Plos One
-
Clinical Trial
Resilience in middle-aged partners of patients diagnosed with incurable cancer: A thematic analysis.
Providing care for patients with advanced cancer is often the responsibility of the partner. Being confronted with an incurable cancer diagnosis can be highly disruptive for the patient's partner and can be considered a potentially traumatic event. However, most caregivers seem to adapt well during the process of providing care. This finding is in line with the concept of resilience in literature: a dynamic process of adapting well, resulting from the interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic resources and risks. Resilience is age-related, with the elderly population being higher in resilience as compared to the younger generation. However, resilience has been understudied in middle-aged caregivers. ⋯ A resilient trajectory results from an interplay between individual and contextual resources. To build resilience in middle-aged partners of patients with incurable cancer, health care professionals should address all available resources. Moreover, they should be aware of being part of the caregiver's context, a complex adaptive system that can be either resilience-supporting or -threatening.
-
Low back pain (LBP) is highly prevalent in Nigeria and is more devastating in rural Nigeria due to adverse living and working conditions, reinforced by maladaptive illness beliefs. There is a need to develop measures for assessing such beliefs in this population. This study aimed to cross-culturally adapt the Fear Avoidance Beliefs Questionnaire (FABQ) and test its psychometric properties in mixed rural and urban Nigerian populations with chronic LBP. ⋯ Igbo-FABQ is valid, reliable, and can be used clinically and for research.
-
Appropriate management of people exposed in the home to tuberculosis is essential to prevent morbidity. These household contacts, particularly children, should receive preventive therapy to prevent them from falling ill. However, few people receive preventive therapy worldwide. We sought to determine whether a community-based accompaniment intervention could improve tuberculosis contact management. ⋯ Accompaniment of TB patient households greatly improved the evaluation of household contacts for TB and increased the use of preventive therapy.
-
To provide a Portuguese version of the Multidimensional Dyspnea Profile (MDP), investigating its validity and reliability in Brazilian patients with COPD. ⋯ The Portuguese version of the MDP is the first valid and reliable instrument to assess dyspnea multidimensionally in Portuguese-speaking patients with COPD.
-
Comparative Study Observational Study
Screening and application of nutritional support in elderly hospitalized patients of a tertiary care hospital in China.
Malnutrition is very common in elderly patients admitted to the hospital. The aim of our study is to assess the nutritional status of elderly patients and the use of nutritional support in a tertiary care hospital in China and to analyze the impacts of nutritional status and nutritional support on clinical outcomes. ⋯ Undernourishment and nutritional risk in elderly patients at hospital admission is a common occurrence. In the current study, the nutritional risk rate in the Gastroenterology department was higher than in other departments. Patients with normal nutritional status were still receiving nutritional support. Overall, there is a need to better apply nutritional support in the clinical treatment of elderly patients. In elderly patients with nutritional risk and malnutrition, nutritional support reduced the length of hospital stay and the incidence of infectious complications.