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Pneumonia remains a leading cause of hospitalization and death among young children worldwide, and the diagnostic challenge of differentiating bacterial from non-bacterial pneumonia is the main driver of antibiotic use for treating pneumonia in children. Causal Bayesian networks (BNs) serve as powerful tools for this problem as they provide clear maps of probabilistic relationships between variables and produce results in an explainable way by incorporating both domain expert knowledge and numerical data.
The need for coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination in different age groups and populations is a subject of great uncertainty and an ongoing global debate. Critical knowledge gaps regarding COVID-19 vaccination include the duration of protection offered by different priming and booster vaccination regimens in different populations, including homologous or heterologous schedules.
Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a rare, inherited, life-limiting condition predominantly affecting the lungs, for which there is no cure. The disease is characterized by recurrent pulmonary exacerbations (PEx), which are thought to drive progressive lung damage. Management of these episodes is complex and generally involves multiple interventions targeting different aspects of disease. The emergence of innovative trials and use of Bayesian statistical methods has created renewed opportunities for studying heterogeneous populations in rare diseases.
Despite recent improvements in treatment modalities for cystic fibrosis (CF), there is currently limited evidence and a lack of consensus regarding optimal treatment strategies for the different aspects of CF, including pulmonary exacerbations (PEx). We aimed to establish a prospective cohort of people with CF (pwCF) to evaluate alternative approaches to managing CF in the era of modulator therapies.
This study aimed to map the national, regional and local prevalence of hypertension and diabetes in Ethiopia.
Diagnosing urinary tract infections (UTIs) in children in the emergency department (ED) is challenging due to the variable clinical presentations and difficulties in obtaining a urine sample free from contamination.
Otitis media with effusion (OME) affects hearing, speech development, and quality of life (QoL) in children. The 'Blow, Breathe, Cough' (BBC) intervention promotes nasal, respiratory, and middle ear clearance through nose blowing, deep breathing, coughing, and hand hygiene. It shows promise in resolving OME but lacks randomized-controlled trial (RCT) evaluation. This paper presents a RCT protocol evaluating BBC's effect on OME resolution, hearing, speech, and QoL in children aged two to seven years.
Bringing optimised coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine schedules to immunocompromised populations (BOOST-IC) is a multi-site, adaptive platform trial designed to assess the effect of different booster vaccination schedules in the Australian immunocompromised population on the immunogenicity, safety and cross-protection against COVID-19 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and its variants.
Although benzylpenicillin (penicillin G) is listed by the World Health Organization as an Essential Medicine, dose optimization is a persistent challenge, especially for long-acting intramuscular formulations. Maintaining sustained antibiotic exposure at target concentrations is crucial for secondary chemoprophylaxis of rheumatic heart disease and treatment of syphilis.
The estimated effectiveness of SMS (short message service) reminders for improving childhood vaccine coverage and timeliness has varied in previous studies. The observed heterogeneity in effectiveness may be explained in part by variation in reminder content or timing of the reminder relative to the vaccine schedule date. We sought to evaluate the effectiveness of a range of SMS reminders of varied content and timing for improving on-time childhood vaccination.