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The purpose of this paper is to estimate the possible impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the hospitalization and hospital mortality of the patients with gallstone disease and chronic liver diseases (CLD) in the worst pandemic period in Ukraine.

A retrospective comparative analysis of annual reports data of all economy subjects, which conducted economic activity in medical practice for 2019 and 2021. Data was accepted from the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (NSDC) and the State Statistics Service of Ukraine (SSSU).

The total hospitalization rates for diffuse liver disease and cholelithiasis significantly decreased during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ukraine, compared to the values of 2019. At the same time, the rates of in-hospital mortality for these diseases have significantly grown. Also, various proportions of similar trends were described in other countries during the first wave of the pandemic.

This paper highlights the fact that regulatory restrictions and the fear of the population of referring to healthcare facilities considering the high risk of getting an infection had significant disruption to medical care for patients with gallstone disease and CLD. Improving the management of medical resources and strengthening all kinds of institutions in the healthcare system must be thought about if similar challenges appear in the future.

Epidemiology is often described as “the basic science of public health” (Savitz, Poole & Miller, 1999; Syme & Yen, 2000). This description suggests both a close association with public health practice, and the separation of “pure” scientific knowledge from its application in the messy social world. Although the attainability of absolute objectivity is rarely claimed, epidemiologists are routinely encouraged to “persist in their efforts to substitute evidence for faith in scientific reasoning” (Stolley, 1985, p. 38) and reminded that “public health decision makers gain little from impassioned scholars who go beyond advancing and explaining the science to promoting a specific public health agenda” (Savitz et al., 1999, p. 1160). Epidemiology produces authoritative data that are transformed into evidence which informs public health. Those data are authoritative because epidemiology is regarded as a neutral scientific enterprise. Because its claims are grounded in science, epidemiological knowledge is deemed to have “a special technical status and hence is not contestable in the same way as are say, religion or ethics” (Lock, 1988, p. 6). Despite the veneer of universality afforded by its scientific pedigree, epidemiology is not a static or monolithic discipline. Epidemiological truth claims are embodied in several shifting paradigms that span the life of the discipline. Public health knowledges and practices, competing claims internal and external to epidemiology, and structural conditions (such as current political economies, material technologies, and institutions) provide important contexts in which certain kinds of epidemiological knowledge are more likely to emerge.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the urgency of better chronic disease management and the importance of making it an integral part of the recovery agenda in Europe. This paper aims to explore the shift towards digital and integrated care systems in Europe.

In this viewpoint paper the Expert Group for Integrated Care and Digital Health Europe (EGIDE) group argues that an orchestrated shift towards integrated care holds the solution to the chronic disease pandemic.

The development of integrated care cannot happen without shifting towards a digitalised healthcare system via large-scale initiatives like the European Health Data Space (EHDS) and the involvement of all stakeholders.

The EGIDE group has identified some foundational principles, which can guide the way to realise the full potential of the EHDS for integrated care and can support the involved stakeholders’ thinking.

Despite having inadequate resources, highly impoverished patients tend to seek and share health information over social media groups to improve each other’s well-being. This study aims to focus on access to health-care information for such patients and aims to provide an understanding of how online health-care communities (OHCs), as transformative service mediators, can be platforms for patients with chronic and nonchronic health conditions to share their experiences in a base-of-the-pyramid (BOP) context.

A large-scale survey among 658 respondents was conducted in a very low-income country. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

A model of patients’ experience sharing (PES), motivations and consequences for health-care services are introduced and tested. The result supports the PES model for patients with chronic health conditions, showing that utilitarian, hedonic and social value dimensions directly influence PES and indirectly influence patients’ continuance intention with OHCs and patient efforts. However, a mediating effect of PES was found only between the value dimensions and patients’ efforts. A negative moderation effect of medical mistrust was found in the relationship between utilitarian value and PES for both chronic and nonchronic patient groups.

This study is a pioneering attempt to develop and test a PES model in a BOP market.

The purpose of this paper is to discover the extent to which evidence‐based practices and computer systems for managing chronic illness are used within Swedish primary health care.

The methodology was a replication of a similar national USA survey study and an interview study.

The findings show large variations and an under‐use of a number of evidence‐based care management practices and of IT for managing depression, heart disease, asthma, and diabetes in Sweden. Follow‐up interview studies with heads of primary care centres gathered their views about the factors which helped and hindered improving care and prevention for these patient groups.

The study data identify actions which would significantly improve the quality of care for people suffering from chronic illnesses. Effective prevention and management of chronic illness in primary care can reduce unnecessary patient suffering and lower costs of care.

Evidence of effective methods for managing these illnesses has been reported, but it is not known how widely these methods or information technology are used in primary care outside the USA. The paper gives the first comprehensive nation‐wide data on the use of evidence‐based practices and computer systems for managing chronic illness in primary care in a European public health care system. It provides information allowing targeted actions which would improve quality of care which are low cost and high cost saving in the long term.

Acute and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a common and progressive lung disease that makes breathing difficult over time and can even lead to death. Despite this, there is no definitive treatment for it yet. This study aims to evaluate the studies on single and combined herbal interventions affecting COPD.

In this study, all articles published in English up to 2020 were extracted from the Web of Science (WoS) database and collected using Boolean tools based on keywords, titles and abstracts. Finally, the data required for bibliographic analysis, such as the author(s), publication year, academic journal, institution, country of origin, institution, financial institution and keywords were extracted from the database.

