Identifying people living with cystic fibrosis in the Danish National Patient Registry: A validation study.

BACKGROUND: The Danish National Patient Registry (DNPR) serves as a valuable resource for scientific research. However, to ensure accurate results in cystic fibrosis (CF) studies that rely on DNPR data, a robust case-identification algorithm is essential. This study aimed to develop and validate algorithms for the reliable identification of CF patients in the DNPR. METHODS: Using the Danish Cystic Fibrosis Registry (DCFR) as a reference, accuracy measures including sensitivity and positive predictive value (PPV) for case-finding algorithms deployed in the DNPR were calculated. Algorithms were based on minimum number of hospital contacts with CF as the main diagnosis and minimum number of days between first and last contact. RESULTS: An algorithm requiring a minimum of one hospital contact with CF as the main diagnosis yielded a sensitivity of 96.1 % (95 % CI: 94.2 %; 97.4 %) and a PPV of 84.9 % (82.0 %; 87.4 %). The highest-performing algorithm required minimum 2 hospital visits and a minimum of 182 days between the first and the last contact and yielded a sensitivity of 95.9 % (95 % CI: 94.1 %; 97.2 %), PPV of 91.0 % (95 % CI: 88.6 %; 93.0 %) and a cohort entry delay of 3.2 months at the 75th percentile (95th percentile: 38.7 months). CONCLUSIONS: The DNPR captures individuals with CF with high sensitivity and is a valuable resource for CF-research. PPV was improved at a minimal cost of sensitivity by increasing requirements of minimum number of hospital contacts and days between first and last contact. Cohort entry delay increased with number of required hospital contacts.

The impact of sleep on factual memory retention over 24 hr.

Although a period of sleep seems to benefit the retention of declarative memories, recent studies have challenged both the size of this effect and its active influence on memory consolidation. This study aimed to further investigate the effect of sleep and its time dependency on the consolidation of factual information. In a within-subjects design, 48 participants (Mage = 24.37 ± 4.18 years, 31F) were asked to learn several facts in a multi-sensory "flashcard-like" memory task at 21:00 hours (sleep first condition) or at 09:00 hours (wake first condition). Then, in each condition, participants performed an immediate recall test (T0), and two delayed tests 12 hr (T1) and 24 hr (T2) later. Participants' sleep was recorded at their homes with a portable device. Results revealed that memory retention was better after a night of sleep compared with wakefulness, regardless of the delay from encoding (a few hr versus 12+ hr), but the sleep effect was modest. The decline in memory during the wake period following sleep was smaller compared with the decline observed during the 12 hr of wakefulness after encoding. However, after 24 hr from the encoding, when all participants experienced a period of both sleep and wakefulness, memory performance in the two conditions was similar. Overall, our data suggest that sleep exerts a small, yet beneficial, influence on memory retention by likely reducing interference and actively stabilizing memory traces.

Efficacy and Safety of IDegAsp in a Real-World Korean Population with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.

Background: This study investigated the real-world efficacy and safety of insulin degludec/insulin aspart (IDegAsp) in Korean adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), whose insulin treatment was switched to IDegAsp. Methods: This was a multicenter, retrospective, observational study comprising two 26-week treatment periods, before and after switching to IDegAsp, respectively. Korean adults with uncontrolled T2DM treated with basal or premix insulin (±oral antidiabetic drugs) were enrolled. The primary objective was to compare the degree of glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) change in each 26-week observation period. The analyses included changes in HbA1c, fasting plasma glucose (FPG), body weight, proportion of participants achieving HbA1c <7.0%, hypoglycemic events, and total daily insulin dose (ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT04656106). Results: In total, 196 adults (mean age, 65.95 years; mean T2DM duration, 18.99 years) were analyzed. The change in both HbA1c and FPG were significantly different between the pre-switching and the post-switching period (0.28% vs. -0.51%, P<0.001; 5.21 mg/dL vs. -23.10 mg/dL, P=0.005), respectively. After switching, the rate of achieving HbA1c <7.0% was significantly improved (5.10% at baseline vs. 11.22% with IDegAsp, P=0.012). No significant differences (before vs. after switching) were observed in body weight change, and total daily insulin dose. The rates of overall and severe hypoglycemia were similar in the two periods. Conclusion: In real-world clinical practice in Korea, the change of insulin regimen to IDegAsp was associated with an improvement in glycemic control without increase of hypoglycemia, supporting the use of IDegAsp for patients with T2DM uncontrolled with basal or premix insulin.

