mutual assistance” vigorously to strengthen the moral consciousness of ‘iife first”, stimulate individual moral consciousness, and construct socialbenign moralrelations. © 2022, Editorial department of Chinese Medical Ethics. All rights reserved.
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Purpose While blended learning has been proved to be successful in learning outcomes, the landscape of blended learning has changed under coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Hence, the present study aims to explore first-year university students' perceptions of wholly blended learning during the pandemic, through the three constructs in the community of inquiry (CoI) instrument, namely teaching, social and cognitive presences (CPs). Design/methodology/approach Survey data (N = 449) were collected from the 2020 Fall Cohort in Hong Kong for quantitative analysis. Reliability and validity of the CoI model is examined, followed by correlation and independent-samples t-tests. Findings First-year students perceived overall low teaching, social and CPs with social presence (SP) scoring the highest. Findings also indicated that teaching presence (TP) significantly determined CP and SP;SP was a mediating variable in CoI. Students' gender and prior learning experience (online/blended) were not associated with perceptions of presences. Practical implications Students today are more familiar with technology-based communication, and staying up to date in educational technology is crucial for teachers. Trainings in online teaching should be provided to teachers. Also, interactive technology should focus on improving peer interaction. Originality/value The proposed study is novel in that it used the CoI model among first-year students in Hong Kong during the pandemic. Findings are valuable to higher education in understanding students' perception of bended learning and in addressing issues.
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In this paper, we use the permutation entropy algorithm to derive the static and dynamic permutation entropy of commodity futures, and to evaluate the effectiveness of main products in China's commodity futures market. The intraday data of six varieties belonging to six categories in China's commodity futures market are taken as samples. We find the following: (1) The return distribution of the main varieties shows high peaks, fat tails and asymmetry, and follows the biased random walk distribution characteristics;(2) The permutation entropy of all varieties decreases significantly in the same time window, during which the price volatility of major commodity markets rises. And the time window coincides with the impact time of COVID-19 epidemic;(3) By comparing the distribution of permutation entropy of main varieties in different stages of event shock, we found that the mean value of permutation entropy decreases significantly during the process of event shock, and the price fluctuates greatly. Therefore, the significant decrease of permutation entropy is a valuable warning signal for regulators and investors.
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The COVID-19 continues to spread throughout the world, and local clusters and outbreaks related to overseas imports have occurred in many places in China. Vaccination against COVID-19 is one of the most effective tools to prevent disease, severe illness and death. For vaccines developed and used by China, it is particularly important for scientific and targeted prevention and control to study different outbreak scenarios, to conduct in-depth real-world research on SARS-CoV-2 variants, and to further promote vaccine development and technical reserves. This article commented the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccine, and prospected the future research on vaccine efficacy, immunization strategy and vaccine development, which provided evidence for optimizing vaccination strategy.
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COVID-19 , COVID-19/prevention & control , COVID-19 Vaccines , Humans , Pandemics/prevention & control , SARS-CoV-2 , Vaccine EfficacyABSTRACT
The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has exerted a tremendous impact on the psyche of people around the world, especially adolescents. In order to provide a valuable theoretical basis for effective measures to prevent psychological problems in adolescents during public health emergencies in the future, this study examined the mediating effect of coping style (CS, including positive coping style (PCS) and negative coping style (NCS)) and the moderating effect of emotional management ability (EMA) on the relationship between the psychological stress response (PSR) and aggression (AGG) in adolescents during the COVID-19 epidemic in China. The Buss-Warren Aggression Questionnaire, Simplified Coping Style Questionnaire, and Emotion Management Questionnaire were employed to investigate the mental health of Chinese adolescents from April 10-20 (Time point 1, T1) and May 20-30 (Time point 2, T2), 2020. A total of 1,931 adolescents (aged 10-25 years, M = 19.18 years, 51.4% male) were examined at T1 and 334 adolescents (aged 11-25 years, M = 19.97 years, 48.7% male) were reinvestigated at T2. Overall, 17.6% of the participants at T1 and 16.8% at T2 reported obvious PSR activation. NCS partly mediated the relationship between the PSR and AGG, and the indirect effect was moderated by EMA reported at T2. There were regional differences in the moderated mediation model in low-risk areas at T1. The moderated effects of EMA at T1 and T2 were opposite. Specifically, high EMA resulted in a stronger relationship between NCS and AGG at T1, whereas high EMA resulted in a weaker relationship between NCS and AGG at T2. Psychological reactions resulting from sudden public health events may trigger AGG in younger individuals. However, EMA may have a buffering effect on the onset of AGG. This research expands our understanding of the development of AGG in adolescents during the pandemic.
