The Impact of Sars-Cov-2 Pandemic in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Systematic Review of Clinical Data

Introduction: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and its consequences on individuals with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) are not yet fully understood despite the fact that evidence on this topic are rapidly evolving. Aims & Methods: This comprehensive study of clinical data aims to enhance the gastroenterologists' ability to manage inflammatory bowel disease during these Covid-19 pandemic dominated times. Until November 2021, a thorough search of PubMed and Embase for published data served as the primary source for the examined research, which was solely composed of English-language sources. Additionally, websites of gastroenterology societies and organizations dedicated to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) were searched for consensus statements and recommendations for patients and clinicians (IBD). The information sources, the search strategy, and the eligibility criteria of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statements were followed Results: There are 1560 publications on this subject, including 30 randomized controlled trials, including 64,259 patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). There are twenty-four studies (n = 51,920) that examined the effect of COVID 19 on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) management. Crohn's disease affected 52.9% of patients, ulcerative colitis affected 42.0%, and indeterminate colitis affected 5.1%. These trials showed that the use of corticosteroids, azathioprine, or mesalamine was related to adverse outcomes, but the use of anti-TNFs was linked to improved outcomes. Seven randomized controlled trials evaluated the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients and found that vaccination was extremely effective, with a seroconversion rate of 96.49% and no significant increase in adverse outcomes when compared to the general population. Conclusion(s): Patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are at an increased risk of severe COVID-19 infection. There is a substantial influence on the management of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients during the pandemic, as certain IBD drugs have been connected with a worsening of outcomes. Although the COVID vaccine has been shown to be effective, additional research is needed to determine the long-term consequences of COVID 19 infection and vaccination.

Attention-Based Model for Accurate Stance Detection

Effective representation learning is an essential building block for achieving many natural language processing tasks such as stance detection as performed implicitly by humans. Stance detection can assist in understanding how individuals react to certain information by revealing the user’s stance on a particular topic. In this work, we propose a new attention-based model for learning feature representations and show its effectiveness in the task of stance detection. The proposed model is based on transfer learning and multi-head attention mechanisms. Specifically, we use BERT and word2vec models to learn text representation vectors from the data and pass both of them simultaneously to the multi-head attention layer to help focus on the best learning features. We present five variations of the model, each with a different combination of BERT and word2vec embeddings for the query and value parameters of the attention layer. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated against multiple baseline and state-of-the-art models. The best of the five proposed variations of the model improved the accuracy on average by 0.4% and achieved 68.4% accuracy for multi-classification, while the best accuracy for binary classification is 86.1% with a 1.3% improvement. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Repositioning gastroenterology services during covid-19 pandemic

BACKGROUND: In COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals become overwhelmed with acute admissions leading to the suspension of outpatient clinics including gastroenterology and endoscopic services. Similarly available resources are channeled to combat the scourge. These diversions of resources coupled with lockdowns and fear of getting infected prevent patients from accessing routine and lifesaving gastroenterology services leading to increased gastrointestinal-related morbidity and mortality in at-risk populations. Often, there are delays in the diagnosis and early treatment of gastrointestinal cancers, and high risks of death from gastrointestinal bleeding. SUMMARY: This review discusses COVID-19 risk factors and ways and means of ensuring safe essential gastroenterology services in the setting of COVID-19 pandemic based on available evidence. Telemedicine avoids physical contacts, maximizes safety by reducing the risk of infection to both clinicians and patients, and is conducive to a lockdown, quarantine, or self-isolation environment of COVID-19. It can be used to triage critical cases requiring life-saving endoscopic procedures. The review also explores measures at derisking endoscopies being high-risk aerosol generating procedures. The emerging technology of non-contact endoscopy in the form of robotic endoscopy raises hope in this direction.