Recruitment is often a difficult and costly part of any human research study. Social media and other emerging means of mass communication hold promise as means to complement traditional strategies ...used for recruiting participants because they can reach a large number of people in a short amount of time. With the ability to target a specified audience, paid Facebook advertisements have potential to reach future research participants of a specific demographic. This paper describes the experiences of a randomized controlled trial in Edmonton, Alberta, attempting to recruit healthy pregnant women between 8 and 20 weeks' gestation for participation in a prenatal study. Various traditional recruitment approaches, in addition to paid Facebook advertisements were trialed.
To evaluate the effectiveness of paid advertisements on Facebook as a platform for recruiting pregnant women to a randomized controlled trial in comparison with traditional recruitment approaches.
Recruitment using traditional approaches occurred for 7 months, whereas Facebook advertisements ran for a total of 26 days. Interested women were prompted to contact the study staff for a screening call to determine study eligibility. Costs associated with each recruitment approach were recorded and used to calculate the cost to recruit eligible participants. Performance of Facebook advertisements was monitored using Facebook Ads Manager.
Of the 115 women included, 39.1% (n=45) of the women who contacted study staff heard about the study through Facebook, whereas 60.9% (n=70) of them heard about it through traditional recruitment approaches. During the 215 days (~7 months) that the traditional approaches were used, the average rate of interest was 0.3 (0.2) women/day, whereas the 26 days of Facebook advertisements resulted in an average rate of interest of 2.8 (1.7) women/day. Facebook advertisements cost Can $506.91 with a cost per eligible participant of Cad $20.28. In comparison, the traditional approaches cost Cad $1087, with approximately Cad $24.15 per eligible participant. Demographic characteristics of women were similar between the 2 recruitment methods except that women recruited using Facebook were significantly earlier in their pregnancy than those recruited using traditional approaches (P<.03).
Paid Facebook advertisements hold promise as a platform for reaching pregnant women. The relative ease of placing an advertisement, the comparable cost per participant recruited, and the dramatically improved recruitment rates in comparison with traditional approaches highlight the importance of combining novel and traditional recruitment approaches to recruit women for pregnancy-related studies.
ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02711644; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02711644 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6kKpagpMk).
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
•Women in the intervention reported positive changes in diet and activity behaviours.•Healthy conversation skills make opportunities to discuss healthy behaviour changes.•Interventions to improve ...gestational-weight-gain may need to begin preconception.
This study evaluated the use of Healthy Conversation Skills (a client-centered communication approach to behaviour change) in supporting women to achieve optimal gestational-weight-gain and health behaviours.
Seventy pregnant women were randomised to the control or intervention group. Study visits and phone calls were delivered by Registered Dietitians (RDs) to women in the intervention and control groups. The intervention RD was trained in Healthy Conversation Skills while the control RD was not. Diet, physical activity and gestational-weight-gain were assessed at baseline and again at follow-up in the intervention and control groups.
Women in the intervention group improved their diet score between baseline and visit 2, while the control group did not. At 34 weeks, women in the control group reported being sedentary for longer than women in the intervention group. There were no differences in total gestational-weight-gain between the groups.
Pregnant women who interacted with an RD using Healthy Conversation Skills reported positive outcomes in health behaviours.
Practice implications: Healthy Conversation Skills shows promise as an approach to initiate, and maintain discussions promoting health behaviour change in pregnancy.
Now in its sixth year, the war in Syria has triggered the largest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time. For most refugees and migrants, Turkey is the main transit country to reach Europe, ...where Syrian refugees hope for a better future. However, this journey has been hampered as several European countries closed their borders following the arrival of an unprecedented number of migrants and asylum seekers in 2015. In response, a deal was struck with Turkey to stem the migrant flow to Europe in exchange for some concessions. By outsourcing the management of migration flows to Turkey, the EU is failing to take its fair share of responsibility for refugee protection. Furthermore, as a result of the political situation in Turkey and the unmet promises under the deal, relations between Turkey and the EU have touched their lowest point since the start of accession negotiations in 2005. While survival of the deal is of critical importance as the EU needs Turkey's assistance in curbing migration flows and Turkey is keen on revitalising its accession negotiations, the deal has exposed serious flaws that need to be addressed and must not be replicated with other countries.
The re-use of previously validated designs is critical to the evolution of synthetic biology from a research discipline to an engineering practice. Here we describe the Synthetic Biology Open ...Language (SBOL), a proposed data standard for exchanging designs within the synthetic biology community. SBOL represents synthetic biology designs in a community-driven, formalized format for exchange between software tools, research groups and commercial service providers. The SBOL Developers Group has implemented SBOL as an XML/RDF serialization and provides software libraries and specification documentation to help developers implement SBOL in their own software. We describe early successes, including a demonstration of the utility of SBOL for information exchange between several different software tools and repositories from both academic and industrial partners. As a community-driven standard, SBOL will be updated as synthetic biology evolves to provide specific capabilities for different aspects of the synthetic biology workflow.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
To determine if ICU reorganization due to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic affected outcomes in critically ill patients who were not infected with coronavirus disease 2019.
