ABSTRACT
In Italy, the older age group is characterised by a significantly lower level of digital skills, usage and equipment than adults. This gap overlaps with that of financial skills, which are essential for financial well-being. The paper analyse how digital literacy, financial literacy and digital financial literacy influence the perception of a chance in one's financial wellbeing after the arrival of COVID-19 pandemic. The study comments on the main findings of a quantitative survey on 328 older people, representative of the national population by gender and age group, living in the northern regions most affected by the pandemic and able to answer an online questionnaire. The results indicate that digital literacy helped protect against a worsening of one's (perceived) economic situation, but not financial literacy. Copyright © FrancoAngeli.
ABSTRACT
In Italy, the older age group is characterised by a significantly lower level of digital skills, usage and equipment than adults. This gap overlaps with that of financial skills, which are essential for financial well-being. The paper analyse how digital literacy, financial literacy and digital financial literacy influence the perception of a chance in one's financial wellbeing after the arrival of COVID-19 pandemic. The study comments on the main findings of a quantitative survey on 328 older people, representative of the national population by gender and age group, living in the northern regions most affected by the pandemic and able to answer an online questionnaire. The results indicate that digital literacy helped protect against a worsening of one's (perceived) economic situation, but not financial literacy. Copyright © FrancoAngeli.
ABSTRACT
The Connecting European SARS-CoV-2 Cohorts to Increase Common and Effective Response to SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic (ORCHESTRA) consortium, led by University of Verona (Italy), brings together key European academic experts and research institutions in infectious diseases, data management and High Performance Computing (HPC) from 26 organizations (extending to 37 partners) from 15 countries. The project aims to create a new pan-European cohort built on existing and new large-scale population cohorts in European and non-European countries to significantly impact on the responsiveness to SARS-CoV-2. The integration and analysis of the very heterogeneous characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 data coming from many different sources such as EHR, retrospective and prospective patient registries, and related ‘omics’ data (incl. genomics, proteomics and transcriptomics) can benefit of data analytics enabled by HPC, where both high compute performance and fast storage capabilities are immensely important. During the first year of the project, a dedicated HPC cloud infrastructure have been designed and partially deployed to fulfill the functional requirements for data management ensuring healthcare data confidentiality/privacy, integrity and security in compliance with the European GDPR regulations. The result is an infrastructure for Data Management composed by three main layers: National Data Providers;National Hubs (one for each HPC center involved: CINECA - Italy, CINES - France and HLRS - Germany), to centralize data at national level and to support data storage, sharing and analysis on data ingested from the National Data Providers;ORCHESTRA Data Portal: the pan-European portal for sharing aggregated data and results. Currently data collection is on going;at the end of the project, clinical centers are expected to have enrolled more than 10.000 patients with about 50.000 samples for the prospective studies. Key messages • The SARS-CoV-2 crisis made evident the need to manage and analyse very heterogeneous health data coming from many different resources across different countries. • The HPC cloud infrastructure released for the Orchestra project can act as a model to manage future public health threats.
ABSTRACT
Background: SARS-COV-2 anti-Spike IgG response following mRNA vaccination (BNT162b2) is suboptimal and highly variable in MM patients. Patients and Methods: We report here a single-institution retrospective analysis of 127 consecutive patients with symptomatic MM (71 males, 56 females), [median age 69.5 years (range 45-85)], 63 patients with untreated MM and 64 patients with MM refractory to one or more previous treatment lines. Myeloma therapies included PI+IMiD combos, IMiD-based regimens, PI-based regimens, anti-CD38 mAb-based therapies, antibody-drug conjugates (Belantamab Mafodotin monotherapy), dexamethasone and high dose melphalan. Anti-spike IgG antibody were detected also in 50 healthy volunteers. Patients with symptomatic MM and healthy controls received two dose of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine (Pfizer BioNTech) on days 1 and 21 between 29 April and 15 May 2021. Patients with prior history of SARS-CoV-2 were excluded from analysis. Quantitative determination of anti-spike S1/S2 IgG antibody was performed at 4 weeks from vaccination completion (LIAISONR SARS-COV-2 S1/S2 IgG, LIAISONR). It was previously established a threshold >15 AU/ml of anti-Spike IgG which was related to neutralizing activity of anti-SARS-COV-2 antibodies. Results: Sixty-five out of 127 patients were evaluable for response. Antispike IgG antibody were detected in 50/65 (76.9%) MM patients, defined as responders [177 AU/mL (range 26.4 - 1430)]. 23.1% of MM patients, defined as non-responders, failed to respond at two doses of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine [3.8 AU/mL (range 0.65 - 9.33)]. Seroprotection rate at cutoff of 15 AU/mL was 100% in controls [249 AU/mL (range 104 - 2430)]. No statistically significant differences were found between the two subgroups of patients for myeloma disease phase (relapse/refractory MM vs. untreated symptomatic MM), LDH, residual gammaglobulin levels, WBC, ANC, lymphocytic response, age and sex (Tab. 2). Conversely, plasmacytosis, B2M and haemoglobin concentration were associated with a different response to vaccine. Patients with extreme plasmacytosis (60.0 20.3 vs. 28.218.8 meanSD;p <0.001) (Tab. 2) had a mean titer less than 15 AU/ml of anti-Spike IgG compared with patients with a low plasmacytosis, who, conversely, showed significantly higher mean titers of anti-Spike IgG. B2M was significantly higher in non-responders compared to responders (4.6 4.1 vs. 3.23.6 mean SD;p = 0.006) (Tab. 2). Haemoglobin value was significantly lower in non-responders compared to responders (10.8 1.8 vs. 12.11.8 mean SD;p = 0.008) (Tab. 2). Multivariate analysis confirmed the bone marrow infiltration pattern and haemoglobin value as statistically significant variables. In addition, in the present cohort, the myeloma treatment, including high-dose melphalan and autologous stem cell transplantation, have not been associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Conclusions: In our experience, significant fraction of MM patients (23.1%) does not developed any detectable anti-Spike IgG after two dose of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. Lack of IgG response associated with three statistically significant variables: extreme plasmacytosis, B2M, and haemoglobin concentration. In the subgroup of patients with good response to vaccine, after a median follow-up of 7 months from second dose of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, no cases of COVID-19 occurred. .