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Objective We aimed to provide a comprehensive assessment of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) of different activities and to evaluate the correlation between clinical activity measures and HRQoL instruments. This research also analysed the extent to which different aspects of HRQoL (physical, psychological and social) were affected.Design Cross-sectional, observational, non-interventional study.Setting The study was conducted at the Department of Rheumatology and Immunology, Qilu Hospital, Shandong University.Methods From December 2019 to October 2020, a total of 340 RA patients participated in the survey using convenient sampling. Three generic instruments, EQ-5D-5L,SF-12 and the AQoL-4D, as well as an RA-specific instrument,the Stanford Health Assessment Questionnaire Disability Index (HAQ-DI), were administered to assess patients’ HRQoL. The Disease Activity Score 28-Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate (DAS28-ESR) was used by doctors to measure patients’ clinical activity. Multivariable linear regression was used to compare patients’ HRQoL across different levels of activity. Spearman’s correlation was used to assess the correlation between doctor-reported clinical activity and HRQoL.Results A total of 314 patients with RA participated in this study. The mean score of HAQ-DI was 0.87 (SD: 0.91). Using patients in the clinical remission group as a reference, patients in the moderate and high disease activity groups showed significantly reduced health state utility values and HRQoL scores (all p

Abstract Background Gaucher’s disease (GD), a rare condition, represents the most common lysosomal storage disorder. The cardinal manifestations of GD are fatigue, hepatosplenomegaly, anemia, thrombocytopenia, bone pain, and bone infarction, thereby culminating in a marked deterioration of patients’ quality of life (QoL). Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) offer valuable insights into the impact of GD on patients’ QoL and symptoms. This systematic review aimed to identify and analyze PROs and outcome measures in GD patients. Methods We systematically searched PubMed, Web of Science Core Collections, EMBASE, SCOPUS, Cochrane Library, PsycINFO, Wan Fang Data, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), and the Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM). The methodological quality of the included studies was assessed using a mixed methods assessment tool. Results A total of 33 studies were identified, encompassing 24 distinct patient-reported outcome instruments, with the most frequently employed instrument being the SF-36. The study designs included eighteen cross-sectional studies, seven pre- and post-intervention investigations, three randomized controlled trials, two cohort studies, two qualitative inquiries, and one validation study. These studies explored diverse domains such as the QoL and cardinal symptoms (e.g., fatigue, pain, bleeding, cognition, social relationships, and psychological functioning) in patients with GD. Furthermore, significant attention was directed towards the appraisal of the therapeutic benefits of various interventions in patients with GD. A novel GD-specific instrument has also been developed, which has two applied versions: a 24-item variant for routine clinical monitoring and a 17-item form for use in clinical trials. Conclusion PROs have garnered increased attention and concern in the realm of GD. Despite this progress, it is noteworthy that the instruments used to measure PROs in GD are still predominantly generic instruments. While researchers have endeavored to develop and validate a disease-specific instrument, currently the use of this instrument is limited. Owing to several challenges, including the small number of patients, heterogeneity of the disease, and cross-regional discrepancies in study findings, GD poses substantial difficulties in the measurement of QoL and development of instruments. Consequently, patients with GD require more dependable measurement instruments that accurately reflect their QoL, efficacy of treatment, and facilitate healthcare decision-making.

Abstract Background Haemophilia A is a rare, hereditary haemorrhagic disease that manifests as induced spontaneous bleeding and leads to disability or premature death in severe cases. Prophylactic treatment is optimal for patients to prevent uncontrolled bleeding and reduce the severity of the injury. However, little is known about the use of prophylactic treatment among patients with haemophilia A in China, especially barriers that predispose them to low or non-adherence. In this study, we explore the barriers to the prophylactic treatment of patients with haemophilia A. Method We used personal interviews and focus groups to collect the data and analysed the data through thematic analysis. Purposive sampling was employed to recruit our participants. We continued recruiting participants until data saturation was reached from the thematic analysis. Ultimately, we obtained 37 participants, among whom 19 participated in personal interviews and 18 participated in focus groups (i.e., 3 focus groups with 6 participants each). Results Three themes and nine subthemes were identified from the thematic analysis. Nine subthemes (i.e., perceived barriers) emerged from the analysis, which were further clustered into three themes: (1) poor primary health care, (2) inadequate financial support, and (3) a lack of patient-centred care. Conclusion The findings presented in this descriptive qualitative study offer a unique view of Chinese patients with haemophilia A and their barriers to prophylactic treatment. Our findings not only provide an in-depth understanding of barriers to prophylactic treatment encountered by Chinese patients with haemophilia A but also address the urgent need to strengthen primary care, provide adequate financial support, and establish patient-centred care for these suffering patients.

Understanding the performance of the data mining approach and topic evolution in a certain scientific domain is imperative to capturing key domain developments and facilitating knowledge transfer within and across domains. Our research selects linguistics as an exploratory domain and exploits the feature maximization (FM) measurement for feature selection, combined with the contrast ratio to conduct the diachronic analysis for the linguistics domain’s topics. To accurately mine the linguistics domain’s topics and obtain the optimal clustering model selection, we exploit an integrated method associated with the deep embedding for clustering (DEC) algorithm based on the keywords-based Text Representation Matrix (KTRM) and Lamirel’s EC index and test the performance of this method. The results show that the FM measurement is applicable in the linguistics domain for topic mining, and the combinatory method has the advantage of an unbiased clustering optimization model and applies to the design of non-parameter clustering and algorithms from the low dimension to the high dimension of datasets. The findings suggest that this approach could be suitable for a diachronic analysis of topic evolution and facilitate the performance of topic detection. In addition, these findings of text detection can rise to knowledge fusion cognition with the factor of language as an available research objective in interdisciplinary research.

