-
F1000Research 2022: Whitening toothpastes exert a whitening effect on teeth through higher surface cleaning effectiveness resulting from the abrasive properties of the paste or specific... (Meta-Analysis)
Meta-Analysis
: Whitening toothpastes exert a whitening effect on teeth through higher surface cleaning effectiveness resulting from the abrasive properties of the paste or specific chemical components. This systematic review and meta-analysis was conceptualized to examine the relationship between whitening toothpastes and surface roughness as well as microhardness of human teeth and to clarify the evidence base available around this relationship by conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies in this topic area, looking at randomized control trials. : Criteria for including studies in the review were done based on population, intervention, comparison, outcomes and study and studies were identified from electronic databases. Covidence® was used for data screening and data extraction. The CONSORT tool was used for checking relevant content and methodology used in each of the papers reviewed. Systematic review was done followed by meta-analysis, using Review Manager. : A total of 125 articles were obtained on key word search. After duplicate removal and title screening, 17 articles were eligible for full text review. Finally, 7 studies were included for systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted on 4 studies. The forest plot for surface roughness showed that that the meta-analytic effect was statistically significant with surface roughness value being higher in the intervention group. The forest plot for microhardness showed that the meta-analytic effect was statistically significant with the microhardness value being lesser in the intervention group. : Although whitening toothpastes typically can lighten tooth color by about one or two shades, there is some evidence to show that these toothpastes also affect the mineral content of teeth by increasing surface roughness and reducing microhardness. More evidence and further research are needed to identify the type of whitening agent which will whiten the tooth effectively while maintaining the integrity of the tooth structure.
Topics: Humans; Tooth; Tooth Bleaching; Toothpastes
PubMed: 35265322
DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.76180.3 -
Journal of the American Medical... Jun 2021Modern health care requires patients, staff, and equipment to navigate complex environments to deliver quality care efficiently. Real-time locating systems (RTLS) are... (Review)
Review
OBJECTIVE
Modern health care requires patients, staff, and equipment to navigate complex environments to deliver quality care efficiently. Real-time locating systems (RTLS) are local tracking systems that identify the physical locations of personnel and equipment in real time. Applications and analytic strategies to utilize RTLS-produced data are still under development. The objectives of this systematic review were to describe and analyze the key features of RTLS applications and demonstrate their potential to improve care delivery.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
We searched MEDLINE, SCOPUS, and IEEE following PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. Inclusion criteria were articles that utilize RTLS to evaluate or influence workflow in a healthcare setting. We summarized aspects of relevant articles, identified key themes in the challenges of applying RTLS to workflow improvement, and thematically reviewed the state of quantitative analytic methodologies.
RESULTS
We included 42 articles in the final qualitative synthesis. The most frequent study design was observational (n = 24), followed by descriptive (n = 12) and experimental (n = 6). The most common clinical environment for study was the emergency department (n = 12), followed by entire hospital (n = 7) and surgical ward (n = 6).
DISCUSSION
The focus of studies changed over time from early experience to optimization to evaluation of an established system. Common narrative themes highlighted lessons learned regarding evaluation, implementation, and information visibility. Few studies have developed quantitative techniques to effectively analyze RTLS data.
CONCLUSIONS
RTLS is a useful and effective adjunct methodology in process and quality improvement, workflow analysis, and patient safety. Future directions should focus on developing enhanced analysis to meaningfully interpret RTLS data.
Topics: Computer Systems; Delivery of Health Care; Health Facilities; Hospitals; Humans; Workflow
PubMed: 33682009
DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocab026 -
PloS One 2022This study offers meta-analytic data on the potential association between epilepsy and depression especially for the prevalence of depression in epilepsy or vice versa. (Meta-Analysis)
Meta-Analysis
OBJECTIVE
This study offers meta-analytic data on the potential association between epilepsy and depression especially for the prevalence of depression in epilepsy or vice versa.
METHODS
The relevant studies were searched and identified from nine electronic databases. Studies that mentioned the prevalence and/or incidence of epilepsy and depression were included. Hand searches were also included. The search language was English and the search time was through May 2022. Where feasible, random-effects models were used to generate pooled estimates.
RESULTS
After screening electronic databases and other resources, 48 studies from 6,234 citations were included in this meta-analysis. The period prevalence of epilepsy ranged from 1% to 6% in patients with depression. In population-based settings, the pooled period prevalence of depression in patients with epilepsy was 27% (95% CI, 23-31) and 34% in clinical settings (95% CI, 30-39). Twenty studies reported that seizure frequency, low income, unemployment of the patients, perception of stigma, anxiety, being female, unmarried status, disease course, worse quality of life, higher disability scores, and focal-impaired awareness seizures were risk factors for depression.
