WikiProject Clinical Trials is a Wikidata community project to integrate clinical trials metadata with the Wikipedia ecosystem. Using Wikidata methods for data modeling, import, querying, curating, and profiling, the project brought ClinicalTrials.gov records into Wikidata and enriched them. The motivation for the project was gaining the benefits of hosting in Wikidata, which include distribution to new audiences and staging the content for the Wikimedia editor community to develop it further. Project pages present options for engaging with the content in the Wikidata environment. Example applications include generation of web-based profiles of clinical trials by medical condition, research intervention, research site, principal investigator, and funder.The project’s curation workflows including entity disambiguation and language translation could be expanded when there is a need to make subsets of clinical trial information more accessible to a given community. This project’s methods could be adapted for other clinical trial registries, or as a model for using Wikidata to enrich other metadata collections.
429 Background: Pancreatic cancer (PC) and its treatment(s) results in symptom and side effect burden and can impact patient’s overall quality of life (QOL). Methods: Patient reported information on management of side effects and symptoms were collected using PanCAN’s Patient Registry (01/2016 – 07/2018). Results: Patient reported information on side effects, pain and depression is detailed in the table. Side effects: 94% reported fatigue and 8% reported taking anti-fatigue medication. 72% reported nausea or vomiting during treatment and 83% reported taking anti-nausea medication. Pain: Of the 90% of patients who reported pain related to PC, 27% did not take pain medication, 47% visited the ER and 32% were hospitalized due to pain. Depression: Of the 83% of users reported feeling depressed during PC, 46% were diagnosed with depression, 37% prescribed anti-depressant, and 48% did not see a therapist. Conclusions: Nausea was reported as most managed. Fatigue, pain and depression were generally unmanaged. ER visits and hospitalizations due to pain were frequently reported. An improvement in the management of these side effects and symptoms is needed as it can affect patient’s ability to tolerate treatment, improve overall QOL, and may lower overall healthcare costs. [Table: see text]
Background: Patients with complex regional pain syndrome type I (CRPS I) show a cortical
reorganization with contralateral shrinkage of cortical maps in S1. The relevance of pain and
disuse for the development and the maintenance of this shrinkage is unclear.
Objective: Aim of the study was to assess whether short-term pain relief induces changes in
the cortical representation of the affected hand in patients with CRPS type I.
Study Design: Case series analysis of prospectively collected data.
Methods: We enrolled a case series of 5 consecutive patients with CRPS type I (disease duration
3 – 36 months) of the non-dominant upper-limb and previously diagnosed sympathetically
maintained pain (SMP) by reduction of the pain intensity of more than > 30% after prior
diagnostic sympathetic block. We performed fMRI for analysis of the cortical representation of
the affected hand immediately before as well as one hour after isolated sympathetic block of the
stellate ganglion on the affected side. Statistics: Wilcoxon-Test, paired t-test, P < 0.05.
Results: Pain decrease after isolated sympathetic block (pain intensity on the numerical rating
scale (0 – 10) before block: 6.8 ± 1.9, afterwards: 3.8 ± 1.3) was accompanied by an increase in
the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response of cortical representational maps only
of the affected hand which had been reduced before the block, despite the fact that clinical and
neurophysiological assessment revealed no changes in the sensorimotor function.
Limitations: The interpretation of the present results is partly limited due to the small number
of included patients and the missing control group with placebo injection.
Conclusions: The association between recovery of the cortical representation and pain relief
supports the hypothesis that pain could be a relevant factor for changes of somatosensory
cortical maps in CRPS, and that these are rapidly reversible.
Key words: Cortical reorganization, cortical plasticity, cortical maps, complex regional pain
syndrome (CRPS), sympathetically maintained pain (SMP), sympathetic block (SB)
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.