Background: As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, 692,000 (August 7, 2020) human lives and counting have been lost worldwide to COVID-19. Understanding the relationship between short- and long-term exposure to air pollution and adverse COVID-19 health outcomes is crucial for developing solutions to this global crisis. Objectives: To conduct a scoping review of epidemiologic research on the link between short- and long-term exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 health outcomes. Method: We searched PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, Cochrane, MedRxiv, and BioRxiv for preliminary epidemiological studies of the association between air pollution and COVID-19 health outcomes. 28 papers were finally selected after applying our inclusion/exclusion criteria; we categorized these studies as long-term studies, short-term time-series studies, or short-term cross-sectional studies. One study included both short-term time-series and a cross-sectional study design. Results: 27 studies of the 28 reported evidence of statistically significant positive associations between air pollutant exposure and adverse COVID-19 health outcomes; 11 of 12 long-term studies and all 16 short-term studies reported statistically significant positive associations. The 28 identified studies included various confounders, spatial and temporal resolutions of pollution concentrations, and COVID-19 health outcomes. Discussion: We discuss methodological challenges and highlight additional research areas based on our findings. Challenges include data quality issues, ecological study design limitations, improved adjustment for confounders, exposure errors related to spatial resolution, geographic variability in testing, mitigation measures and pandemic stage, clustering of health outcomes, and a lack of publicly available data and code.
Lag time between state-level policy interventions and change points in COVID-19 outcomes in the United StatesHighlights d Time series models can feature non-stationarity and correlation in COVID-19 outcomes d Data-driven algorithms detect change points in COVID-19 outcomes due to policy changes d Five patterns with geographical similarities are found in the COVID-19 trajectory d The COVID-19 trajectory changes in about 10-14 days after policy implementation
Conventional means of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) screening rely on qualitative tests typically administered by trained neurologists. Tablet technologies that enable data collection during handwriting and drawing tasks may provide low-cost, portable, and instantaneous quantitative methods for high-throughput PD screening. However, past efforts to use data from tablet-based drawing processes to distinguish between PD and control populations have demonstrated only moderate classification ability. Focusing on digitized drawings of Archimedean spirals, the present study utilized data from the open-access ParkinsonHW dataset to improve existing PD drawing diagnostic pipelines. Random forest classifiers were constructed using previously documented features and highly-predictive, newly-proposed features that leverage the many unique mathematical characteristics of the Archimedean spiral. This approach yielded an AUC of 0.999 on the particular dataset we tested on, and more importantly identified interpretable features with good promise for generalization across diverse patient cohorts. It demonstrated the potency of mathematical relationships inherent to the drawing shape and the usefulness of sparse feature sets and simple models, which further enhance interpretability, in the face of limited sample size. The results of this study also inform suggestions for future drawing task design and data analytics (feature extraction, shape selection, task diversity, drawing templates, and data sharing).
Several peer-reviewed papers and reviews have examined the relationship between exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 spread and severity. However, many of the existing reviews on this topic do not extensively present the statistical challenges associated with this field, do not provide comprehensive guidelines for future researchers, and review only the results of a relatively small number of papers. We reviewed 139 papers, 127 of which reported a statistically significant positive association between air pollution and adverse COVID-19 health outcomes. Here, we summarize the evidence, describe the statistical challenges, and make recommendations for future research. To summarize the 139 papers with data from geographical locations around the world, we also present an open-source data visualization tool that summarizes these studies and allows the research community to contribute evidence as new research papers are published. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Public Health, Volume 44 is April 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Introduction: von Willebrand Disease (VWD) is the most common inherited bleeding disorder with significant variability in clinical phenotype. Patients with the most severe forms of VWD suffer from frequent bleeding complications including mucosal bleeding, gastrointestinal hemorrhage, hemarthrosis, and muscle hematomas. Long-term prophylaxis with von Willebrand factor (VWF) concentrate has been shown to reduce the frequency of bleeding episodes, but higher costs associated with regular VWF concentrate administration remains a barrier to access. Methods: We constructed a Markov state transition model to compare the cost-effectiveness of on-demand treatment (ODT) with long-term prophylaxis (PRO) from a United States (US) societal perspective with costs inflated to 2020 US dollars using the Consumer Price Index. Cycle-length was one month with a one-year time horizon and during each cycle, patients could experience either major (hemarthrosis, gastrointestinal bleeding, muscle hematoma), minor (epistaxis, other mucosal bleeding), or no bleeding. Model inputs for event probabilities, costs, and utility were obtained from previously published literature; while there are no specific utility data for these treatment strategies in VWD patients, we assumed they would be similar to published age-specific utilities used in hemophilia analyses and performed sensitivity analyses to assess these assumptions. The base case scenario was modeled on a 70 kg patient with severe VWD receiving plasma-derived VWF concentrate. In the PRO strategy, patients received 60 units/kg every 3 days. ODT patients were only treated for specific bleeding events (minor bleeding: 60 units/kg every 12 hours for 3 days in the outpatient setting; major bleeding: VWF concentrate 60 units/kg every 12 hours for 5 days in the hospital). Microsimulation of 1000 trials was performed using to calculate mean quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) and costs associated with the two treatment strategies. TreeAge Pro 2017 (TreeAge Software, Williamstown, MA) was used to construct the model and perform analyses. Results: In the base-case scenario using plasma-derived VWF concentrate, on-demand treatment resulted in a mean cost of US$1,140,586 (± $65,215) generating 0.52 QALYs (±0.01) while the prophylaxis strategy resulted in a mean cost of US$918,329 (± $94,983) generating 0.8 QALYs (±0.04). The microsimulation was repeated to reflect the cost of recombinant VWF concentrate for prophylaxis and a single dose of recombinant factor VIII. Using recombinant VWF, on-demand treatment resulted in a mean cost of US$1,568,005 (± $94206) and generated 0.52 QALYs (±0.01) while the prophylaxis strategy resulted in a mean cost of US$1,343,715 (± $124,974) and generated 0.8 QALYs (±0.04). One-way sensitivity analysis of model inputs showed this result to be robust, as prophylaxis remained the preferred strategy at a willingness to pay (WTP) threshold of US$150,000/QALY for both plasma-derived and recombinant therapies (Figure). Conclusions: With greater effectiveness and lower total societal health care costs, the prophylaxis strategy dominated the on-demand treatment strategy. While the cost of long-term prophylaxis is primarily due to the high cost of VWF concentrate every 3 days, this strategy results in significantly fewer bleeding episodes per year resulting in more QALYs. Our findings suggest that when compared to on-demand treatment, long-term prophylaxis with VWF concentrate is a cost-effective strategy in patients with severe forms of VWD, which helps to avoid expensive hospitalizations and decreased quality of life due to bleeding episodes and their complications. Figure 1 Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.
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