Associated factors to insulin adherence in type 1 diabetes in Tehran and Karaj, Iran.

Purpose: Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) is a chronic metabolic disorder, and its prevalence and incidence are increasing globally. Insulin therapy is the basis of T1DM management that can prevent numerous complications. Identifying and resolving the factors involved in patients' non-adherence can reduce complications, mortality, and economic burden. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, a sample of patients with T1DM were included from Alborz and Tehran cities of Iran in 2020. Patients filled the questionnaires consisting of sociodemographic and diabetes characteristics, weight and height measurements, 8-item Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS), and barriers to insulin therapy. Patients with < six scores of MMAS were considered to have low adherence, while ≥ 6 scores showed moderate/high adherence. Data were analyzed using SPSS, and a P-value of less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: 189 patients with T1DM with a mean (± SD) age of 17.95 (± 10.98) years were enrolled in the study, and 73.5% of patients had moderate/high adherence to insulin therapy. Younger age and owning insurance were significantly associated with being classified in the higher adherence group. The barriers that were significantly associated with non-adherence were forgetting to buy, physician inaccessibility, cost, exhaustion from the long-term injection, forgetfulness, injection site reaction, and rebellion against parents in the < 20 years age group. The main barriers in ≥ 20 years age group were forgetting to buy and insufficient injection instruction. Conclusion: The identified barriers to insulin injection would be helpful for policymakers and clinicians to increase insulin adherence among patients with T1DM. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40200-022-01105-0.

A year of experience with COVID-19 in patients with cancer: A nationwide study.

BACKGROUND: Cancer is a major public health problem and comorbidity associated with COVID-19 infection. According to previous studies, a higher mortality rate of COVID-19 in cancer patients has been reported. AIMS: This study was undertaken to determine associated risk factors and epidemiological characteristics of hospitalized COVID-19 patients with cancer using a nationwide COVID-19 hospital data registry in Iran for the first time. METHODS: In this retrospective study, we used a national data registry of hospitalized patients with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) symptoms and patients with confirmed positive COVID-19 PCR between 18 February 2020 and 18 November 2020. The patients were classified into two groups patients with/without malignancy. Logistic regression model was utilized to analyze demographic factors, clinical features, comorbidities, and their associations with the disease outcomes. RESULTS: In this study, 11 068 and 645 186 in-patients with SARS symptoms with and without malignancy were included, respectively. About 1.11% of our RT-PCR-positive patients had cancer. In patients with malignancy and COVID-19, older ages than 60 (OR: 1.88, 95% CI: 1.29-2.74, p-value: .001), male gender (OR: 1.43, 95% CI: 1.16-1.77, p-value: .001), concomitant chronic pulmonary diseases (CPD) (OR: 1.75, 95% CI: 1.14-2.68, p-value: .009), and presence of dyspnea (OR; 2.00, 95% CI: 1.60-2.48, p-value: <.001) were associated with increased mortality rate. CONCLUSION: Given the immunocompromised state of patients with malignancy and their vulnerability to Covid-19 complications, collecting data on the comorbidities and their effects on the disease outcome can build on a better clinical view and help clinicians make decisions to manage these cases better; for example, determining special clinical care, especially in the shortage of health services.

Scientometric Analysis of Global Scientific Publications on COVID-19 and Diabetes with an Emphasis on Middle Eastern Countries.

Background: Due to the worldwide spread of COVID-19, various countries have designed scientific studies on different aspects of the disease. Patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) have been proven to be at higher risk of COVID-19-related complications, hospitalization, and death. Objectives: The aim was to conduct a scientometric analysis of scholarly outputs on diabetes and COVID-19. Methods: Web of Science was searched for scientific publications on diabetes and COVID-19 by Middle Eastern researchers until September 14, 2021. Collected data were analyzed for document type, subject area, countries, top journals, citation number, and authors' collaboration network using VOS viewer 1.6.15 and bibliometrix R-package 4.1.1. Results: Overall, the characteristics of 603 documents on DM and COVID-19 were analyzed. The top three productive countries in the field were Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The top affiliation was from Iran; "Tehran University of Medical Sciences" (n = 168), followed by "Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences" (n = 82). The total citation number was 3704 times. The highest cited paper (348) was a systematic review from Iran, published in arch Acad Emerg Med. The top source was "Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviews," with 26 documents. Conclusions: The current study provides an overview of the quantity and quality of published scholarly documents on the intersection of DM and COVID-19 in the region. Our findings help scientists find the existing gaps, manage the research budgets, identify active authors and scientific institutes to collaborate with, and use their experience to produce new knowledge in the future.

Scientometric assessment of scientific documents published in 2020 on herbal medicines used for COVID-19.

