ED visits for appendicitis, miscarriage fell sharply in first wave of COVID-19 pandemic
2021-05-25
(Press-News.org) Emergency department visits for common conditions such as appendicitis, miscarriage, gallbladder attacks and ectopic pregnancy decreased markedly at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but patient outcomes were not worse, found research published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.202821.
"These findings are reassuring, as patients who required emergency care in the first wave of the pandemic continued to present to the emergency department, received similar care and had similar outcomes to patients presenting in the prepandemic period," writes Dr. David Gomez, a trauma surgeon at St. Michael's Hospital, Unity Health Toronto and assistant professor of surgery, University of Toronto, with coauthors.
The researchers compared emergency department visits over 2 periods, from January 1 to July 1, 2019, and January 1 to June 30, 2020. During this period, there were 39 691 emergency department visits for abdominal and gynecological conditions, including 15 964 (40%) for appendicitis, 12 733 (32%) for miscarriage, 8457 (21%) for gallbladder (cholecystitis) and 2537 (6%) for ectopic pregnancy.
Emergency department visits declined sharply at the start of the pandemic, with a 20% to 39% reduction in visits for appendicitis and miscarriage. This translates to 1087 fewer visits for appendicitis in 11 weeks of the pandemic period and 984 fewer patients seeking care for miscarriage in the 14 weeks. Over the total study period, just over half of patients (52%) were hospitalized, most (80%) for appendicitis.
Despite fewer emergency department visits, there was no increase in adverse patient outcomes, such as sicker patients presenting or increased rates of death. In addition, among those who presented, management strategies were unchanged.
There are two theories for decreased visits to emergency departments: underusage and an actual reduction in the acute conditions. However, the authors have another theory that could affect delivery of care.
"Our study suggests a third possibility: potential overusage of the emergency department before the pandemic," write the authors. "Avoidance of the emergency department during the pandemic may have resulted in miscarriages being managed through outpatient or virtual clinics without an emergency department visit. For some patients with mild symptoms of uncomplicated appendicitis, their symptoms may have resolved without presenting to the emergency department or they may have used virtual visits for conservative management."
Public messaging about when to seek emergency care and options for alternative care, such as telemedicine and after-hours clinics, could be employed in future to better use emergency department resources. Importantly, care during the pandemic was safe, and the findings suggest that patients who needed emergency care did seek help.
"These observations have direct relevance to the maintenance of care in future waves of the pandemic," write the authors. "Telemedicine, which became widely available early in the pandemic, may facilitate safe delivery of care outside the emergency department for certain conditions or may be used as part of a pre-emergency department triage strategy."
"A population-based analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on common abdominal and gynecological emergency department visits" is published May 25, 2021.
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-05-25
Summary: A new study published by the open access publisher Frontiers shows the usefulness of opportunistically collected specimens, such as stranded carcasses, to study elusive species. The researchers used stable isotope analysis of skin, muscle, and bone tissue of Sowerby's beaked whales to study their spatial ecology. They found that the species exhibits both short- and long-term habitat fidelity. The results are published in Frontiers in Conservation Science and show the importance of such studies for marine wildlife conservation.
A mysterious whale species
Beaked whales, a species of toothed whales, make up more than 25% of extant cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises, and whales), but are elusive and notoriously difficult to study. They live in deep waters and stay away ...
2021-05-25
In a study funded by National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) researchers examined whether depression, either before or during pregnancy, affects the mother-infant relationship. The research was published today (Tuesday 25 May) in BJPsych Open.
Researchers looked at the quality of mother-infant interactions eight weeks and 12 months after birth in three groups of women; healthy women, women with clinically-significant depression in pregnancy, and women with a lifetime history of depression but healthy pregnancies.
The study used a sample of 131 women: 51 healthy mothers with no current or past depression, 52 mothers with depression referred to the South London and Maudsley ...
2021-05-25
A team of UBC Okanagan researchers is looking at strategies that could help the homeless during a pandemic.
John Graham, director of UBC Okanagan's School of Social Work, says while many populations have been targeted with guidelines to keep them safe, homeless people have been mostly overlooked.