There is a pressing need to establish automated solutions for the rapid, high-throughput, and automatic detection of chromosome aberrations (CAs) in the occupational health surveillance of large-scale radiation workers. Here, we described and verified the accuracy of a new measurement system based on the automatic scanning and analysis of dicentric chromosomes (DICs). The effects of cell number on DIC detection by automatic scanning and analysis were studied, and the distribution of DIC values per cell was calculated. In total, 1088 cases were detected by automatic DIC scanning and analysis in 26 663 radiation workers, and 73 cases were further confirmed by a technician, including 5 cases in which radiation exposure lead to harmful medical consequences. Our approach reduces the workload by 96% and increases the speed of assessment approximately 7-fold. Overall, this study validates the utility of a novel rapid and high-throughput CA detection procedure as a means of occupational health surveillance of large-scale radiation workers.

The patient was contaminated with multiple radionuclides 38 years ago due to an accident. To investigate the effects of radionuclide contamination on humans, he has been followed up by examinations for many years. Long-term effects gradually emerge in these years. Lung cancer was diagnosed by medical examinations. Besides, chronic gastritis with intestinal metaplasia was indicated by gastroscopic biopsies, while colorectal polyps found by colonoscopy. All 13 colorectal polyps were removed, and radical surgery for lung cancer was performed. Fortunately, pathological examinations indicated that it was early lung cancer. The ground glass nodule (GGN) in left lung identified during the follow-up will be resected when needed. It is speculated that multiple manifestations of the patient may be related to radiation, and different lesions in the organs may be related to systemic adaptive response. However, longer follow-up is needed due to a lack of effective and direct evidence. This work is expected to provide experiences for similar patients’ treatment and follow-up.

To establish a complete technical solution for the automatic radiation biological dose estimation platform for biological dose estimation and classification of the wounded in large-scale radiation accidents, the “dose–effect curve by dicentric chromosome (DIC) automatic analysis” was established and its accuracy was verified. The effects of analyzed cell number and the special treatment of the culture on dose estimation by DIC automatic analysis were studied. Besides, sample processing capabilities of the special equipments were tested. The fitted “dose–effect curve by DIC automatic analysis” was presented as follows: Y = (0.01806 ± 0.00032) D 2 + (0.01279 ± 0.00084) D + (0.0004891 ± 0.0001358) ( R 2 = 0.961). Three-gradient scanning method, culture refrigeration method, and interprofessional collaboration under extreme conditions were proposed to improve the detection speed, prolong the sample processing time window, and reduce the equipment investment. In addition, the optimized device allocation ratio for the automatic biological dose estimation laboratory was proposed to eliminate the efficiency bottleneck. The complete set of technical solutions for the high-throughput automatic biological dose estimation laboratory proposed in this study can meet the requirements of early classification and rapid biological dose assessment of the wounded during the large-scale nuclear radiation events, and it is worthy of further promotion.

This paper aims to study the relationship between the geographical distribution of terrorist attacks and features of headlines and media organizations reporting terrorist attacks. Data are derived from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and are established into terrorist attacks news corpus along One Belt One Road. This paper adopted a combinatory algorithm with the edit distance algorithm and the longest common subsequence algorithm to calculate the similarity headlines of media organizations across the world. Also, this paper further explores the relationship between the geographical distribution of terrorist attacks and that of global media organizations with co-occurrence analysis and social network analysis. The results show that the mainstream media organizations always imitate or copy news reports of media organizations with regional natures where terrorist attacks often happened. In regards to the geographical distribution of terrorist attacks, the results show that there is a positive correlation between the geographical distribution frequencies of terrorist attacks and that of media organizations in areas prone to suffering from terrorist attacks. The proposed combinatory algorithm for features of media coverage about terrorist attacks along One Belt One Road could provide a very significant performance increase in the terrorist events studies. The findings of this research could help relevant institutions early warn and guard against hazards of terrorist attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Although brucellosis is the most common zoonotic disease worldwide, human meningitis infected with Brucella melitensis is rare and difficult to diagnosis. Herein we describe the clinical aspects of a rare case of Brucella melitensis meningitis accompanied by epileptic seizure. Methods: Bacterial culture of CSF was utilized to find the pathogen. Serum and CSF agglutination tests were used to detect the capacity of Brucella antigen. Bacterial clone was identified by the matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF). Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was used to monitor the recovery changes for meningitis. Results: The bacterial culture was positive for Brucella app. Antigen-antibody agglutination test was also positive with a titer more than 1/200. A reliable identification score of 2.8 for Brucella melitensis was obtained by MALDITOF. MRI showed obviously improved meningitis after therapy. Conclusions: The results of this study suggest the treatments for Brucella meningitis must be planned depending on the patient's clinical conditions and the laboratory identification of pathogen infection as early as possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rational allocation of the urban construction land is an important task of urbanization in China. This paper, based on Malmquist index model, studies the allocation scheme of construction land of China during urbanization with the carbon emissions caused by the urban land use change as constraints. The major finding of this study is that the ecological efficiency of urban construction land in eastern China is the highest, followed by the middle region, and the efficiency in western China is the lowest. Therefore, the eastern region of China should be allocated with more construction land and the weatern region should be allocated with more agricultural land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]