This was a ...Before-After study, with coronavirus disease 2019-induced ICU reorganization as the intervention. A retrospective chart review of adult patients admitted to a reorganized ICU during the coronavirus disease 2019 surge (from March 23, 2020, to May 06, 2020: intervention group) was compared with patients admitted to the ICU prior to coronavirus disease 2019 surge (from January 10, 2020, to February 23, 2020: before group).
High-intensity cardiac, medical, and surgical ICUs of a community hospital in metropolitan Missouri.
All patients admitted to the ICU during the before and intervention period were included. Patients younger than 18 years old and those admitted after an elective procedure or surgery were excluded. Patients with coronavirus disease 2019 were excluded.
None.
We identified a total of 524 eligible patients: 342 patients in the before group and 182 in the intervention group. The 28-day mortality was 25.1% (86/342) and 28.6% (52/182), respectively (
= 0.40). The ICU length of stay, ventilator length of stay, and ventilator-free days were similar in both groups. Rates of patient adverse events including falls, inadvertent endotracheal tube removal, reintubation within 48 hours of extubation, and hospital acquired pressure ulcers occurred more frequently in the study group (20 events, 11%) versus control group (12 events, 3.5%) (
= 0.001).
Twenty-eight-day mortality, in patients who required ICU care and were not infected with coronavirus disease 2019, was not significantly affected by ICU reorganization during a pandemic.
Advances in biological engineering are likely to have substantial impacts on global society. To explore these potential impacts we ran a horizon scanning exercise to capture a range of perspectives ...on the opportunities and risks presented by biological engineering. We first identified 70 potential issues, and then used an iterative process to prioritise 20 issues that we considered to be emerging, to have potential global impact, and to be relatively unknown outside the field of biological engineering. The issues identified may be of interest to researchers, businesses and policy makers in sectors such as health, energy, agriculture and the environment.
Horizon scanning is intended to identify the opportunities and threats associated with technological, regulatory and social change. In 2017 some of the present authors conducted a horizon scan for ...bioengineering (Wintle et al., 2017). Here we report the results of a new horizon scan that is based on inputs from a larger and more international group of 38 participants. The final list of 20 issues includes topics spanning from the political (the regulation of genomic data, increased philanthropic funding and malicious uses of neurochemicals) to the environmental (crops for changing climates and agricultural gene drives). The early identification of such issues is relevant to researchers, policy-makers and the wider public.
Recognizing that certain biological functions can be associated with specific DNA sequences has led various fields of biology to adopt the notion of the genetic part. This concept provides a finer ...level of granularity than the traditional notion of the gene. However, a method of formally relating how a set of parts relates to a function has not yet emerged. Synthetic biology both demands such a formalism and provides an ideal setting for testing hypotheses about relationships between DNA sequences and phenotypes beyond the gene-centric methods used in genetics. Attribute grammars are used in computer science to translate the text of a program source code into the computational operations it represents. By associating attributes with parts, modifying the value of these attributes using rules that describe the structure of DNA sequences, and using a multi-pass compilation process, it is possible to translate DNA sequences into molecular interaction network models. These capabilities are illustrated by simple example grammars expressing how gene expression rates are dependent upon single or multiple parts. The translation process is validated by systematically generating, translating, and simulating the phenotype of all the sequences in the design space generated by a small library of genetic parts. Attribute grammars represent a flexible framework connecting parts with models of biological function. They will be instrumental for building mathematical models of libraries of genetic constructs synthesized to characterize the function of genetic parts. This formalism is also expected to provide a solid foundation for the development of computer assisted design applications for synthetic biology.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract The minimally invasive repair of pectus excavatum has become increasingly popular. Life-threatening complications have included bleeding and cardiac perforation. There have been a number of ...delayed cases of bleeding, many of which never demonstrated a clear source. We present a case of a delayed acute bleed from the Nuss bar eroding into the internal mammary artery 4 months after bar placement.
Background
The risk of multiglandular disease (MGD) dictates the extent of exploration in patients with primary hyperparathyroidism (PHPT). Historically, young patients with PHPT were more likely to ...have MGD, but the existing literature is sparse and conflicting. We hypothesized that young adults (ages 16–40 years) without familial PHPT have a disease process similar to that in older patients.
Methods
A 22-year retrospective chart review was performed on patients who underwent neck exploration for PHPT at our tertiary care center. Altogether, 708 charts were reviewed for demographics, family history, laboratory values, operative findings, pathology, and outcomes.
Results
As a group, young adults comprised 14.0% of the total population and were more likely to have preexisting familial disorders of PHPT (
p
< 0.01), therapeutic failure (
p
< 0.01), failure to identify an abnormal parathyroid at operation (
p
< 0.01), and higher reoperative rates (
p
= 0.02); they were less likely to have single-gland disease (
p
= 0.04). Young adults without a family history of the disease demonstrated no disease differences except for a higher rate of symptoms (
p
< 0.01). Additional analysis found that patients with a family history of hypercalcemia, a sole family member with PHPT, or nephrolithiasis (“possible” family history) were more likely to have MGD (relative risk 2.0).
Conclusions
In this largest single-institution study of young adults with sporadic PHPT, we conclude that sporadic PHPT in young adults represents a disease entity similar to that in older patients, with no increased risk for MGD, and hence they can be managed with a similar surgical approach. Further studies are needed to assess the role of a “possible” family history as a risk factor for MGD.
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