Eu, nós… ELAS quilombolas: documentário sobre vacinação contra COVID-19 em quilombolas enquanto dispositivo antirracista / We quilombola women: a documentary about COVID-19 vaccination among quilombolas as an anti-racist device

Resumo Eu, nós... ELAS quilombolas, documentário que aborda a identidade quilombola e o direito à vacinação contra a COVID-19, faz emergir noções como prioridade, direito, privilégio e identidade durante o processo que precisa vincular os números de doses a braços de cidadãos. No Brasil, diante da omissão do governo federal, fundamentada na necropolítica e no negacionismo, a falta de informações levou as comunidades quilombolas a se responsabilizarem pela construção das listas de aptos a receberem a vacina. O objetivo da produção foi utilizar as imagens como linguagem política na área da saúde, documentando e dando visibilidade para essas questões, como ilustração de processos de enfrentamento das desigualdades e iniquidades sociais e de saúde pautadas no racismo estrutural. Ao associar ciência e arte, o método de produção audiovisual, entrelaçado com os referenciais da sociologia das imagens, da antropologia visual e dos dispositivos de produção e estética de Coutinho, emergiram três categorias: o eu, o nós e o elas. Este artigo apresenta as categorias que embasaram a construção narrativa do documentário a partir das potencialidades das imagens, que se apresentaram como dispositivo político-pedagógico antirracista, tanto durante o processo de produção quanto ao longo das exibições públicas.

Abstract We quilombola women, a documentary that considers the quilombola identity and the right to COVID-19 vaccination, evokes notions of priority, rights, privileges and identity during the process of matching the number of vaccine doses available to citizens' arms. Omission by a Brazilian federal government grounded in necro-politics and denial, plus a lack of information, led quilombo communities to take it on themselves to draw up lists of those eligible for vaccination. The production team's aim was to use images as political language in the health field, so as to document and give visibility to these issues as one illustration of combating social and health inequalities and inequities rooted in structural racism. By combining science and art and interlacing references from the sociology of images, visual anthropology, plus the work and aesthetic devices of Eduardo Coutinho, the audiovisual production method brought out three key categories: I, We, and They, quilombola women. This article explores these categories underpinning construction of the documentary narrative, which drew on the potential of images, which in turn served as anti-racist, political and educational devices, both in the course of the production process and during the public screenings.

Effectiveness of an Innovative Card Game as a Supplement for Teaching Factual Content to Medical Students: A Mixed Method Study.

Introduction Lectures and small group teaching are useful to transfer conceptual knowledge. Anatomy is the foundation of medical sciences, but it is perceived to be difficult to comprehend and recall. For such clinically relevant aspects of medical education that require memorization, educational card games can be very effective. As the complex concepts and terminology of Embryology are difficult to follow and retain, we designed a card game "MedFc" for a topic on pharyngeal arches. This study was planned to determine the effectiveness of the card game on curriculum comprehension, recall of factual topics among medical undergraduates, and its utility as a supplement to interactive lecture sessions. Methods The mixed method study was conducted in the Department of Anatomy of an undergraduate medical college. Ethical approval was obtained prior to beginning the study. Convenience sampling was done. From a batch of 50 first-year medical students, a total of 40 students consented to participate in the study, 24 (60%) were males and 16 (40%) were female participants. A lecture on the pharyngeal arches was conducted for the entire batch of 50 first-year medical students. After three weeks, the students who consented to participate in the study were randomly grouped into two groups of 20 each. The groups were the game group (which played the card game in teams of five) and the control group (which discussed the same topic in small groups of five). For both the group's pretests and posttests, 10 higher order multiple choice questions, were conducted and students' feedback regarding the effectiveness of the teaching technique was obtained. Results Students opined that playing the card game was a superb experience, a positive use of time, and a very effective method of comprehension and memorizing complex topics. The scores increased from the pretest to the posttest indicating that both methods effectively reinforced the embryological concepts, but a t test showed that card game is more effective than small group discussions, with p-value = 0.008. The improvement in scores of students who had achieved <50% in pretest for the game group was statistically significant with t-value = 0.0023, when compared with the improvement in scores of similar students from the control group. Conclusions The study has demonstrated the effectiveness of "MedFc" card game in the recall of factual topics and can be used as supplementary material for enhancing learning amongst medical graduates. This educational card game applies gamification to Anatomy education to create a fun filled learning experience and is a valuable addition to the learning resources.

