ABSTRACT
Despite the impact of the COVID-19 vaccination, vaccine hesitancy is a matter of concern. Despite a lower disease incidence, people continue to start primo-vaccination late. The aim of this study is to characterize people late primo-vaccinated and the reasons that led them to start vaccination. A quantitative, descriptive and prospective study was performed on the basis of phone surveys of people vaccinated from February to May 2022 in the Region of Murcia (Spain). The survey included socio-demographic and COVID-19 information, self-perception risk, vaccine security, Fear of COVID-19 Scale, reasons for not being vaccinated and reasons that have led them to vaccination. From a total of 1768 people receiving primo-vaccination, 798 people were contacted, and 338 people completed the survey. Among the interviewed people, 57% reported non-health-related reasons to get vaccinated, travel reasons being the primary one. The most reported health-related reason was a fear of COVID-19. There was a significant positive association between vaccination for health-related reasons and female gender (ß = 0.72), cohabiting with a vulnerable person (ß = 0.97), higher self-perceived risk (ß = 0.13) and vaccine security dimension (ß = 0.14). We identified two different profiles of people with late COVID-19 primo-vaccination, with health-related or non-health-related reasons. This work can be useful in designing specific communication strategies.
ABSTRACT
PURPOSE OF REVIEW: In epidemiologic studies, biomarkers are the best possible choice to assess individual exposure to toxic metals since they integrate all exposure sources. However, measuring biomarkers is not always feasible, given potential budgetary and time constraints or limited availability of samples. Alternatively, approximations to individual metal exposure obtained from geographic information systems (GIS) have become popular to evaluate diverse metal-related health outcomes. Our objective was to conduct a systematic review of epidemiological studies that evaluated the validity of GIS-based geolocation and distance to pollutant sources as an approximation of individual metal exposure based on correlation with biological samples. RECENT FINDINGS: We considered 11 toxic metals: lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd), antimony (Sb), aluminum (Al), arsenic (As), chromium (Cr), nickel (Ni), mercury (Hg), tungsten (W), uranium (U), and vanadium (V). The final review included 12 manuscripts which included seven metals (Pb, Cd, Al, As, Cr, Hg, and Ni). Many studies used geolocation of the individuals to compare exposed (industrial, urban, agricultural, or landfill sources) and unexposed areas and not so many studies used distance to a source. For all metals, except lead, there was more animal than human biosampling to conduct biological validation. We observed a trend towards higher levels of Cd, Cr, Hg, and Pb in biosamples collected closer to exposure sources, supporting that GIS-based proxies for these metals might approximate individual exposure. However, given the low number and heterogeneity of the retrieved studies, the accumulated evidence is, overall, not sufficient. Given the practical benefits and potential of modern GIS technologies, which allow environmental monitoring at a reasonable cost, additional validation studies that include human biosampling are needed to support the use of GIS-based individual exposure measures in epidemiologic studies.
Subject(s)
Cadmium , Geographic Information Systems , Humans , Environmental MonitoringABSTRACT
In recent studies, neuroanatomical volume and shape asymmetries have been seen during the course of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and could potentially be used as preclinical imaging biomarkers for the prediction of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and AD dementia. In this study, a deep learning framework utilizing Siamese neural networks trained on paired lateral inter-hemispheric regions is used to harness the discriminative power of whole-brain volumetric asymmetry. The method uses the MRICloud pipeline to yield low-dimensional volumetric features of pre-defined atlas brain structures, and a novel non-linear kernel trick to normalize these features to reduce batch effects across datasets and populations. By working with the low-dimensional features, Siamese networks were shown to yield comparable performance to studies that utilize whole-brain MR images, with the advantage of reduced complexity and computational time, while preserving the biological information density. Experimental results also show that Siamese networks perform better in certain metrics by explicitly encoding the asymmetry in brain volumes, compared to traditional prediction methods that do not use the asymmetry, on the ADNI and BIOCARD datasets.
Subject(s)
Alzheimer Disease/pathology , Brain/diagnostic imaging , Brain/pathology , Cognitive Dysfunction/pathology , Magnetic Resonance Imaging/methods , Neural Networks, Computer , Aged , Aged, 80 and over , Female , Humans , MaleABSTRACT
El objetivo principal de este estudio es comparar el desarrollo pondero-estatural de niños amamantados de forma exclusiva durante seis meses de una cohorte de niños que son atendidos en un Centro de Salud con los de la población aragonesa de referencia cuyos datos se obtuvieron del estudio longitudinal del crecimiento de la Fundación Andreas Prader. Se estima que la tasa de lactancia materna de esta población de referencia a partir de los 3meses de vida es menor de un 30%. Se pretende con esta comparación saber si el desarrollo delos niños amamantados es peor y si por lo tanto existe fundamento para introducir la alimentación no materna entre los 4 y los 6 meses, o si por el contrario es correcto recomendar lactancia materna exclusiva hasta los 6 meses de vida
The main goal of this study is to compare the growth and physical development of exclusive breastfed infants during 6 months of a cohort of infants of a health centre with the reference population of Aragon obtained of Longitudinal Study of Growth and development of Andreas Prader Foundation.The prevalence of breast feeding in this population is less than 30%. The authors want to know if the growth and development of exclusive breastfeeding during 6 months is worse than the reference population. So that it may be necessary to introduce non maternal food before 6months