While this research project began a few years ago, Graham says his team quickly turned their attention to the impact of COVID-19. His team looked at peer-reviewed publications, dating back to 1984, that examined how homeless populations were impacted by other highly contagious or communicable illnesses such as tuberculous, H1NI and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome ...
2021-05-25
Researchers from University of Sydney, University of Florida, and Rutgers University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines the role of serendipity in customer satisfaction and how marketers can provide it.
The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Serendipity: Chance Encounters in the Marketplace Enhance Consumer Satisfaction" and is authored by Aekyoung Kim, Felipe Affonso, Juliano Laran, and Kristina Durante.
Netflix knows you are tired of choice. The streaming service recently introduced what might be the perfect hack: a shuffle button that eliminates choice and plays a randomly selected program for the consumer. Under COVID-19 restrictions, the newly homebound were happy to have so many programming ...
2021-05-25
BINGHAMTON, N.Y. - A team of evolutionary biologists including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York have shown that some Anolis lizards, or anoles, have adapted to rebreathe exhaled air underwater using a bubble clinging to their snouts.
Semi-aquatic anoles live along neotropical streams and frequently dive for refuge, remaining underwater for up to 16 minutes. Lindsey Swierk, assistant research professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University, documented this behavior in a Costa Rican anole species in 2019. She had been shocked to see an anole submerge itself for such long periods and used a GoPro underwater to document the behavior.
"It's easy to imagine the advantage that these small, slow anoles gain by hiding from their predators ...
2021-05-25
A new study from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London has established that Intermittent Fasting (IF) is an effective means of improving long term memory retention and generating new adult hippocampal neurons in mice, in what the researchers hope has the potential to slow the advance of cognitive decline in older people.
The study, published today in Molecular Biology, found that a calorie restricted diet via every other day fasting was an effective means of promoting Klotho gene expression in mice. Klotho, which is often referred to as the "longevity gene" has now been shown in this study to play ...
2021-05-25
A study of healthcare workers shows they were three times more likely to become infected during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the general population. Around one in five of workers who were infected were asymptomatic and unaware they had COVID-19.
The study published in ERJ Open Research [1] also shows that it was not only frontline staff who faced the higher risk, suggesting that there was transmission between staff and within the wider community.
However, health care workers who had been infected were very unlikely to contract COVID-19 a second time in the following six months.
The research was led by Professor James Chalmers, a consultant respiratory physician from the University of Dundee, UK. He said: "We have always believed that front line health workers face a high risk ...
2021-05-24
Rubisco is arguably the most abundant--and most important--protein on Earth. This enzyme drives photosynthesis, the process that plants use to convert sunlight into energy to fuel crop growth and yield. Rubisco's role is to capture and fix carbon dioxide (CO2) into sugar that fuels the plant's activities. However, as much as Rubisco benefits plant growth, it also can operate at a notoriously slow pace that creates a hindrance to photosynthetic efficiency.
About 20 percent of the time Rubisco fixes oxygen (O2) molecules instead of CO2, costing the plant energy that could have been utilized ...
2021-05-24
According to researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago, the antibiotics used to treat common bacterial infections, like pneumonia and sinusitis, may also be used to treat human diseases, like cancer. Theoretically, at least.
As outlined in a new Nature Communications study, the UIC College of Pharmacy team has shown in laboratory experiments that eukaryotic ribosomes can be modified to respond to antibiotics in the same way that prokaryotic ribosomes do.
Fungi, plants, and animals -- like humans -- are eukaryotes; they are made up of cells that have a clearly defined nucleus. Bacteria, on the other hand, are prokaryotes. They are made up of cells, which do not have a nucleus and have a different structure, size and properties. The ribosomes of eukaryotic and procaryotic cells, ...
2021-05-24
New York, NY--May 24, 2021--Whenever you buy something on Amazon, your customer data is automatically updated and stored on thousands of virtual machines in the cloud. For businesses like Amazon, ensuring the safety and security of the data of its millions of customers is essential. This is true for large and small organizations alike. But up to now, there has been no way to guarantee that a software system is secure from bugs, hackers, and vulnerabilities.
Columbia Engineering researchers may have solved this security issue. They have developed SeKVM, the ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] ED visits for appendicitis, miscarriage fell sharply in first wave of COVID-19 pandemic
