Statement of the problem. In this study we describe the prevalence of fecal incontinence by race, age, sex, the presence of major chronic conditions of stroke and diabetes, and the use of certain ...psychoactive medications. Methods. 6,099 participants in the Chicago Health and Aging Project, a study of older Chicago residents of a geographically defined area completed the baseline interview which included questions regarding demographics, medical history, and medication use. The question used to determine the presence of fecal incontinence was: "In the past few months have you ever lost control of your bowels when you didn't want to?" Results. The overall prevalence of Fl was 9.6% and was strongly associated with age and the use of psychoactive medications. The increase in prevalence with age was significantly greater among blacks than whites. Diabetes and stroke were associated with a higher prevalence of FI. Conclusions. FI is correlated with increasing age, the presence of certain conditions (e.g. stroke and diabetes) and the use of certain psychoactive medications.
To compare clinical characteristics and prognosis between patients with primary (PTL) and secondary thyroid lymphoma (STL) .
A retrospective analysis was performed on 46 patients with thyroid ...lymphoma (PTL 19, STL 27) from January 2002 to October 2018.
①PTL group included 4 males and 15 females, with a median age of 57 years. The STL group included 10 males and 17 females, with a median age of 61 years. Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) was the main pathological subtype in both PTL and STL groups, with 14 cases (73.7%) and 20 cases (74.1%) respectively. In terms of clinical manifestations, goiter was the most common symptom in PTL patients 100.0% (19/19) , while 29.6% (8/27) STL had goiter (
<0.001) . The incidences of increased thyroglobulin antibody (TRAb) /thyroid peroxidase antibody (TPO) were 81.3% (13/16) in PTL group and 43.8% (7/16) in STL group (
=0.028) respectively. Concerning the clinical features of patients, only two PTL patients (10.5%) with advanced Ann Arbor stage (Ⅲ/Ⅳ) , while 21 (77.8%)
Background The semantics of entities extracted from a clinical text can be dramatically altered by modifiers, including entity negation, uncertainty, conditionality, severity, and subject. Existing ...models for determining modifiers of clinical entities involve regular expression or features weights that are trained independently for each modifier. Methods We develop and evaluate a multi-task transformer architecture design where modifiers are learned and predicted jointly using the publicly available SemEval 2015 Task 14 corpus and a new Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) data set that contains modifiers shared with SemEval as well as novel modifiers specific for OUD. We evaluate the effectiveness of our multi-task learning approach versus previously published systems and assess the feasibility of transfer learning for clinical entity modifiers when only a portion of clinical modifiers are shared. Results Our approach achieved state-of-the-art results on the ShARe corpus from SemEval 2015 Task 14, showing an increase of 1.1% on weighted accuracy, 1.7% on unweighted accuracy, and 10% on micro F1 scores. Conclusions We show that learned weights from our shared model can be effectively transferred to a new partially matched data set, validating the use of transfer learning for clinical text modifiers. Keywords: Data mining, Disease attribute, Multi-task learning, Domain adaptation, Natural language processing
To determine the characteristics and risk factors of breast cancer patients in a tertiary care setting.
The retrospective, cross-sectional study was conducted at the Sindh Institute of Urology and ...Transplantation, Karachi, and comprised data of all patients diagnosed with breast cancer from March 2017 to December 2021. Demographic characteristics, clinical presentation, stage of the disease and histopathological characteristics were noted. Data related to all the variables was not available in all cases. Data was analysed using SPSS 23.
Of the 690 patients, 683(99%) were females and 7(1%) were males. The mean age at presentation was 49.3±13.5 years, while the mean duration of symptoms was 10.24±17.64) months. Most of the females were married 642(93%) and multiparous 484(70.9%), while 293(42.5%) had breastfed their children for >1 year, and 412(59.7%) had no history of contraception use. The most common stage at presentation was stage II (48.6%), and most patients had grade II 395(57.2%) invasive ductal carcinoma, with Luminal A molecular subtype noted in 287(41.6%) cases.
The characteristics of breast cancer in the sample had certain distinctions compared to other populations. It is important to integrate all datasets and develop guidelines appropriate to Pakistani population.
Over the past several decades there has been an explosion of interest in genetics and genetic inheritance within both the research community and the mass media. The science of genetics now forecasts ...great advances in alleviating disease and prolonging human life, placing the family and kin group under the spotlight. InExperiencing the New Genetics, Kaja Finkler argues that the often uncritical presentation of research on genetic inheritance as well as the attitudes of some in the biomedical establishment contribute to a "genetic essentialism," a new genetic determinism, and the medicalization of kinship in American society. She explores some of the social and cultural consequences of this phenomenon. Finkler discovers that the new genetics can turn a healthy person into a perpetual patient, complicate the redefinition of the family that has been occurring in American society for the past few decades, and lead to the abdication of responsibility for addressing the problem of unhealthy environmental conditions.Experiencing the New Geneticswill assist scholars and general readers alike in making sense of this timely and multifaceted issue.
