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Abstract. Acute variceal bleeding, a crucial complication of liver cirrhosis requires high energy expenditures but gastrointestinal bleeding limits enteral feeding in the acute stage. We investigated the safety and efficacy of ω-3 fatty acid-enriched parenteral nutrition in acute variceal bleeding patients. In this retrospective study, a total of 208 cirrhotic patients with acute variceal bleeding who underwent parenteral nutrition in the absence of enteral nutrition were enrolled. Among the patients, 86 patients received ω-3 fatty-acid-enriched parenteral nutrition. The primary endpoint was to evaluate the duration of hospital stay and the presence of clinical complications of liver cirrhosis. The mean age of the patients enrolled was 54.9 years-old and 185 patients (88.9%) were male. The cause of liver cirrhosis, Child-Pugh score and comorbidities were statistically not different. Patients with ω-3 enriched parenteral nutrition had a significantly lower systolic blood pressure and total bilirubin levels. The difference in the in-hospital mortality (P = .813) or rate of complications (P = .880) was not statistically significant. The duration of hospital stay was significantly shorter in the patients who underwent ω-3 fatty acid-enriched parenteral nutrition (10.7 ± 7.3 vs 7.9 ± 4.2 days, P = .001). In liver cirrhosis patients with acute variceal bleeding, ω-3 fatty acid-enriched parenteral nutrition significantly decreased the length of hospital stay. Further prospective studies to consolidate these findings are warranted.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, government authorities have responded by issuing new public health policies, many of which were intended to contain its spread but ended up limiting economic and social activities. The citizen responses to these policies are diverse, ranging from goodwill to fear and anger. It is challenging to determine whether or not these public health policies achieved the intended impact. This requires systematic data collection and scientific studies, which can be very time-consuming. To overcome such challenges, in this paper, we provide an alternative approach to continuously monitor and dynamically make sense of how public health policies impact citizens. Our approach is to continuously collect Twitter posts related to COVID-19 policies and to analyze the public reactions. We have developed a web-based system that collects tweets daily and generates timelines and geographical displays of citizens’ “concern levels”. Tracking the public reactions towards different policies can help government officials assess the policy impacts in a more dynamic and real-time manner. For this paper, we collected and analyzed over 16 million tweets related to ten policies over a 10-month period. We obtained several findings; for example, the “COVID-19 (General)” and ”Ventilators” policies engendered the highest concern levels, while the “Face Coverings” policy caused the lowest. Nine out of ten policies exhibited significant changes in concern levels during the observation period.