ABSTRACT
Background: COVID19 Lockdown resulted in an extreme change in daily lifestyle with a significant increase in weight and loss of quality of life, as well as an increase in the risk of secondary health conditions even in young people. One reason for this is a fatal change in the nutritional situation, especially among adolescents. Convincing models to counter this problem are missing so far. Multiprofessional training programs could reveal an outstanding effect for secondary prevention of obesity in youth. Telehealth measures were successfully implemented several times during the COVID19 pandemic. Method(s): Adolescents (8-17 years) with severe obesity referred through a large obesity consultation were interviewed using standardized dietary behavior questionnaires (FEV-K, FFL-K, FFV-K) and quality of life questionnaires (WHO-5, KIND-L) and enrolled in a structured multimodal education program for adolescents with overweight. The program content (sports, nutrition, medicine, psychology) was tought exclusively video-based. After the end of the program (12 months), the patients were interviewed again regarding eating behavior and quality of life. In addition, a clinical examination including analysis of blood parameters was performed before and after the program. The results were analyzed and compared with results from the pre-pandemic period (2017 - 2019). Result(s): 108 children and adolescents (mean age 12.1 yrs;male 46.2%, BMI SDS 2.21) were studied and telemedicated. Based on a significantly increased intake of fatty and sugary foods and an increased amount of meals per day (7.2 meals per day), a significantly increased intake of vegetables and fruits as well as a massive decrease of sweets, snacks and soft drinks was observed after program participation, which corresponds to a significant improvement in dietary behavior also compared to the pre-pandemic period. The amount of meals per day decreased to 4.1 meals per day. The quality of life of the adolescents increased significantly. The BMI SDS and the blood parameters (cholesterol, triglycerides, HOMA index) showed a decreasing trend, which roughly corresponds to the effect of the pre-pandemic period. Discussion and Conclusion(s): This study demonstrated a beneficial effect on dietary behaviors and quality of life of adolescents with obesity during lockdown through video-based structured education. Future research needs to show the extent to which this effect is replicable with respect to new periods of contact restriction. It is possible that telemedicine obesity education components can reach a large number of patients and especially families in rural areas, and thus can be a supraregional support for adolescents with obesity.
ABSTRACT
Poor nutrition predisposes to infection, and various food compounds, such as micronutrients, are key elements of immune competence. A large number of scientific publications have suggested a role of phytochemicals, food bioactives and nutrition in combating the current coronavirus pandemic. Various dietary components and specific food supplements have been proposed to be helpful in the prevention or therapy of COVID-19. While findings in preclinical models suggest that food bioactives and micronutrients may potentially augment viral defense, evidence supporting antiviral and immunomodulatory efficacy of these compounds in the prevention or management of COVID-19 is non-existent. Large-scale epidemiological and well-designed clinical studies investigating dosage and combinations of food compounds in different age groups and populations are needed before any recommendations can be made. Both malnutrition and overnutrition can adversely affect the immune system. Malnutrition at population level appears to be associated with elevated rates of fatal outcomes of COVID-19. Obesity and non-communicable diseases have been found to be a prognostic risk factor associated with worse COVID-19 outcomes. A focus on obesity and nutrition-related chronic diseases should be a key element of public health. This approach would be more effective than the far less promising search for food bioactives with potential immune-supportive efficacy. © 2019 The Authors
ABSTRACT
Topic modeling methods such as e.g. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) are popular techniques to analyze large text corpora. With huge amounts of textual data that are collected over time in various fields of applied research, it becomes also relevant to be able to automatically monitor the evolution of topics identified from some sort of dynamic topic modeling approach. For this purpose, we propose a dynamic change detection method that relies on a rolling version of the classical LDA that allows for coherently modeled topics over time that are able to adapt to changing vocabulary. The changes are detected by assessing the intensity of word change in the LDA's topics over time in comparison to the expected intensity of word change under stable conditions using resampling techniques. We apply our method to topics obtained by applying the RollingLDA to Covid-19 related news data from CNN and illustrate that the detected changes in these topics are well interpretable. © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors
ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were increased concerns about glycemic control in patients with diabetes. Therefore, we aimed to assess changes in diabetes management during the COVID-19 lockdown for patients with type 1 or type 2 diabetes mellitus (T1DM, T2DM) in Germany. We included data from 24,623 patients (age>18 years) with T1DM (N=6,975) or T2DM (N=17,648) with documented data in 2019 and 2020 from the multicenter Diabetes-Prospective Follow-up registry (DPV). We conducted a groupwise comparison of identical patients in 2019 and 2020 for different time periods of pandemia. Pairwise differences of continuous parameters of treatment modalities and metabolic outcome between 2019 and 2020 were adjusted for seasonality, age, and diabetes duration. We presented these outcomes as adjusted medians with 95% confidence intervals. Rates were compared using negative-binomial models, dichotomous outcomes were compared using logistic models. Models were additionally adjusted for age and diabetes duration. These outcomes were presented as least-square means with 95% confidence intervals, p-values of<.05 were considered significant.In participants with T1DM, CGI (combined glucose indicator) increased only by 0.11-0.12% in all time periods of 2020 compared to 2019 (all p<0.001) while BMI decreased slightly by -(0.09-0.10) kg/m² (p<0.0001). In participants with T2DM, HbA1c increased by 0.12%, while BMI decreased slightly by -(0.05-0.06) kg/m² (p<0.0001).During the COVID-19 lockdown period, patients with T1DM and T2DM experienced only clinically insignificant changes in glucose control or body weight. Despite lockdown restrictions, patients were able to maintain metabolic control.