Bmc Med
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Cigarette smoking is incredibly harmful, even for people who do not smoke every day. This study aimed to estimate trends in non-daily smoking in England between 2006 and 2024, how these differed across population subgroups, and to explore changes in the profile of non-daily smokers in terms of their sociodemographic and smoking characteristics and vaping and alcohol consumption. ⋯ An increasing proportion of adults in England who smoke cigarettes do not smoke every day, particularly younger adults. Although non-daily smokers report smoking fewer cigarettes and weaker urges to smoke than they used to, which may make it easier for them to stop smoking, they appear to be decreasingly motivated to quit.
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Biomedical and lifestyle factors in Western populations have significantly shifted in recent decades, influencing public health and contributing to the increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) that share inflammation as common pathology. ⋯ The dual insights into age-at-disease-onset and gut microbiota composition in disease emphasize the role of certain biomedical and lifestyle factors, e.g., nutrition quality, in disease prevention and management. Understanding these relationships provides a foundation for developing targeted strategies to mitigate the impact of metabolic and inflammatory diseases through lifestyle modifications and gut health management.
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Systemic corticosteroid has been recommended for the treatment of severe acute exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD). Little is known about the use of systemic corticosteroid in patients admitted to intensive care units (ICU) since most of previous trials excluded these critically ill patients. ⋯ The results of this study do not support routine use of systemic corticosteroid in patients with AECOPD admitted to ICUs.
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Regulatory applications for cell therapy face more objections compared to conventional small molecule or biological drugs, leading to delays in market approval and clinical adoption. Increased regulatory objections frequently relate to issues regarding preclinical evidence, such as experimental design of animal studies, selection of animal models, endpoints, and determination of mechanism of action. Synthesis and clarification of the preclinical evidence necessary to demonstrate treatment efficacy and advance into early-phase clinical trials is needed to help researchers avoid regulatory objections. ⋯ Regulatory guidance for preclinical efficacy studies often recommends a strong emphasis on the clinical relevance of animal models, intervention parameters, outcomes, and mechanism of action. Incorporating these recommendations into early preclinical studies should improve the acceptability of preclinical evidence for approval by the relevant national regulators and can be used as a guide to ensure that all evidence that regulators say they expect is efficiently assembled into new clinical trial applications.
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Multicenter Study
Loss to follow-up of patients after antiviral treatment as an additional barrier to HCV elimination.
Eliminating hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections is a goal set by the World Health Organization. This has become possible with the introduction of highly effective and safe direct-acting antivirals (DAA) but limitations remain due to undiagnosed HCV infections and loss of patients from the cascade of care at various stages, including those lost to follow-up (LTFU) before the assessment of the effectiveness of the therapy. The aim of our study was to determine the extent of this loss and to establish the characteristics of patients experiencing it. ⋯ In a real-world population of nearly 19,000 HCV-infected patients, we documented a 2.7% loss to follow-up rate. Independent predictors of this phenomenon were male gender, GT3 infection, HIV co-infection, alcohol addiction, mental illnesses, lack of prior antiviral treatment and discontinuation of DAA therapy.