Assessment and evaluation of a serious game for teaching factual knowledge in dental education.

OBJECTIVES: A serious game application was developed to train factual knowledge and for self-assessment. The aim of the present study was to compare the effects of a game application (intervention group) or paper scripts (control group) on knowledge acquisition and to evaluate the acceptance of the new application among dental students. METHODS: The 4th semester students of the second preclinical prosthodontics course were randomly assigned to one of the two groups (n = 58/51) for two consecutive years. The study was conducted in two phases: First, all participants took a pretest, with the intervention group using the game application and the control group receiving the same set of questions in a paper script. In the second phase, all participants took a post-test. After the post-test, both groups had access to the application for another three weeks. After that, all participants completed standardized questionnaires and a scale to evaluate the usability of the system. Usage statistics were also tracked. Differences between groups were evaluated together and for both years separately in terms of pretest and posttest scores and learning success. RESULTS: There was no significant difference between the groups with regard to the posttest and learning success. A significant improvement in knowledge between pretest and posttest (p < 0.05) was demonstrated in both groups. Each student played approximately 350 questions. Participants rated the application with the German school grade "good". Participants appreciated the application and rated it positively. They stated that the game motivated them to learn and that they spent more time with the learning content. CONCLUSION: Due to the positive perception achieved through the game, this application is able to motivate students to learn. The learning effect achieved is similar to learning on paper.

[The social traces of the trauma of the 13 November 2015 terrorist attacks: Five years and seven months after]. / Les traces sociales du traumatisme des attentats du 13 novembre 2015 : cinq ans et sept mois après.

The monitoring of how public opinion memorizes the terrorist attacks from 13th November 2015, and moreover the terrorist attacks since the early 2000s, provides new material for understanding the evolution over time and the mechanisms of the construction of collective memory. Data collected to date show that these attacks had a greater impact on the population than other tragic events that have occurred in recent history in France, or even a greater impact than other and much more recent attacks. In the long term, the precise memory of the factual aspects and the memories of the personal circumstances in which people learned about the events begin to vanish. While imprecision is gaining ground, collective memory now crystallizes on very significant and overdetermined markers such as emblematic places or locations such as the "Bataclan". As a matter of fact, this imprecision of memory goes hand-in-hand with a much stronger symbolic and emotional investment of the event as a whole and leads to an overestimation of the number of terrorists or victims. The special place given to the terrorist attacks of 13th November in the collective memory is due to the unprecedented number of victims, the fact that the attacks took place in the heart of the capital city, the reaction of the public authorities who declared a long lasting state of emergency, the discursive framing of the war on terrorism in all major media, and the feeling that the Islamist threat can kill indiscriminately without targeting specific categories of the population. The study also reveals the influence of value systems (political opinions, views of the republican model) and social characteristics of individuals on the way people memorize such experiences. It is part of a fundamentally multidisciplinary research around "Memory and trauma" that includes neuroscience, biological and clinical investigations.

