Donating books and journals to less developed countries : The BMA/BMJ information fund welcomes applications from institutions
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PROVIDER: S-EPMC1125171 | biostudies-literature | 2003 Feb
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common arrhythmia and is a major cardiovascular challenge due to its close association with increased morbidity and mortality. Although the incidence and prevalence of AF is slightly lower in developing countries than in developed countries, the AF-associated risk of stroke is similar. Treatment of AF is far from satisfactory in developing countries, which may be due to limited health-care resources and social and racial characteristics that differ from Western populations. Chronic rate control is still the main treatment strategy of persistent AF because anti-arrhythmic drugs have only a modest long-term effect on maintenance of sinus rhythm, and no superior impact in terms of cardiovascular outcomes. With the development of ablation techniques and strategies, more AF patients received catheter ablation, although the benefit, complications, and high recurrence rate associated with AF ablation remain under investigation. Improvement in antithrombotic therapy of AF has been observed, although still fewer patients receive oral anticoagulants in developing countries than in Western countries. Novel treatment for the prevention of thromboembolism, such as new oral anticoagulants with different mechanisms of action or the percutaneous transcatheter closure of the left atrial appendage, has recently been introduced in developing countries as an alternative option for the prevention of AF-associated strokes. More data are needed regarding upstream therapy.
| S-EPMC4956295 | biostudies-other
Project description:We show that Bayesian population reconstruction, a recent method for estimating past populations by age, works for data of widely varying quality. Bayesian reconstruction simultaneously estimates age-specific population counts, fertility rates, mortality rates, and net international migration flows from fragmentary data, while formally accounting for measurement error. As inputs, Bayesian reconstruction uses initial bias-reduced estimates of standard demographic variables. We reconstruct the female populations of three countries: Laos, a country with little vital registration data where population estimation depends largely on surveys; Sri Lanka, a country with some vital registration data; and New Zealand, a country with a highly developed statistical system and good quality vital registration data. In addition, we extend the method to countries without censuses at regular intervals. We also use it to assess the consistency of results between model life tables and available census data, and hence to compare different model life table systems.
| S-EPMC4798897 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Recently, the rate of cancer deaths in less-developed countries such as Bangladesh has significantly increased day by day, making it a major health issue. The most predominant types of cancers among the populations of less-developed countries (especially Bangladesh) are lung, throat, colon, gastric, ovarian, breast, and skin cancers. The mortality rate is increasing for both males and females. The main common factors are smoking, use of tobacco leaves, bacterial or viral infection, hereditary disorders, food adulterations, and environmental factors, which are highly responsible for the development of carcinoma in the young to adult population in this region. Raising consciousness among people regarding early diagnosis, decreasing the use of chemicals such as formalin for food preservation, and reducing environmental pollution such as arsenic as well as air pollution might help to reduce the number of deaths. Education and public campaigns can also reduce the intensity of cancer occurrence. Breast, esophagus, and cervical cancer are common diseases in less-developed countries such as Bangladesh.
| S-EPMC8949682 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Understanding the relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and the urbanization of national populations has been a key concern for environmental scholars for several decades. Although sophisticated modeling techniques have been developed to explore the connection between increases in urban populations and CO2 emissions, none has attempted to assess whether declines in urbanization have an effect on emissions that is not symmetrical with that of growth in urbanization. The present study uses panel data on CO2 emissions and the percentage of individuals living in urban areas, as well as a variety of other structural factors, for less-developed countries from 1960-2010, to empirically assess whether the effect of growth in urban populations on emissions is symmetrical with the effect of decline. Findings indicate that the effect of growth/decline in urban populations on CO2 emissions is asymmetrical, where a decline in urbanization reduces emissions to a much greater degree than urbanization increases emissions. We hypothesize that this is at least in part because deurbanization is connected with disruptions to the production and distribution of goods and services and/or access to electricity and other energy sources. Our finding suggests that not only the absolute level of urbanization of nations matters for emissions, but also how the patterns of migration between rural and urban areas change over time. Future research should be mindful of the processes behind deurbanization when exploring socioeconomic drivers of CO2 emissions.
| S-EPMC6286174 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveTo compare treatment effects from randomised trials conducted in more developed versus less developed countries.DesignMeta-epidemiological study.Data sourcesCochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (August 2012).Data extractionMeta-analyses with mortality outcomes including data from at least one randomised trial conducted in a less developed country and one in a more developed country. Relative risk estimates of more versus less developed countries were compared by calculating the relative relative risks for each topic and the summary relative relative risks across all topics. Similar analyses were performed for the primary binary outcome of each topic.Results139 meta-analyses with mortality outcomes were eligible. No nominally significant differences between more developed and less developed countries were found for 128 (92%) meta-analyses. However, differences were beyond chance in 11 (8%) cases, always showing more favourable treatment effects in trials from less developed countries. The summary relative relative risk was 1.12 (95% confidence interval 1.06 to 1.18; P<0.001; I(2)=0%), suggesting significantly more favourable mortality effects in trials from less developed countries. Results were similar for meta-analyses with nominally significant treatment effects for mortality (1.15), meta-analyses with recent trials (1.14), and when excluding trials from less developed countries that subsequently became more developed (1.12). For the primary binary outcomes (127 meta-analyses), 20 topics had differences in treatment effects beyond chance (more favourable in less developed countries in 15/20 cases).ConclusionsTrials from less developed countries in a few cases show significantly more favourable treatment effects than trials in more developed countries and, on average, treatment effects are more favourable in less developed countries. These discrepancies may reflect biases in reporting or study design as well as genuine differences in baseline risk or treatment implementation and should be considers when generalising evidence across different settings.