CONCLUSION
Our study found that epilepsy was associated with an increased risk of depression. Depression was associated with the severity of epilepsy.
Topics: Humans; Female; Male; Depression; Quality of Life; Epilepsy; Epilepsies, Partial; Seizures
PubMed: 36520790
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0278907 -
Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) Nov 2023Pain can have a serious impact on a patient's physical, mental, and social health, often causing their quality of life to decline. Various nicotine dosage forms, such as... (Review)
Review
BACKGROUND
Pain can have a serious impact on a patient's physical, mental, and social health, often causing their quality of life to decline. Various nicotine dosage forms, such as nicotine patches and nasal spray, have been developed and used as analgesics in clinical settings. However, there is controversy over the anti-nociceptive effects of nicotine among different clinical trials. The purpose of this meta-analysis is to quantify the analgesic effect of nicotine patches, nicotine nasal spray, and tobacco smoking on pain in humans.
METHODS
Relevant articles published in English prior to July 2023 were identified using the PubMed, Cochrane Library, and Embase online databases in accordance with PRISMA (2020) guidelines. Two reviewers independently screened and selected studies, extracted data, and assessed the quality of the included studies using version 2 of the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool for randomized trials (RoB 2). RStudio was used for data synthesis, heterogeneity assessment, sensitivity analysis, publication bias assessment, trim-and-fill analyses, and generating forest plots.
RESULTS
Sixteen eligible articles, including k = 5 studies of pain tolerance ( = 210), k = 5 studies of pain threshold ( = 210), and k = 12 studies of pain scores (N = 1249), were included for meta-analysis. Meta-analytic integration for pain threshold (Hedges' g = 0.28, 95% CI = 0-0.55, Z = 1.99, = 0.05) and pain tolerance (Hedges' g = 0.32, 95% CI = 0.05-0.59, Z = 2.30, = 0.02) revealed that nicotine administered via tobacco smoke generated acute analgesic effects to thermal stimuli. Meta-analytic integration for pain scores revealed that nicotine had a weak anti-nociceptive effect on postoperative pain of -0.37 (95% CI = -0.77 to 0.03, Z = -1.80) but with no statistical significance ( = 0.07). In addition, a limited number of included studies revealed that long-term smoking produced hyperalgesia that may be characterized as small to medium in magnitude (Hedges' g = 0.37, 95% CI = 0.29-0.64, Z = 5.33, < 0.01).
CONCLUSION
These results help to clarify the mixed outcomes of trials and may ultimately inform the treatment of pain. We observed that acute nicotine administration prolonged the laboratory-induced pain threshold and tolerance time and may mildly relieve postoperative pain. In addition, long-term tobacco smoking may have a nociceptive effect on different types of chronic pain. More research is needed to determine the anti-nociceptive effects of nicotine in humans, and to understand the optimal timing, dose, and method of delivery of nicotine.
PubMed: 38139792
DOI: 10.3390/ph16121665 -
Canadian Medical Education Journal Mar 2020The field of augmented reality (AR) is rapidly growing with many new potential applications in medical education. This systematic review investigated the current state... (Review)
Review
INTRODUCTION
The field of augmented reality (AR) is rapidly growing with many new potential applications in medical education. This systematic review investigated the current state of augmented reality applications (ARAs) and developed an analytical model to guide future research in assessing ARAs as teaching tools in medical education.
METHODS
A literature search was conducted using PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar. This review followed PRISMA guidelines and included publications from January 1, 2000 to June 18, 2018. Inclusion criteria were experimental studies evaluating ARAs implemented in healthcare education published in English. Our review evaluated study quality and determined whether studies assessed ARA validity using criteria established by the GRADE Working Group and Gallagher et al., respectively. These findings were used to formulate an analytical model to assess the readiness of ARAs for implementation in medical education.
RESULTS
We identified 100,807 articles in the initial literature search; 36 met inclusion criteria for final review and were categorized into three categories: Surgery (23), Anatomy (9), and Other (4). The overall quality of the studies was poor and no ARA was tested for all five stages of validity. Our analytical model evaluates the importance of research quality, application content, outcomes, and feasibility of an ARA to gauge its readiness for implementation.