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Interferometric scattering microscopy is a newly emerging alternative to fluorescence microscopy in biomedical research and diagnostic testing due to its ability to detect nano-objects such as individual proteins, extracellular vesicles, and virions individually through their intrinsic elastic light scattering. To improve the signal-to-noise ratio, we developed photonic resonator interferometric scattering microscopy (PRISM) in which a photonic crystal (PC) resonator is used as the sample substrate. The scattered light is amplified by the PC through resonant near-field enhancement, which then interferes with the <1% transmitted light to create intensity contrast. Importantly, the scattered photons assume the wavevectors defined by PC's photonic band structure, resulting in the ability to utilize a non-immersion objective without significant loss at illumination density as low as 25 W/cm2. We demonstrate virus and protein detection, including highly selective capture and counting of intact pseudotype SARS-CoV-2 from saliva with sensitivity equivalent to conventional nucleic acid tests. The results showcase the promise of nanophotonic surfaces in the development of resonance-enhanced interferometric microscopies, and as a single step, room temperature, and rapid viral detection technology. © 2022 SPIE.
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Background: Symptoms reduction is a crucial outcome to be considered when testing novel treatments for COVID-19. The goal was to assess the impact of casirivimab+imdevimab (cas+imd) dose/exposure on the trajectory and resolution time of symptoms in outpatients with COVID-19. Methods: Analysis used data from the COV-2067 trial (NCT04425629). Cas+imd was administered intravenously (total dose 1.2 to 8 g). Symptoms data were collected using SE-C19, a patient-reported survey developed de novo to assess the symptomatic course of COVID-19. Based on patients' responses on SE-C19, a Rasch analysis was used to derive a latent score to infer their overall underlying symptom severity. A direct response model was fitted to the latent score-time data to quantify the effects of dose/exposure, demographic and clinical characteristics on latent symptom trajectory. Symptoms resolution time was defined as time from randomization to the 1st day during which the patient scored "no symptom". Several parametric models were tested as structural model, assuming a known distribution, eg, exponential or Weibull, for time to symptoms resolution data. Risk variables (eg, binary treatment or categorical dose levels, exposure metrics, baseline demographic, clinical, and biological characteristics) were tested as covariates using a proportional hazard model. Results: Results from the direct response model suggest that each dose, as compared to placebo, remarkably reduced IT50 (time taken to achieve half of the maximal response of reducing symptom) by ∼40%. By excluding data from placebo arm, none of the tested doses or predicted exposures, were significant covariates on any of the model parameters. Results from the parametric regression analysis further confirmed that cas+imd (HR=1.25) is a major factor shortening the symptoms resolution time in a dose-and exposure-independent manner. Males (HR=1.13) have a shorter symptoms resolution time. Older age (HR=0.991), higher BMI (HR=0.988), and more severe baseline symptoms (HR=0.783 for moderate and 0.589 for severe) significantly contribute to longer symptoms resolution time. Conclusion: Treatment with cas+imd (1.2 g or above), rapidly resolved symptoms in outpatients in a dose-and exposure-independent manner as indicated by a direct response model using derived latent score and further confirmed by a survival analysis using time to symptoms resolution. In addition, symptom severity, age, BMI, sex were major risk factors affecting the symptoms resolution time.