Title: Les traces sociales du traumatisme des attentats du 13 novembre 2015 : cinq ans et sept mois après. Abstract: Le suivi de la mémoire des attentats du 13 novembre, et plus généralement des attaques terroristes depuis l'an 2000, auprès de la population générale offre un matériau inédit pour comprendre l'évolution dans le temps et la construction de la mémoire collective. L'étude montre que ces attaques ont davantage marqué la population que d'autres événements tragiques survenus dans l'Hexagone dans une période de temps proche, ou même que d'autres attentats beaucoup plus récents. Avec le temps, la mémorisation précise des faits et les souvenirs des circonstances dans lesquelles les personnes ont appris les faits s'érodent, et se concentrent notamment autour du lieu du Bataclan. Mais, cette imprécision fait place à un investissement symbolique plus fort, qui conduit notamment à une surestimation du nombre de terroristes ou de victimes. Les raisons de la place particulière dévolue aux attaques du 13 novembre dans la mémoire collective tiennent à la fois au nombre inégalé de victimes, à l'attaque de lieux situés dans la capitale, à la réaction des pouvoirs publics qui instaurent l'état d'urgence, au cadrage discursif de la guerre contre le terrorisme amplifié par les médias télévisuels et au sentiment que la menace islamiste peut tuer aveuglément sans viser des catégories précises de population. L'étude met également à jour l'influence des systèmes de valeur (couleur politique, regard sur le modèle républicain) et des caractéristiques sociales des individus sur la mémoire. Elle s'inscrit dans une recherche fondamentalement pluridisciplinaire autour de la « Mémoire et traumatisme ¼ intégrant des travaux en biologie, neurosciences et médecine.

Risk-adjusted benchmarking of long-term overall survival in patients with HER2-positive early-stage Breast cancer: A Swedish retrospective cohort study.

AIM: The main objective of the current study was to explore the value of risk-adjustment when comparing (i.e. benchmarking) long-term overall survival (OS) in breast cancer (BC) between Swedish regions. We performed risk-adjusted benchmarking of 5- and 10-year OS after HER2-positive early BC diagnosis between Sweden's two largest healthcare regions, constituting approximately a third of the total population in Sweden. METHODS: All patients diagnosed with HER2-positive early-stage BC between 01-01-2009 and 31-12-2016 in healthcare regions Stockholm-Gotland and Skane were included in the study. Cox proportional hazards model was used for risk-adjustment. Unadjusted (i.e. crude) and adjusted 5- and 10-year OS was benchmarked between the two regions. RESULTS: The crude 5-year OS was 90.3% in the Stockholm-Gotland region and 87.8% in the Skane region. The crude 10-year OS was 81.7% in the Stockholm-Gotland region and 77.3% in the Skane region. However, when adjusted for age, menopausal status and tumour biology, there was no significant OS disparity between the regions, neither at the 5-year nor 10-year follow-up. CONCLUSION: This study showed that risk-adjustment is relevant when benchmarking OS in BC, even when comparing regions from the same country that share the same national treatment guidelines. This is, to our knowledge, the first published risk-adjusted benchmarking of OS in HER2-positive BC.

"It's Easy to Put Oneself in the Shoes of Others." Results of a School Study in Geography Lessons on Working with Authentic Personal Narratives in Comparison to Factual Texts.

Texts represent the most frequently used medium in geography teaching, although they do not belong to leading subject-specific media. Despite their undisputed didactic importance, they have not yet been sufficiently researched. In this article, we consider the use of authentic and personal narratives in geography lessons. We first show their theoretical potential for realistic, multi-perspective and motivating teaching. Then, we present a school study in which the use of authentic, personal narratives was investigated in comparison to a factual text. The areas of investigation were the students' understanding of the content of a geographical topic, their memory performance and their motivation to work. The results show that authentic, personal narratives are better suited than factual texts to convey a topic to pupils in a multi-perspective and differentiated way. They also confirm their potential to empathise better with other people and to understand their actions through changes in perspective. Regarding recall performance, however, the results show no difference between the two groups. Finally, the results of the school study are considered in the context of forming suggestions for the use of authentic, personal narratives in geography lessons.

Big Data Research in the Field of Endocrine Diseases Using the Korean National Health Information Database.

