ABSTRACT
Through an adequate survey of the history of the disease, Narrative Medicine (NM) aims to allow the definition and implementation of an effective, appropriate, and shared treatment path. In the present study different topic modeling techniques are compared, as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and topic modeling based on BERT transformer, to extract meaningful insights in the Italian narration of COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the main focus was the characterization of Post-acute Sequelae of COVID-19, (i.e., PASC) writings as opposed to writings by health professionals and general reflections on COVID-19, (i.e., non-PASC) writings, modeled as a semi-supervised task. The results show that the BERTopic-based approach outperforms the LDA-base approach by grouping in the same cluster the 97.26% of analyzed documents, and reaching an overall accuracy of 91.97%.
ABSTRACT
Post-prandial hyperglycemia can be relevant in developing early manifestations of atherosclerosis. EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil), rich in saturated fatty acids and commonly used in the Mediterranean diet, seems to control post-prandial hyperglycemia better than butter. Subjects with type 1 diabetes are at higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease and show endothelial dysfunction, an early manifestation of atherosclerosis in the first years of the disease. Our study aims to evaluate whether EVOO and butter influence endothelial function in subjects with type 1 diabetes when added to a single high glycemic index (HGI) meal. In this exploratory cross-over study, 10 subjects with type 1 diabetes and 6 healthy subjects were scheduled to receive two types of HGI meals: one enriched with EVOO and one with butter. Before and after each test meal at different time points, all subjects underwent the evaluation of endothelial function by flow-mediated dilation technique, glucose and lipids measurements, and gastric emptying assessment by ultrasound. Flow-mediated dilation significantly increased after EVOO-enriched meal compared with butter in subjects with type 1 diabetes (two-way-repeated measurements ANOVA, p = 0.007). In patients with type 1 diabetes, the add-on of EVOO to HGI meal improves vascular function compared to butter, which has detrimental effects.
