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This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality rates associated with hematological malignancies in Italy. The study found that deaths with any mention of hematological malignancies increased in 2020 compared to the previous year, while deaths classified as the underlying cause of death declined. The increase in mortality was most pronounced for chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and less prominent for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and multiple myeloma (MM). The study highlights the importance of considering multiple causes of death in assessing the mortality burden in hematological patients during the pandemic. [Extracted from the article]

Objectives: This study aimed at investigating gender differences in the relationship between sociodemographic factors and suicide mortality, as well as in the method used for suicide and the presence of comorbidities in an older population in Italy.Methods/design: We conducted a historical cohort study based on individual record linkage across the 15th Italian Population Census, the Italian Population Register, and the National Register of Causes of Death. Suicides among people aged 75 years or older from 2012 to 2017 were analyzed. Crude mortality rates were computed, and cause-specific mortality rate ratios were estimated using negative binomial regression models. Chi-square tests were used to evaluate significant gender differences in suicide methods and comorbidities associated with suicide.Results: The study included 9,686,698 individuals (41% men, 59% women). Compared to living alone, living with children or partners reduced suicide mortality, especially among men. Having high or medium educational levels was associated with lower mortality than low educational levels among men. Foreign citizens had lower mortality among men, but not among women. Living in urban areas was associated with lower suicide rates in men and higher rates in women. Methods of suicide significantly differed by gender: leading methods were hanging, strangulation, and suffocation in men, and falling from height in women. Mental comorbidity was significantly more frequent among women, especially at ages 75-84 years.Conclusions: We believe that our findings might help to promote public health strategies taking gender differences in old age into account to improve social support and quality of life of older men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flows over time problems relate to finding optimal flows over a capacitated network where transit times on network arcs are explicitly considered. In this article, we study the problem of determining a minimum cost origin-destination path where the cost and the travel time of each arc depend on the time taken to travel from the origin to that particular arc along the path. We provide computational complexity results for this problem and an exact solution algorithm based on an enumeration scheme on the corresponding time expanded network. Finally, we show the efficiency of our approach through a number of experimental tests. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 69(1), 23-32 2017 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]