The Korean National Health Information Database (NHID) contains big data combining information obtained from the National Health Insurance Service and health examinations. Data are provided in the form of a cohort, and the NHID can be used to conduct longitudinal studies and research on rare diseases. Moreover, data on the cause and date of death are provided by Statistics Korea. Research and publications based on the NHID have increased explosively in the field of endocrine disorders. However, because the data were not collected for research purposes, studies using the NHID have limitations, particularly the need for the operational definition of diseases. In this review, we describe the characteristics of the Korean NHID, operational definitions of endocrine diseases used for research, and an overview of recent studies in endocrinology using the Korean NHID.

Neurosynergy: an animated documentary exploring the synergistic capabilities of art, science, and medicine.

Neurosynergy is an award-winning animated documentary film focussed on the convergence of art, science, and medicine. It highlights Dr. Joel Schechter, a retired medical instructor who has been drawing and teaching medical students for several years. The use of animated documentaries has great potential in connecting viewers with lived experiences of individuals.

Qualitative research on thematic interviews and factual records of Kampo medicine based on grounded theory / 国际中医中药杂志

Through literature search and screening, with qualitative research methods and the guidance of the three-level coding framework of grounded theory, literature about interview and factual records with Kampo medicine as theme was analyzed to explore concern areas and key points of Kampo medicine. The included literature mainly showed the modern development prospect of Kampo medicine from the fields of the revival background, laws and regulations, clinical work, education and teaching, scientific research, Kampo medicine industry, periodicals and books, representatives, symbolic events, organization and communication of Kampo medicine. Among them, half or more of the literature involved specific aspects such as clinical diagnosis and treatment methods of Kampo medicine, international communication, drug dosage forms and marketing, scientific research institutions and clinical research, and university education. At the same time, the specific aspects of events, legislation, organizations, periodicals, books and representatives mentioned in the literature provided important indexes for the comparative study of traditional medicine between China and Japan. In the future, the above fields and aspects can be set as starting points and main framework to further obtain and research relevant interviews and documentary literature, so as to promote the communication and development of traditional medicine at home and abroad.

A 25 años de la implementación del identificador de objeto digital / Twenty-five years after the implementation of the Digital Object Identifier

RESUMEN El identificador de objeto digital, conocido en inglés como digital object identifier y abreviado DOI, surgido en 1997, es una cadena alfanumérica única que identifica un contenido electrónico y proporciona un enlace permanente a su ubicación en internet. A 25 años de la implementación de esta herramienta, todavía quedan muchas revistas con un impacto considerable que no cuentan con DOI. Cuba no lo tiene porque le es negado por las grandes agencias registradoras. Fue objetivo de los autores de esta comunicación destacar la importancia del DOI como herramienta básica para el control de la documentación digital. Se concluyó que su principal aporte es asegurar la identificación persistente y unívoca de un documento, a través de un registro sistemático central de sus metadatos. Se recomienda que siempre que esté disponible el DOI en línea, se utilice en la cita bibliográfica, para mejorar la visibilidad de las revistas y los propios investigadores.

ABSTRACT The Digital Object Identifier, abbreviated as DOI and emerged in 1997, is a unique alphanumeric string that identifies electronic content and provides a permanent link to its location on the Internet. Twenty-five years after the implementation of this tool, there are still many journals with a considerable impact which do not have DOIs. Cuba does not have it because it is denied by the big registration agencies. The objective of this article was to highlight the importance of the DOI as a basic tool for the control of digital documentation. We concluded that its main contribution is to ensure the persistent and unique identification of a document, through a central systematic record of its metadata. It is recommended that whenever the DOI is available online, it is used in the bibliographic citation, to improve the visibility of the journals and the researchers themselves.

Understanding the Social Mechanism of Cancer Misinformation Spread on YouTube and Lessons Learned: Infodemiological Study.