Objective: Many studies have suggested herbal medicines as alternatives or adjuvants to modern drugs for COVID-19. Their scientometric analyses can provide a scientific overview of this topic. Materials and methods: Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus were searched for articles on the use of herbal medicines in COVID-19 published until 26 October 2020. Collected data were analyzed for document type, subject area, top journal, citation number, and authors' collaboration network using VOSviewer 1.6.15, ScientoPy 2.0.3, Gephi 0.9.2, and SPSS 15 statistical tools. Results: After screening the 3185 retrieved records, 378 and 849 records, respectively from WOS and Scopus, remained for quantity analysis. Original and review articles were the two main types of papers in both databases. Top subject areas were drug and medicine, respectively in the WOS and Scopus databases. The top three productive countries in the field were China, the US, and India. The most cited article was a practice guideline in both databases. "Journal of Biomolecular Structure Dynamics" in WOS and "Chinese Traditional and Herbal Drugs" in Scopus were the top journals. Top keywords included "COVID-19″ and "Traditional Chinese Medicine". US authors had the highest collaboration with other authors. Conclusions: The current study provides a snapshot of the quantity and characteristics of published scholarly documents in recent months in the intersection of herbal medicines and COVID-19. Our findings help scientists to find the existing gaps, identify the active authors and scientific institutes to collaborate with and use their experience to produce new knowledge in the future.

Characteristics of published/registered clinical trials on COVID-19 treatment: A systematic review.

OBJECTIVES: Due to the rapid spread of COVID-19 worldwide, many countries have designed clinical trials to find efficient treatments. We aimed to critically report the characteristics of all the registered and published randomized clinical trials (RCTs) conducted on COVID-19, and summarize the evaluation of potential therapies developed in various regions. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION: We comprehensively searched PubMed, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Scopus, and Clinicaltrial.gov databases to retrieve all the relevant studies up to July 19, 2021, in conformity with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) flowchart. We included all English-language published/registered RCTs on COVID-19, and excluded non-RCT, in-vitro/in-vivo, editorials, and review studies. Two reviewers independently evaluated all the records, and then analyzed by using SPSS 17. RESULTS: Within 3018 included studies, 2801 (92.8%) and 217 (7.2%) were registered or published RCTs consisting of about 600 synthetic drugs. Herbal medicines have been studied in 23 trials (10.6%) among the published RCTs and in 357 registered RCTs (12.7%). Hydroxychloroquine 23 (10.6%) and convalescent plasma 194 (6.9%) alone or in combination with other agents were the most frequently used interventions in published and registered RCTs, respectively. Most published RCTs have been conducted in Western Pacific Region (WPRO) (50 trials, 23.0%) including 45 trials from China. Also, a greater proportion of registered RCTs have been conducted in the Region of the Americas (PAHO) (885 trials, 31.6%) including 596 RCTs from the United States (U.S). Globally, 283 registered trials have been conducted to assess new developed vaccines for COVID or previously established for other disorders. CONCLUSION: The present study highlighted the wide range of potential therapeutic agents in published and registered COVID-19 clinical trials across a wide range of regions. However, it is urgently required to global coordination in order to conduct more well-designed trials and progress in discovering safe and effective treatments.

Scientometric analyzing the output of researchers and organizations on COVID-19 for better conducting the scientific efforts: with a glance to endocrinology.

Purpose: As COVID-19 spreads rapidly and could affect the people and also lead to their death, especially individuals with underlying diseases, such as diabetes, the research community is also active in publishing novel research about it. Analyzing scientific outputs in this topic can represent an overview of publications. For this purpose, this study was conducted to determine status of publishing research works related to COVID-19 and analyzing the all documents published and indexed in Web of Science database and illustrate the co-occurrence and co-authority of hot papers in this documents. Methodology: Our search strategy was based on using the related key terms including COVID-19, coronavirus, SARS2, etc., to find out all the published scientific works related to coronavirus disease indexed in web of science (WoS) in 2020. We then extracted the all hot papers and especially hot papers in endocrinology category and analyzed them. The data saved and imported in VOSviewer and ScientoPy programs for analysis and illustration of our data. We have shown our analysis in the tables, figures and maps. Results: Totally, 56,402 records and 309 hot papers were retrieved. 3 of these hot papers were in endocrinology category. The most common type of publication was original papers followed by editorial papers in the second rank. The country with the most published documents was the USA followed by China. The journals of "British Medical Journal" and "Journal of Medical Virology" were ranked as the first and second sources, respectively. The "Harvard University" was the top organization with high proportion of scientific publications and "the Lancet" was the top-ranked journal that published highly-cited papers. Conclusion: The literature on COVID-19 is increasing with a high and fast growth. In this regard, there is a need to evaluate these publications once in a while and their results should be published to use this information for more effective management of future research works with emphasizes on the gaps of researches and more citable documents and allocation of budgets on more needed research and don't carry out the duplicates research. This would be helpful for prevention, control, and treatment of COVID-19 that is now among the most common topics in the world.

Beneficial Effects of Anti-Oxidative Herbal Medicines in Diabetic Patients Infected with COVID-19: A Hypothesis.

During the pandemic of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), it is critical to introduce potential medical treatments. Anti-oxidative herbal medicines with evidence-based beneficial impacts in the treatment of diabetes mellitus can be suggested as an adjuvant therapy to its conventional treatments in patients infected with COVID-19.