CONCLUSION
While AR technology is growing at a rapid rate, the current quality and breadth of AR research in medical training is insufficient to recommend the adoption into educational curricula. We hope our analytical model will help standardize AR assessment methods and define the role of AR technology in medical education.
PubMed: 32215146
DOI: 10.36834/cmej.61705 -
Frontiers in Psychology 2022The importance of humble leadership has garnered attention from both researchers and practitioners. Unfortunately, despite the accumulation of recent findings on the...
The importance of humble leadership has garnered attention from both researchers and practitioners. Unfortunately, despite the accumulation of recent findings on the effects of leader humility, a quantitative review remains scant. In addressing this void, this study is among the first to conduct a meta-analytic review of humble leadership and its outcomes. Eighty-four correlations ( = 16,534) from 53 independent studies are synthesized. The authors found that: (a) humble leadership is positively related to affective commitment (ρ = 0.56), affective trust (ρ = 0.62), creativity (ρ = 0.39), engagement (ρ = 0.40), leader-member exchange (LMX) (ρ = 0.58), job satisfaction (ρ = 0.51), organizational identification (ρ = 0.48), psychological empowerment (ρ = 0.33), self-efficacy (ρ = 0.24), task performance (ρ = 0.33), and voice (ρ = 0.34); and that (b) humble leadership contributes a significant incremental variance beyond transformational, servant, and ethical leadership in several crucial criterion variables, providing solid evidence for the construct's uniqueness. However, humble leadership does not explain incremental variance in some criterion variables, indicating that future studies should control for the influence of some positive leadership (e.g., transformational and servant leadership). Age, gender, study design, country, and year partially moderate the correlations of interest. We discuss our findings with caution and propose future research directions.
PubMed: 36619057
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.980322 -
Environmental Research Apr 2020Environment-wide association studies (EWAS) are an untargeted, agnostic, and hypothesis-generating approach to exploring environmental factors associated with health...
Environment-wide association studies (EWAS) are an untargeted, agnostic, and hypothesis-generating approach to exploring environmental factors associated with health outcomes, akin to genome-wide association studies (GWAS). While design, methodology, and replicability standards for GWAS are established, EWAS pose many challenges. We systematically reviewed published literature on EWAS to categorize scope, impact, types of analytical approaches, and open challenges in designs and methodologies. The Web of Science and PubMed databases were searched through multiple queries to identify EWAS articles between January 2010 and December 2018, and a systematic review was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Item for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) reporting standard. Twenty-three articles met our inclusion criteria and were included. For each study, we categorized the data sources, the definitions of study outcomes, the sets of environmental variables, and the data engineering/analytical approaches, e.g. neighborhood definition, variable standardization, handling of multiple hypothesis testing, model selection, and validation. We identified limited exploitation of data sources, high heterogeneity in analytical approaches, and lack of replication. Despite of the promising utility of EWAS, further development of EWAS will require improved data sources, standardization of study designs, and rigorous testing of methodologies.
Topics: Adolescent; Adult; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Child; Child, Preschool; China; Cohort Studies; Environmental Exposure; Environmental Health; Female; Genome-Wide Association Study; Humans; Infant, Newborn; Male; Middle Aged; Nutrition Surveys; Pregnancy; Prospective Studies; Young Adult
PubMed: 32105887
DOI: 10.1016/j.envres.2020.109275 -
PloS One 2021According to family systems theory, a family is regarded as an organized whole and relations within this system are interconnected. However, it is not clear to date... (Meta-Analysis)
Meta-Analysis
According to family systems theory, a family is regarded as an organized whole and relations within this system are interconnected. However, it is not clear to date whether the interparental and the sibling relationship are associated and, if such an association exists, whether it is positive or negative. Previous findings on the associations between the interparental and sibling relationships are inconsistent and there is as yet no pertinent review or meta-analysis. Therefore, this systematic review and meta-analysis set out (1) to aggregate previous studies investigating the links between the interparental and sibling relationships and (2) to examine potential moderators in this link. Based on 47 studies reporting 234 effect sizes (N = 29,746 from six nations; 6-12 years; 49% boys), meta-analytic results suggest a small positive correlation between interparental and sibling relationship quality (r = .14). Only the percentage of male children in the sample moderated this effect. Sex composition of sibling dyad and source of publication affected whether positive or negative associations were found. The findings support a growing consensus that family relations do not function in isolation, but are mutually interdependent, which should be considered in clinical practice.