BACKGROUND: A knowledge gap exists between the list of required actions and the action plan for countering cancer misinformation on social media. Little attention has been paid to a social media strategy for disseminating factual information while also disrupting misinformation on social media networks. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to, first, identify the spread structure of cancer misinformation on YouTube. We asked the question, "How do YouTube videos play an important role in spreading information about the self-administration of anthelmintics for dogs as a cancer medicine for humans?" Second, the study aimed to suggest an action strategy for disrupting misinformation diffusion on YouTube by exploiting the network logic of YouTube information flow and the recommendation system. We asked the question, "What would be a feasible and effective strategy to block cancer misinformation diffusion on YouTube?" METHODS: The study used the YouTube case of the self-administration of anthelmintics for dogs as an alternative cancer medicine in South Korea. We gathered Korean YouTube videos about the self-administration of fenbendazole. Using the YouTube application programming interface for the query "fenbendazole," 702 videos from 227 channels were compiled. Then, videos with at least 50,000 views, uploaded between September 2019 and September 2020, were selected from the collection, resulting in 90 videos. Finally, 10 recommended videos for each of the 90 videos were compiled, totaling 573 videos. Social network visualization for the recommended videos was used to identify three intervention strategies for disrupting the YouTube misinformation network. RESULTS: The study found evidence of complex contagion by human and machine recommendation systems. By exposing stakeholders to multiple information sources on fenbendazole self-administration and by linking them through a recommendation algorithm, YouTube has become the perfect infrastructure for reinforcing the belief that fenbendazole can cure cancer, despite government warnings about the risks and dangers of self-administration. CONCLUSIONS: Health authorities should upload pertinent information through multiple channels and should exploit the existing YouTube recommendation algorithm to disrupt the misinformation network. Considering the viewing habits of patients and caregivers, the direct use of YouTube hospital channels is more effective than the indirect use of YouTube news media channels or government channels that report public announcements and statements. Reinforcing through multiple channels is the key.

Support for learning under naturalistic conditions.

Educational opportunities occur through naturalistic everyday life experiences (e.g., reading a newspaper, listening to a podcast, or visiting a museum). Research primarily examines learning under controlled conditions, such as in a classroom or laboratory. There is relatively little known about the extent to which adults extract semantic content, beyond factual recall, from naturalistic educational experiences. In the present work, we focused on virtual museum exhibits. The materials were sourced directly from an art history museum. The naturalistic nature of this work stems from the type of content used though an important component of naturalistic learning-motivational processes-was not measured. In each of three experiments, we assessed adult learners' performance on tests of factual recall, inferential reasoning, and self-derivation through memory integration from naturalistic virtual museum exhibits. In anticipation of the potential challenge associated with learning outcomes under naturalistic conditions, we administered a yoked protocol under which participants had opportunities to engage in retrieval practice (Experiment 2a) or restudy (Experiment 2b) as explicit mechanisms of support for the three tests of learning. In all experiments, participants performed successfully on all three tests of learning; factual recall was the most accessible of the three learning outcomes. There was no difference in performance at the group level across experiments, but there was at the individual level, such that idea units generated during retrieval practice predicted learning outcomes, whereas restudy of those exact idea units did not. The current work provides novel insight into mechanisms underlying adult learning from naturalistic educational opportunities.

Exploiting Intersentence Information for Better Question-Driven Abstractive Summarization: Algorithm Development and Validation.

BACKGROUND: Question-driven summarization has become a practical and accurate approach to summarizing the source document. The generated summary should be concise and consistent with the concerned question, and thus, it could be regarded as the answer to the nonfactoid question. Existing methods do not fully exploit question information over documents and dependencies across sentences. Besides, most existing summarization evaluation tools like recall-oriented understudy for gisting evaluation (ROUGE) calculate N-gram overlaps between the generated summary and the reference summary while neglecting the factual consistency problem. OBJECTIVE: This paper proposes a novel question-driven abstractive summarization model based on transformer, including a two-step attention mechanism and an overall integration mechanism, which can generate concise and consistent summaries for nonfactoid question answering. METHODS: Specifically, the two-step attention mechanism is proposed to exploit the mutual information both of question to context and sentence over other sentences. We further introduced an overall integration mechanism and a novel pointer network for information integration. We conducted a question-answering task to evaluate the factual consistency between the generated summary and the reference summary. RESULTS: The experimental results of question-driven summarization on the PubMedQA data set showed that our model achieved ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L measures of 36.01, 15.59, and 30.22, respectively, which is superior to the state-of-the-art methods with a gain of 0.79 (absolute) in the ROUGE-2 score. The question-answering task demonstrates that the generated summaries of our model have better factual constancy. Our method achieved 94.2% accuracy and a 77.57% F1 score. CONCLUSIONS: Our proposed question-driven summarization model effectively exploits the mutual information among the question, document, and summary to generate concise and consistent summaries.

