The Impact of Funding Insulin Research on Open Access Publishing: A 20-Years Bibliometric Analysis.

BACKGROUND: The recent report of The World Health Organization on diabetes has stressed on the burden of diabetes on low/middle income countries. Recent studies advocated the importance of funding more research on diabetes and insulin in these countries. Recently, the European Research Council advocated the importance of gold Open Access (OA) publishing, where the funded research should be immediately accessible. In this study, we aim to assess funding for insulin research, where we will compare the OA status between funded and unfunded research. METHODS: We used Scopus database to assess insulin research published from January 1st, 1999 to December 31st, 2018. Our bibliometric analysis consisted of three main sections: analysis of all publications on insulin, analysis of funded insulin publications, and analysis of unfunded insulin publications. RESULTS: We found a total of 388,202 publications, of which only 83,180 (21.4%) were funded. USA produced around 30.1% of the total publications, and the National Institute of Health (NIH) was the major funder with 18.6% of all publications. Of the funded publications, 29,143 (35%) were OA publications, compared to 97,347 (31.9%) of the unfunded publications. We didn't find a significant difference in OA status between funded and unfunded research. CONCLUSION: In concordance with the European Research Council's decision to support gold OA publishing model, we found that only 35% of the funded and 31.9% of the unfunded insulin research were OA. Although the funded research is increasing in China, most of it is produced in high income countries. This highlights the importance of allocating more funds to low/middle income countries.

Prognostic significance of post-stress reduction in left ventricular ejection fraction with adenosine stress in Jordanian patients with normal myocardial perfusion.

BACKGROUND: The significance of post-stress reduction in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) in patients with normal perfusion on adenosine stress/rest imaging remains controversial. METHODS: Consecutive patients who underwent 2-day adenosine gated stress/rest 99mTc-sestamibi imaging and had normal perfusion were analyzed. LVEF was quantified at rest and 1 hour post-adenosine. Patients were followed up for hard (cardiac death or nonfatal MI) and soft (coronary revascularization or congestive heart failure) cardiac events for 24.1 ± 11.0 months. RESULTS: Of 560 patients included in the study, 135 (24.1%) had a post-stress reduction in LVEF of ≥ 5%. Rest LVEF (P < 0.001), known history of CAD (P = 0.01) and transient ischemic dilatation ratio (P = 0.02) were independent predictors of LVEF reduction. Event-free survivals were similar in patients with and without ≥ 5% LVEF reduction (P = 0.8). The unadjusted hazard ratio (95% CI) for cardiac events for ≥ 5% LVEF reduction was 1.09 (0.55-2.15), P = 0.81, while the hazard ratio adjusted for known history of CAD, smoking, post-stress LVEF and peak heart rate was 0.87 (0.44-1.75), P = 0.71. CONCLUSIONS: Significant post-adenosine reduction in LVEF occurs in about one-fourth of patients with normal perfusion but does not confer adverse prognosis compared with patients without such reduction.