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Background: Floods represent a serious threat to human health beyond the immediate risk of drowning. There is few data on the potential link between floods and direct consequences on health such as on cardiovascular health. This study aimed to explore the impact of one of the worst floods in the history of Quebec, Canada on acute cardiovascular diseases (CVD)., Methods: A cohort study with a time series design with multiple control groups was built with the adult population identified in the Quebec Integrated Chronic Disease Surveillance System. A geographic information system approach was used to define the study areas. Logistic regressions were performed to compare the occurrence of CVD between groups., Results: The results showed a 25%-27% increase in the odds in the flooded population in spring 2011 when compared with the population in the same area in springs 2010 and 2012. Besides, an increase up to 69% was observed in individuals with a medical history of CVD., Conclusion: Despite interesting results, the association was not statistically significant. A possible explanation to this result can be that the population affected by the flood was probably too small to provide the statistical power to answer the question, and leaves open a substantial possibility for a real and large effect.

"Translational medicine" has been a buzzword for over two decades. The concept was intended to be lofty, to reflect a new "bench-to-bedside" approach to basic and clinical research that would bridge fields, close gaps, accelerate innovation, and shorten the time and effort it takes to bring novel technologies from basic discovery to clinical application. Has this approach been successful and lived up to its promise? Despite incredible scientific advances and innovations developed within academia, successful clinical translation into real-world solutions has been difficult. This has been particularly challenging within the pulmonary field, because there have been fewer U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs and higher failure rates for pulmonary therapies than with other common disease areas. The American Thoracic Society convened a working group with the goal of identifying major challenges related to the commercialization of technologies within the pulmonary space and opportunities to enhance this process. A survey was developed and administered to 164 participants within the pulmonary arena. This report provides a summary of these survey results. Importantly, this report identifies a number of poorly recognized challenges that exist in pulmonary academic settings, which likely contribute to diminished efficiency of commercialization efforts, ultimately hindering the rate of successful clinical translation. Because many innovations are initially developed in academic settings, this is a global public health issue that impacts the entire American Thoracic Society community. This report also summarizes key resources and opportunities and provides recommendations to enhance successful commercialization of pulmonary technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to articles published within the issue is presented, including one on which examined the concept of value complexity which can lead to mistrust, misunderstanding, and conflict among stakeholders, another which highlighted the need for a national dialogue to achieve consensus regarding a holistic definition of health for health transformation and equity, and another which examined the association between electoral democracy and working-age mortality.

The article, published in the June 2023 issue of the Quarterly, covers various topics related to population health. Topics include the need for improvements in monitoring child and adolescent mental health indicators, the impact of hospital system mergers on healthcare outcomes, the financing and ownership trends in the American healthcare system, and the strategic messaging to promote policies that advance racial equity.

The article offers information about the public health, medical, and health policy communities for a century supporting by publications, research, and policy-focused commentaries. Topics include the milbank memorial fund quarterly bulletin in 1923, reporting on public health campaigns to reduce the prevalence of tuberculosis in New York State.

The article focuses on the publisher dedicated to population health, public health, and health policy which celebrates its 101st year of publication. Topics in this issue include the performance of alternative payment models for improving healthcare, the political challenges of public option health insurance plans, strategies for testing and detecting lead poisoning in children, and state strategies to reduce childhood obesity.

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics including trends in the use of seven specialty mental health services from 2010 to 2019, impacts of complex policy decisions and unintentional biases in technology, and key considerations for future settlement allocation efforts.