National Yearly Trend of Utilization and Procedural Complication of the Watchman Device in the United States.

Background Complication from the Watchman device (Boston Scientific Corp, Marlborough, Massachusetts) is operator-dependent, with the latest EWOLUTION trial showing low complication rates (1.8%) thought to be due to maturing physician experience. Objectives The objective of this study is to understand the yearly trend of utilization and complication rates of the Watchman device in hospitalized patients. Methods The national inpatient sample (NIS) was queried for all hospitalization with primary atrial fibrillation or flutter from 2016 to 2019 with percutaneous left atrial appendage occlusion (LAAO). The frequency of peri-procedural complications, including death, stroke, major bleeding requiring blood transfusion, pericardial effusion, post-op hypotension, cardiac arrest, postprocedural CHF, implant displacement/leak, systemic embolism, and requiring repeat procedures, were assessed. Results From 2016 to 2019, an estimated 60,350 LAAO procedures were performed. The majority of the procedure was done in white (84.88%), males (58.40%), with a mean age of 76, at teaching hospitals (88.27%). Complication rates were around 5.72%, with no change from 2016 to 2019 (annual percentage change, APC: 6.23; p-value: 0.170) despite rapid increase in yearly utilization of Watchman from 1.12% in 2016 to 5.45% in 2019 (APC: 62.30; p-value of 0.013). Pericardial effusion (3.41%) was the most common complication, followed by bleeding requiring transfusion (1.40%) that had no significant change over time. Conclusion Our study demonstrates that trend of complications with the Watchman device implantation in the real-world practice didn't improve over time, possibly due to characteristics inherent to the device and patient population. Hence, we expect a further drop in nationwide complication rates with the improved design of Watchman-FLX and increased placement experience.

The Role of Political Ideology and Open-Minded Thinking Style in the (in)Accuracy of Factual Beliefs.

The paper investigates the role of political ideology and an open-minded thinking style (i.e., the tendency to reason based on rules of inference rather than intuitive heuristics) with respect to the accuracy of factual beliefs. In line with political asymmetry theory, we assumed that right-wing beliefs, in contrast to left-wing beliefs, are associated with more inaccurate factual beliefs. We also expected that the open-minded thinking style acts as a buffer against inaccurate factual beliefs among people with right-wing (but not left-wing) political affinities. To test these hypotheses, we conducted three studies (total N = 1120) in which participants holding right- and left-wing beliefs, and displaying differing degrees of the open-minded thinking style (as measured by the Active Open-minded Thinking Style questionnaire), assessed policy-relevant facts congenial to left- as well as right-wing beliefs. The results of the study confirm the hypotheses proposed. The paper's findings contribute to the ongoing discussion around the ideological underpinnings of (un)biased cognition and the controversies concerning the role of cognitive factors in ideological polarization. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-022-09789-z.

Time and skeptical opinion content erode the effects of science coverage on climate beliefs and attitudes.

Although experiments show that exposure to factual information can increase factual accuracy, the public remains stubbornly misinformed about many issues. Why do misperceptions persist even when factual interventions generally succeed at increasing the accuracy of people's beliefs? We seek to answer this question by testing the role of information exposure and decay effects in a four-wave panel experiment (n = 2,898 at wave 4) in which we randomize the media content that people in the United States see about climate change. Our results indicate that science coverage of climate change increases belief accuracy and support for government action immediately after exposure, including among Republicans and people who reject anthropogenic climate change. However, both effects decay over time and can be attenuated by exposure to skeptical opinion content (but not issue coverage featuring partisan conflict). These findings demonstrate that the increases in belief accuracy generated by science coverage are short lived and can be neutralized by skeptical opinion content.