A total of 573 articles were analyzed. The number of papers in the lung disease field showed an upward trend from 1984 to 2021, and there was a surge in paper publications in 2013. China, Korea and Brazil published the highest number of studies on COPD, and Chinese medical universities published the most papers. Three journals that received the highest scores in this study were the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, International Immunopharmacology and Plos One. In the cloud map, expression, activation and expression were the most frequently researched subjects. In the plus and author keywords, acute lung injury was the most commonly used word. Inflammation, expression of various genes, nitric oxide-dependent pathways, NFkappa B, TNFalpha and lipopolysaccharide-dependent pathways were the mechanisms underlying COPD. Scientometric analysis of COPD provides a vision for future research and policymaking.

This study aimed to evaluate the studies on single and combined herbal interventions affecting COPD.

This study aims to examine the recent literature on health-promoting behavior, health needs and associated factors among older adults.

An massive search of five databases involving documents in the past decade was commenced.

This review showed a significant relationship between older adults’ demographic characteristics (marital status, income, chronic disease, education level and smoking status) and health-promoting behaviors. This review showed that older adults with a high level of education, high income, chronic diseases and smoker and married older adults are associated with better health-promoting behaviors.

The result of the current review supports the Pender Health Promotion Model that individual personal characteristics can affect the level of engagement in health-promoting behaviors. Assessing the health-promoting behaviors of older adults can help in identifying their health needs.

Leveraging information technology (IT) to improve the treatment and support of patients is a widely studied topic in healthcare. For chronic diseases, such as diabetes, the use of information technology is even more important since its effect extends from a clinic environment to patients’ daily life. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of one widely adopted information technology, the mobile phone, on diabetes treatment, specifically on the complicated process of patients’ health, emotions and compliance.

We leverage a unique longitudinal dataset on diabetes patients’ health status in rural areas of China to study the problem. We also cross-link the dataset with mobile carrier data to further differentiate mobile phone use to phone calls and network use. To address the endogeneity concerns, we apply PSM and a series of instrument variables.

We identify clear evidence that mobile phone use can significantly improve patients’ emotions and compliance, where the effect is generally larger on patients in worse health conditions. While mobile phone calls clearly benefit diabetes patients, we do notice that mobile phone network use has a negative moderating effect with patients’ health condition on improving compliance.

This study not only enriches our theoretical understanding of the role of mobile phones in diabetes management, it also shows the economic benefit of promoting patients’ use of mobile phones, which should be considered by medical care providers and medical policymakers.

This study examines chronic illness, disability and social inequality within an exposure-vulnerabilities theoretical framework.

Using the National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), a preeminent source of national behavioral health estimates of chronic medical illness, stress and disability, for selected sample years 2005–2014, we construct and analyze two foundational hypotheses underlying the exposure-vulnerabilities model: (1) greater exposure to stressors (i.e., chronic medical illness) among racial/ethnic minority populations yields higher levels of serious psychological distress, which in turn increases the likelihood of medical disability; (2) greater vulnerability among minority populations to stressors such as chronic medical illness exacerbates the impact of these conditions on mental health as well as the impact of mental health on medical disability.

Results of our analyses provided mixed support for the vulnerability (moderator) hypothesis, but not for the exposure (mediation) hypothesis. In the exposure models, while Blacks were more likely than Whites to have a long-term disability, the pathway to disability through chronic illness and serious psychological distress did not emerge. Rather, Whites were more likely than Blacks and Latinx to have a chronic illness and to have experienced severe psychological distress (both of which themselves were related to disability). In the vulnerability models, both Blacks and Latinx with chronic medical illness were more likely than Whites to experience serious psychological distress, although Whites with serious psychological distress were more likely than these groups to have a long-term disability.

Several possibilities for understanding the failure to uncover an exposure dynamic in the model turn on the potential intersectional effects of age and gender, as well as several other covariates that seem to confound the linkages in the model (e.g., issues of stigma, social support, education).

This study (1) extends the racial/ethnic disparities in exposure-vulnerability framework by including factors measuring chronic medical illness and disability which: (2) explicitly test exposure and vulnerability hypotheses in minority populations; (3) develop and test the causal linkages in the hypothesized processes, based on innovations in general structural equation models, and lastly; (4) use national population estimates of these conditions which are rarely, if ever, investigated in this kind of causal framework.

Late nephrology referral, a problem currently identified across many high income countries, has been associated with reduced opportunities for delaying or halting the progression of chronic kidney disease (CKD), delayed dialysis initiation, reduced choice in treatment modality, increased morbidity and hospitalization, and premature death. Despite a recent finding that the progression of CKD nearly always presents warning signs, and despite the fact that all Canadians are entitled to receive medically necessary health care free at the point of patient entry, each year in the province of British Columbia (BC) a substantial number of people with CKD experience late or no referral to nephrology care prior to requiring renal replacement therapy. A subset of these CKD patients experience no referral and “crash” onto dialysis (experience an acute or emergent start). Existing research has not fully explored the range of potential health determinants that may affect the timing of nephrology referral. This paper adopts a “determinants of health” framework and assesses the impact of a variety of indicators on patients’ physical health, demographics, socioeconomic status, social support, geographic and health system characteristics. Using a late referral definition of <3 months and data on BC patients who began dialysis between April 2000 and March 2003, multiple regression analysis indicates that the following determinants have an independent effect on the timing of referral: cause of end-stage renal disease (p=<0.0001); age (p=<0.0001); race/ethnicity (p=0.0019); English ability (p=0.0158); marital status (p=0.0202); proximity to care (p=0.0118); and, “age by first language” (p=0.0244).