Background: We have previously developed and validated a biomarker-based metric of overall health status using Mahalanobis distance (DM) to measure how far from the norm of a reference population (RP) an individual's biomarker profile is. DM is not particularly sensitive to the choice of biomarkers; however, this makes comparison across studies difficult. Here we aimed to identify and validate a standard, optimized version of DM that would be highly stable across populations, while using fewer and more commonly measured biomarkers. Methods: Using three datasets (the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, Invecchiare in Chianti and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey), we selected the most stable sets of biomarkers in all three populations, notably when interchanging RPs across populations. We performed regression models, using a fourth dataset (the Women's Health and Aging Study), to compare the new DM sets to other well-known metrics [allostatic load (AL) and self-assessed health (SAH)] in their association with diverse health outcomes: mortality, frailty, cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes, and comorbidity number. Results: A nine- (DM9) and a seventeen-biomarker set (DM17) were identified as highly stable regardless of the chosen RP (e.g.: mean correlation among versions generated by interchanging RPs across dataset of r = 0.94 for both DM9 and DM17). In general, DM17 and DM9 were both competitive compared with AL and SAH in predicting aging correlates, with some exceptions for DM9. For example, DM9, DM17, AL, and SAH all predicted mortality to a similar extent (ranges of hazard ratios of 1.15–1.30, 1.21–1.36, 1.17–1.38, and 1.17–1.49, respectively). On the other hand, DM9 predicted CVD less well than DM17 (ranges of odds ratios of 0.97–1.08, 1.07–1.85, respectively). Conclusions: The metrics we propose here are easy to measure with data that are already available in a wide array of panel, cohort, and clinical studies. The standardized versions here lose a small amount of predictive power compared to more complete versions, but are nonetheless competitive with existing metrics of overall health. DM17 performs slightly better than DM9 and should be preferred in most cases, but DM9 may still be used when a more limited number of biomarkers is available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pneumonia causes a significant burden of disease worldwide. Although all populations are at risk of pneumonia, those at extremes of age and those with immunosuppressive disorders, underlying respiratory disease, and critical illness are particularly vulnerable. Although clinical practice guidelines addressing the management and treatment of pneumonia exist, few of the supporting studies focus on the crucial contributions of the host in pneumonia pathogenesis and recovery. Such essential considerations include the host risk factors that lead to susceptibility to lung infections; biomarkers reflecting the host response and the means to pursue host-directed pneumonia therapy; systemic effects of pneumonia on the host; and long-term health outcomes after pneumonia. To address these gaps, the Pneumonia Working Group of the Assembly on Pulmonary Infection and Tuberculosis led a workshop held at the American Thoracic Society meeting in May 2018 with overarching objectives to foster attention, stimulate research, and promote funding for short-term and long-term investigations into the host contributions to pneumonia. The workshop involved participants from various disciplines with expertise in lung infection, pneumonia, sepsis, immunocompromised patients, translational biology, data science, genomics, systems biology, and clinical trials. This workshop report summarizes the presentations and discussions and important recommendations for future clinical pneumonia studies. These recommendations include establishing consensus disease and outcome definitions, improved phenotyping, development of clinical study networks, standardized data and biospecimen collection and protocols, and development of innovative trial designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including perfect storm of public health emergency, economic upheaval, and long-simmering racial tensions.

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various topics within the issue, including population health science, U.S. public health, communication infrastructure as social determinants of health, and health policymaking and practice.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses several articles published within issue on topics including the U.S. State Polarization, policymaking power, and population health; and contribution of medical measures to the decline of mortality.

An introduction to articles published within the issue is presented on topics including the important characteristics of primary care, the implications of the U.S. underinvestment in its public health infrastructure and how it made the country susceptible to the spread of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), and another on the trends in public health funding in the U.S.

An introduction to articles published within the issue is presented, including one by Laurie Jinkins describing Washington State's 2019 legislation creating a public long-term care insurance program, another by James Capretta on the state's effort to test a public option in the individual insurance market, and one by David Kindig which analyzes infant mortality in the U.S. by using an unconventional approach.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including corporate engagement in promoting a culture of health (CoH); and "State Legislators' Support for Behavioral Health Parity Laws: The Influence of Mutable and Fixed Factors at Multiple Levels."

The article offers information related to the and health care policy topics that were discussed in the September 2019 issue of the periodical. Topics include Global Action Plan to promote the health of refugees and migrants reveals serious inadequacies and inequities among nations; transformation of primary care delivery from a fee-for-service driven enterprise; and transform hospital care by promoting patient safety in its hospital payment policies.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the journal on topics including the economic value of education, the World Health Organization's Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework, and medical care delivery models for older people.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the contents within the issue, including articles on topics such as disruptive innovation in health care, Medicaid work requirements in the U.S., and public health dangers from wildfires in the U.S.