| S-EPMC3570069 | biostudies-literature
Project description:One of the biggest problems in global health is the lack of well trained and supported health workers in less developed settings. In many rural areas there are no physicians, and it is important to find ways to support and empower nurses and other health workers. The Knowledge Translation Unit of the University of Cape Town Lung Institute has spent 14 years developing a series of innovative packages to support and empower nurses and other health workers. PACK (Practical Approach to Care Kit) Adult comprises policy-based and evidence-informed guidelines; onsite, team and case-based training; non-physician prescribing; and a cascade system of scaling up. A series of randomised trials has shown the effectiveness of the packages, and methods are now being developed to respond cost-effectively and sustainably to global demand for implementing PACK Adult. Global health would probably benefit from less time and money spent developing new innovations and more spent on finding ways to spread those we already have.
| S-EPMC4680195 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundIt is unknown whether inequalities in under-5 mortality by wealth in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are growing or declining.MethodsAll Demographic and Health Surveys conducted between 2002 and 2012 were used to measure under-5 mortality trends in 3 wealth tertiles. Two approaches were used to estimate changes in under-5 mortality: within-survey changes from all 54 countries, and between-survey changes for 29 countries with repeated survey waves. The principal outcome measures include annual decline in mortality, and the ratio of mortality between the poorest and least-poor wealth tertiles.ResultsMortality information in 85 surveys from 929 224 households and 1 267 167 women living in 54 countries was used. In the subset of 29 countries with repeat surveys, mortality declined annually by 4.36, 3.36, and 2.06 deaths per 1000 live births among the poorest, middle, and least-poor tertiles, respectively (P = .031 for difference). The mortality ratio declined from 1.68 to 1.48 during the study period (P = .006 for trend). In the complete set of 85 surveys, the mortality ratio declined in 64 surveys (from 2.11 to 1.55), and increased in 21 surveys (from 1.58 to 1.88). Multivariate analyses suggest that convergence was associated with good governance (P ≤ .03 for 4 governance indicators: government effectiveness, rule of law, regulatory quality, and control of corruption).ConclusionsOverall, under-5 mortality in low- and middle-income countries has decreased faster among the poorest compared with the least poor between 1995 and 2012, but progress in some countries has lagged, especially with poor governance.
| S-EPMC4243072 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveWe analyzed the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) to understand leading research institutions, collaborations among institutions, major publication venues, key research concepts, and topics covered by pandemic-related research.MethodsWe conducted a descriptive analysis of authors' institutions and relationships, automatic content extraction of key words and phrases from titles and abstracts, and topic modeling and evolution. Data visualization techniques were applied to present the results of the analysis.ResultsWe found that leading research institutions on COVID-19 included the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the US National Institutes of Health, and the University of California. Research studies mostly involved collaboration among different institutions at national and international levels. In addition to bioRxiv, major publication venues included journals such as The BMJ, PLOS One, Journal of Virology, and The Lancet. Key research concepts included the coronavirus, acute respiratory impairments, health care, and social distancing. The ten most popular topics were identified through topic modeling and included human metapneumovirus and livestock, clinical outcomes of severe patients, and risk factors for higher mortality rate.ConclusionData analytics is a powerful approach for quickly processing and understanding large-scale datasets like CORD-19. This approach could help medical librarians, researchers, and the public understand important characteristics of COVID-19 research and could be applied to the analysis of other large datasets.
| S-EPMC8485960 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Citations measure the importance of a publication, and may serve as a proxy for its popularity and quality of its contents. Here we study the distributions of citations to publications from individual academic institutions for a single year. The average number of citations have large variations between different institutions across the world, but the probability distributions of citations for individual institutions can be rescaled to a common form by scaling the citations by the average number of citations for that institution. We find this feature seems to be universal for a broad selection of institutions irrespective of the average number of citations per article. A similar analysis for citations to publications in a particular journal in a single year reveals similar results. We find high absolute inequality for both these sets, Gini coefficients being around 0.66 and 0.58 for institutions and journals respectively. We also find that the top 25% of the articles hold about 75% of the total citations for institutions and the top 29% of the articles hold about 71% of the total citations for journals.
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Project description:[Figure: see text].
| S-EPMC8284372 | biostudies-literature