Plos One
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Standards for bereavement care propose that support should be matched to risk and need. However, studies in many countries demonstrate that palliative care services continue to adopt a generic approach in offering support to bereaved families. ⋯ Timeliness and consistency of relationship is crucial to building rapport and trust in the service's ability to help at post-bereavement as well as a focus on the specific rather than the generic needs of the bereaved. In light of these limitations, palliative care services might do better investing their efforts principally in assessing and supporting family caregivers during the pre-bereavement period and developing community capacity and referral pathways for bereavement care. Our findings suggest that bereavement support in Australian palliative care services has only a tenuous relationship with guidelines and assessment tools, a conclusion also drawn in studies from other countries, emphasizing the international implications of our study.
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How does scientific research affect the world around us? Being able to answer this question is of great importance in order to appropriately channel efforts and resources in science. The impact by scientists in academia is currently measured by citation based metrics such as h-index, i-index and citation counts. These academic metrics aim to represent the dissemination of knowledge among scientists rather than the impact of the research on the wider world. ⋯ We also consider metrics of online attention surrounding scientific works, such as those provided by the Altmetric API. We argue that in order to be able to evaluate wider non-academic impact we need to mine information from a much wider set of resources, including social media posts, press releases, news articles and political debates stemming from academic work. We also provide our data as a free and reusable collection for further analysis, including the PubMed citation network and the correspondence between REF case studies, grant applications and the academic literature.
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Lung transplant patients are a vulnerable group of immunosuppressed patients that are prone to frequent respiratory infections. We studied 60 episodes of respiratory symptoms in 71 lung transplant patients. Almost half of these episodes were of unknown infectious etiology despite extensive routine diagnostic testing. ⋯ This study highlights the potential of metagenomic sequencing for virus diagnostics in cases with previously unknown etiology of infection and in complex diagnostic situations such as in immunocompromised hosts.
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The aim of the study was to determine the longitudinal validity, reproducibility, responsiveness and interpretability of the adult version of the Brisbane Burn Scar Impact Profile, a patient-report measure of health-related quality of life. ⋯ Support was found for the reproducibility, longitudinal validity, responsiveness and interpretability of most groups of Brisbane Burn Scar Impact Profile items and some individual items in the test population. Potential redundancy of items should be investigated further.
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Comparative Study
Whole-body staging of female patients with recurrent pelvic malignancies: Ultra-fast 18F-FDG PET/MRI compared to 18F-FDG PET/CT and CT.
To evaluate the diagnostic feasibility of an ultra-fast 18F-FDG PET/MRI protocol, including T2-w and contrast-enhanced T1-w imaging as well as metabolic assessment (PET) in comparison to 18F-FDG PET/CT and CT for whole-body staging of female patients with suspected recurrence of pelvic malignancies. ⋯ Ultra-fast PET/MRI provides equivalent diagnostic performance and examination time when compared to PET/CT and superior diagnostic performance to CT in restaging female patients suspected to have recurrent pelvic cancer.