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The lockdown restrictions that have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic have reshaped the way people live, work, and interact with each other. At the same time, it changed the way health-care professionals and national health-care systems around the world are fighting in this battle for public health. Social media (SoMe) have played their informational role in this fight with almost one-third of the world’s population being active users of social media platforms. Contemporary health-care systems have tried to find ways to engage more actively with SoMe as Internet users are increasingly searching for health information on social media platforms. As a result, new demand-side levers arise in the health-care sector along with new opportunities and risks for the stakeholders. Our study looked into the responses of 173 health-care professionals in Greece. SoMe are here to stay and the majority of health-care professionals embrace them in their professional lives. Quality in health information and the work context of Greek health-care professionals in our cohort contribute to attitudes and perceptions of social media use in health care. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Scope: Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common liver disease with poor therapeutic strategies. Mastiha possesses antioxidant/anti-inflammatory and lipid-lowering properties. The authors investigate the effectiveness of Mastiha as a nonpharmacological intervention in NAFLD. Methods and Results: Ninety-eight patients with NAFLD in three countries (Greece, Italy, Serbia) are randomly allocated to either Mastiha or Placebo for 6 months, as part of a multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group clinical trial. The authors assess NAFLD severity via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning and LiverMultiScan technique and evaluate the effectiveness of Mastiha through medical, anthropometric, biochemical, metabolomic, and microbiota assessment. Mastiha is not superior to Placebo on changes in iron-corrected T1 (cT1) and Liver Inflammation Fibrosis score (LIF) in entire patient population; however, after BMI stratification (BMI ≤ 35 kg m-2 and BMI > 35 kg m-2), severely obese patients show an improvement in cT1 and LIF in Mastiha versus Placebo. Mastiha increases dissimilarity of gut microbiota, as shown by the Bray-Curtis index, downregulates Flavonifractor, a known inflammatory taxon and decreases Lysophosphatidylcholines-(LysoPC) 18:1, Lysophosphatidylethanolamines-(LysoPE) 18:1, and cholic acid compared to Placebo. Conclusion: Mastiha supplementation improves microbiota dysbiosis and lipid metabolite levels in patients with NAFLD, although it reduces parameters of liver inflammation/fibrosis only in severely obese patients. © 2021 Wiley-VCH GmbH

BACKGROUND: The number of older adults is increasing rapidly. Malnutrition is a major problem in this age group, which may adversely affect health and quality of life. Several physiological, socioeconomic, and neuropsychological factors can lead to malnutrition. OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to evaluate the nutritional status of community-dwelling older adults, and explore the associations of malnutrition risk with physiological, socioeconomic, and neuropsychological characteristics. METHODS: This study is part of the Hellenic Longitudinal Investigation of Aging and Diet study, a cross-sectional observational study in Greece, and study participants were 1831 urban-dwelling elderly individuals (mean age: 73.1 ± 5.9 y; 40.8% men). Risk for malnutrition was assessed with the Determine Your Nutritional Health checklist. Data on age, sex, level of education, marital status, depression, cognitive performance, body mass index, total energy intake, and adherence to the Mediterranean diet were recorded. Correlations and multivariate analyses were performed between these variables and risk for malnutrition. RESULTS: The estimated prevalence of moderate and high nutritional risks was 34.8% and 29.4%, respectively. Risk for malnutrition was associated with marital status (unmarried), increased body mass index, male sex, lower level of education, lower cognitive performance, and lower adherence to the Mediterranean diet (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Nutritional screening should be performed frequently in all community-dwelling older adults. Health experts should perform nutritional screening in all community-dwelling older adults as part of secondary prevention, and nutrition counselling and support should be offered in those at risk for malnutrition. Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The academic excellence of universities around the globe has always been a matter of extended study and so has the quality of an institution's presence in theWorldWideWeb. The purpose of this research is to study the extent to which a university's academic excellence is related to the quality of its web presence. In order to achieve this, a method was devised that quantified the website quality and search engine optimization (SEO) performance of the university websites of the top 100 universities in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) Shanghai list. A variety of tools was employed to measure and test each website and produced a Web quality ranking, an SEO performance ranking, as well as a combined overall web ranking for each one. Comparing these rankings with the ARWU shows that academic excellence is moderately correlated with website quality, but SEO performance is not. Moreover, the overall web ranking also shows a moderate correlation with ARWU which seems to be positively influenced by website quality and negatively by SEO performance. Conclusively, the results of the research indicate that universities place particular emphasis on issues concerning website quality, while the utilization of SEO does not appear to be of equal importance, indicating possible room for improvement in this area. © 2019 by the authors.

A large part of the hidden web resides in weblog servers. New content is produced in a daily basis and the work of traditional search engines turns to be insufficient due to the nature of weblogs. This work summarizes the structure of the blogosphere and highlights the special features of weblogs. In this paper we present a method for ranking weblogs based on the link graph and on several similarity characteristics between weblogs. First we create an enhanced graph of connected weblogs and add new types of edges and weights utilising many weblog features. Then, we assign a ranking to each weblog using our algorithm, BlogRank, which is a modified version of PageRank. For the validation of our method we run experiments on a weblog dataset, which we process and adapt to our search engine. (http://spiderwave.aueb.gr/Blogwave). The results suggest that the use of the enhanced graph and the BlogRank algorithm is preferred by the users., Comment: 9 pages, in 2nd international workshop on Advanced architectures and algorithms for internet delivery and applications

When searching the web, it is often possible that there are too many results available for ambiguous queries. Text snippets, extracted from the retrieved pages, are an indicator of the pages' usefulness to the query intention and can be used to focus the scope of search results. In this paper, we propose a novel method for automatically extracting web page snippets that are highly relevant to the query intention and expressive of the pages' entire content. We show that the usage of semantics, as a basis for focused retrieval, produces high quality text snippet suggestions. The snippets delivered by our method are significantly better in terms of retrieval performance compared to those derived using the pages' statistical content. Furthermore, our study suggests that semantically-driven snippet generation can also be used to augment traditional passage retrieval algorithms based on word overlap or statistical weights, since they typically differ in coverage and produce different results. User clicks on the query relevant snippets can be used to refine the query results and promote the most comprehensive among the relevant documents., Comment: In proceedings of SIGIR 2007 Workshop on Focused Retrieval. 8 pages