A Computational Platform to Support the Detection, Follow-up, and Epidemiological Surveillance of Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders: Protocol for a Development and Evaluation Study.

BACKGROUND: According to the World Health Organization, approximately 15% of the global population is affected by mental health or substance use disorders. These conditions contribute significantly to the global disease burden, which has worsened because of the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19. In Mexico, a quarter of the population between the ages of 18 and 65 years who reside in urban areas present a mental health condition. The presence of a mental or substance abuse disorder is behind a significant percentage of suicidal behaviors in Mexico, where only 1 in 5 of those who have these disorders receive any treatment. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to develop, deploy, and evaluate a computational platform to support the early detection and intervention of mental and substance use disorders in secondary and high schools as well as primary care units. The platform also aims to facilitate monitoring, treatment, and epidemiological surveillance ultimately helping specialized health units at the secondary level of care. METHODS: The development and evaluation of the proposed computational platform will run during 3 stages. In stage 1, the identification of the functional and user requirements and the implementation of the modules to support the screening, follow-up, treatment, and epidemiological surveillance will be performed. In stage 2, the initial deployment of the screening module will be carried out in a set of secondary and high schools, as well as the deployment of the modules to support the follow-up, treatment, and epidemiological surveillance processes in primary and secondary care health units. In parallel, during stage 2, patient applications to support early interventions and continuous monitoring will also be developed. Finally, during stage 3, the deployment of the complete platform will be performed jointly with a quantitative and qualitative evaluation. RESULTS: The screening process has started, and 6 schools have been currently enrolled. As of February 2023, a total of 1501 students have undergone screening, and the referral of those students presenting a risk in mental health or substance use to primary care units has also started. The development, deployment, and evaluation of all the modules of the proposed platform are expected to be completed by late 2024. CONCLUSIONS: The expected results of this study are to impact a better integration between the different levels of health care, from early detection to follow-up and epidemiological surveillance of mental and substance use disorders contributing to reducing the gap in the attention to these problems in the community. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/44607.

Specific Activation of T Cells by an ACE2-Based CAR-Like Receptor upon Recognition of SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the causative agent of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which is still a health issue worldwide mostly due to a high rate of contagiousness conferred by the high-affinity binding between cell viral receptors, Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2 (ACE2) and SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein. Therapies have been developed that rely on the use of antibodies or the induction of their production (vaccination), but despite vaccination being still largely protective, the efficacy of antibody-based therapies wanes with the advent of new viral variants. Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) therapy has shown promise for tumors and has also been proposed for COVID-19 treatment, but as recognition of CARs still relies on antibody-derived sequences, they will still be hampered by the high evasion capacity of the virus. In this manuscript, we show the results from CAR-like constructs with a recognition domain based on the ACE2 viral receptor, whose ability to bind the virus will not wane, as Spike/ACE2 interaction is pivotal for viral entry. Moreover, we have developed a CAR construct based on an affinity-optimized ACE2 and showed that both wild-type and affinity-optimized ACE2 CARs drive activation of a T cell line in response to SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein expressed on a pulmonary cell line. Our work sets the stage for the development of CAR-like constructs against infectious agents that would not be affected by viral escape mutations and could be developed as soon as the receptor is identified.

Overview of Rest-Mex at IberLEF 2021: Recommendation System for Text Mexican Tourism

This paper presents the framework and results from the Rest-Mex track at IberLEF 2021. This track considered two tasks: Recommendation System and Sentiment Analysis, using texts from Mexican touristic places. The Recommendation System task consists in predicting the degree of satisfaction that a tourist may have when recommending a destination of Nayarit, Mexico, based on places visited by the tourists and their opinions. On the other hand, the Sentiment Analysis task predicts the polarity of an opinion issued by a tourist who traveled to the most representative places in Guanajuato, Mexico. For both tasks, we have built new corpora considering Spanish opinions from the TripAdvisor website. This paper compares and discusses the results of the participants for both tasks.