Topics: Child; Female; Humans; Male; Parent-Child Relations; Parents; Sibling Relations; Siblings
PubMed: 34582487
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257874 -
Cost Effectiveness and Resource... Apr 2022This study aims to synthesize the empirical economic evidence of pharmaceutical therapies for people with dementia. (Review)
Review
OBJECTIVES
This study aims to synthesize the empirical economic evidence of pharmaceutical therapies for people with dementia.
STUDY DESIGN
Systematic review and meta-analysis. Literature evaluating the costs and effects of drug therapies for dementia was indexed until December 2021. Quality of study was assessed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool and Consensus on Health Economic Criteria list. Cost data were standardized to 2020 US dollars and analyzed from healthcare service and societal perspectives. Random-effects models were used to synthesize economic and clinical data, based on mean differences (MDs) and standardized MDs.
RESULTS
Ten unique studies were identified from 11,771 records. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs) and memantine improved dementia-related symptoms, alongside nonsignificant savings in societal cost (AChEIs: MD-2002 [- 4944 ~ 939]; memantine: MD-6322 [- 14355 ~ 1711]). Despite decreases in cost, antidepressants of mirtazapine and sertraline and second-generation antipsychotics were limited by their significant side effects on patients' cognitive and activity functions. Subgroup analysis indicated that the impacts of AChEIs on cost were affected by different analytical perspectives, follow-up periods, and participant age.
CONCLUSIONS
AChEIs and memantine are cost-effective with improvements in dementia-related symptoms and trends of cost-savings. More empirical evidence with non-industrial sponsorships and rigorous design in different settings is warranted.
PubMed: 35443684
DOI: 10.1186/s12962-022-00354-3 -
JMIR Mental Health Jul 2022Rates of mental health problems among youth are high and rising, whereas treatment seeking in this population remains low. Technology-delivered interventions (TDIs)... (Review)
Review
BACKGROUND
Rates of mental health problems among youth are high and rising, whereas treatment seeking in this population remains low. Technology-delivered interventions (TDIs) appear to be promising avenues for broadening the reach of evidence-based interventions for youth well-being. However, to date, meta-analytic reviews on youth samples have primarily been limited to computer and internet interventions, whereas meta-analytic evidence on mobile TDIs (mTDIs), largely comprising mobile apps for smartphones and tablets, have primarily focused on adult samples.
OBJECTIVE
This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of mTDIs for a broad range of well-being outcomes in unselected, at-risk, and clinical samples of youth.
METHODS
The systematic review used 5 major search strategies to identify 80 studies evaluating 83 wellness- and mental health-focused mTDIs for 19,748 youth (mean age 2.93-26.25 years). We conducted a 3-level meta-analysis on the full sample and a subsample of the 38 highest-quality studies.
RESULTS
Analyses demonstrated significant benefits of mTDIs for youth both at posttest (g=0.27) and follow-up (range 1.21-43.14 weeks; g=0.26) for a variety of psychosocial outcomes, including general well-being and distress, symptoms of diverse psychological disorders, psychosocial strategies and skills, and health-related symptoms and behaviors. Effects were significantly moderated by the type of comparison group (strongest for no intervention, followed by inert placebo or information-only, and only marginal for clinical comparison) but only among the higher-quality studies. With respect to youth characteristics, neither gender nor pre-existing mental health risk level (not selected for risk, at-risk, or clinical) moderated effect sizes; however, effects increased with the age of youth in the higher-quality studies. In terms of intervention features, mTDIs in these research studies were effective regardless of whether they included various technological features (eg, tailoring, social elements, or gamification) or support features (eg, orientation, reminders, or coaching), although the use of mTDIs in a research context likely differs in important ways from their use when taken up through self-motivation, parent direction, peer suggestion, or clinician referral. Only mTDIs with a clear prescription for frequent use (ie, at least once per week) showed significant effects, although this effect was evident only in the higher-quality subsample. Moderation analyses did not detect statistically significant differences in effect sizes based on the prescribed duration of mTDI use (weeks or sessions), and reporting issues in primary studies limited the analysis of completed duration, thereby calling for improved methodology, assessment, and reporting to clarify true effects.
CONCLUSIONS
Overall, this study's findings demonstrate that youth can experience broad and durable benefits of mTDIs, delivered in a variety of ways, and suggest directions for future research and development of mTDIs for youth, particularly in more naturalistic and ecologically valid settings.
PubMed: 35904845
DOI: 10.2196/34254