Subphenotyping of Mexican Patients With COVID-19 at Preadmission To Anticipate Severity Stratification: Age-Sex Unbiased Meta-Clustering Technique.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented global health care challenge for both medical institutions and researchers. Recognizing different COVID-19 subphenotypes-the division of populations of patients into more meaningful subgroups driven by clinical features-and their severity characterization may assist clinicians during the clinical course, the vaccination process, research efforts, the surveillance system, and the allocation of limited resources. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to discover age-sex unbiased COVID-19 patient subphenotypes based on easily available phenotypical data before admission, such as pre-existing comorbidities, lifestyle habits, and demographic features, to study the potential early severity stratification capabilities of the discovered subgroups through characterizing their severity patterns, including prognostic, intensive care unit (ICU), and morbimortality outcomes. METHODS: We used the Mexican Government COVID-19 open data, including 778,692 SARS-CoV-2 population-based patient-level data as of September 2020. We applied a meta-clustering technique that consists of a 2-stage clustering approach combining dimensionality reduction (ie, principal components analysis and multiple correspondence analysis) and hierarchical clustering using the Ward minimum variance method with Euclidean squared distance. RESULTS: In the independent age-sex clustering analyses, 56 clusters supported 11 clinically distinguishable meta-clusters (MCs). MCs 1-3 showed high recovery rates (90.27%-95.22%), including healthy patients of all ages, children with comorbidities and priority in receiving medical resources (ie, higher rates of hospitalization, intubation, and ICU admission) compared with other adult subgroups that have similar conditions, and young obese smokers. MCs 4-5 showed moderate recovery rates (81.30%-82.81%), including patients with hypertension or diabetes of all ages and obese patients with pneumonia, hypertension, and diabetes. MCs 6-11 showed low recovery rates (53.96%-66.94%), including immunosuppressed patients with high comorbidity rates, patients with chronic kidney disease with a poor survival length and probability of recovery, older smokers with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, older adults with severe diabetes and hypertension, and the oldest obese smokers with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and mild cardiovascular disease. Group outcomes conformed to the recent literature on dedicated age-sex groups. Mexican states and several types of clinical institutions showed relevant heterogeneity regarding severity, potentially linked to socioeconomic or health inequalities. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed 2-stage cluster analysis methodology produced a discriminative characterization of the sample and explainability over age and sex. These results can potentially help in understanding the clinical patient and their stratification for automated early triage before further tests and laboratory results are available and even in locations where additional tests are not available or to help decide resource allocation among vulnerable subgroups such as to prioritize vaccination or treatments.

Socio-Demographic Health Determinants Are Associated with Poor Prognosis in Spanish Patients Hospitalized with COVID-19.

INTRODUCTION: Social vulnerability is a known determinant of health in respiratory diseases. Our aim was to identify whether there are socio-demographic factors among COVID-19 patients hospitalized in Spain and their potential impact on health outcomes during the hospitalization. METHODS: A multicentric retrospective case series study based on administrative databases that included all COVID-19 cases admitted in 19 Spanish hospitals from 1 March to 15 April 2020. Socio-demographic data were collected. Outcomes were critical care admission and in-hospital mortality. RESULTS: We included 10,110 COVID-19 patients admitted to 18 Spanish hospitals (median age 68 (IQR 54-80) years old; 44.5% female; 14.8% were not born in Spain). Among these, 779 (7.7%) cases were admitted to critical care units and 1678 (16.6%) patients died during the hospitalization. Age, male gender, being immigrant, and low hospital saturation were independently associated with being admitted to an intensive care unit. Age, male gender, being immigrant, percentile of average per capita income, and hospital experience were independently associated with in-hospital mortality. CONCLUSIONS: Social determinants such as residence in low-income areas and being born in Latin American countries were associated with increased odds of being admitted to an intensive care unit and of in-hospital mortality. There was considerable variation in outcomes between different Spanish centers.

Experience and management of two paediatric patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 with major burn injuries in an intensive care unit / Experiencia y manejo de dos pacientes pediátricos grandes quemados e infección por SARS-CoV-2 en una unidad de cuidados intensivos

RESUMEN La infección por SARS-CoV-2 se ha diseminado rápidamente, provocando una pandemia mundial en la cual nos vemos afectados. En el Instituto Nacional de Salud del Niño de San Borja, centro de referencia nacional de pacientes pediátricos quirúrgicos, desde el 14 de abril al 12 de agosto del 2020, se hospitalizaron 106 pacientes con infección por SARS-CoV-2, de los cuales 11 tuvieron diagnostico quemadura y dos fueron pacientes grandes quemados con diagnóstico COVID-19 por prueba molecular. Detallamos el caso de una paciente pediátrica, de siete años, gran quemada que fue atendida en unidad de cuidados intensivos, y con COVID-19 asintomática, presentó evolución y pronóstico favorable, con recuperación total de su lesión. Por otro lado, el COVID-19 se puede manifestar de forma severa produciendo un síndrome inflamatorio multisistémico que presenta manifestaciones clínicas poco comunes y que puede empeorar el pronóstico, como fue observado en nuestro otro paciente de siete meses que falleció pese a recibir manejo especializado y oportuno.

ABSTRACT SARS-CoV-2 infection is rapidly disseminating, leading to a world pandemics in which we are also affected. In San Borja Peruvian National Children Health Institute, which is the reference center for surgical pediatric patients, 106 patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 were hospitalized. Of them, 11 presented with burns and two had large burns. The viral infection was diagnosed using molecular testing. We present in detail the case of a pediatric seven-year old patient who had large burns and was taken care of in the intensive care unit. She had asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, and her outcome was good, with a good prognosis, and she recovered completely and uneventfully. On the other hand, COVID-19 may present as a severe disease leading to a multi- systemic inflammatory syndrome with some uncommon clinical manifestations which affect its prognosis , as it was the case with another seven-month old patient who passed away in spite of having received specialized and timely therapy.