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Objective: Recent studies have shown that CPPD might be associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular events related to inflammation. Thus, we aim to examine the outcomes of patients admitted for acute coronary syndrome (ACS) with and without CPPD., Methods: We used data from the US National Inpatient Sample (NIS) Database to identify patients who were admitted for ACS between 2006 and 2019. The ICD-9 and -10 codes were used to determine the patients with ACS related hospitalizations and of those, we classified two groups of patients: those with and those without any CPPD code. Data collection included demographics and comorbidities. Outcomes were in-hospital mortality, length of stay, hospital charges, and in-hospital complications. Associations between CPPD and specific morbidity were evaluated with chi-square tests. T-tests were used for continuous variables. We have also presented odds ratio (OR) along with 95 % confidence intervals (CI) for the outcomes of interest., Results: A total of 17,322,362 patients were admitted for ACS. Among them, 7,458 had CPPD, with a mean age of 75 years and 48 % were females. CPPD patients were more likely to be older (75 vs 68 years; p < 0.001) compared to non-CPPD patients. Among the comorbidities, chronic kidney disease was more frequently observed in CPPD patients. Regarding the inpatient complications, acute ischemic stroke and post-procedural hemorrhage were more frequently seen in CPPD patients. Interestingly, the in-hospital mortality was lower in the CPPD patients than the non-CPPD patients (OR: 0.77; CI 95 % 0.70-0.85). ACS in CPPD patients was associated with a longer mean length of stay than those without CPPD (OR: 3.35; 95 % CI 3.17-3.53). In addition, mean total charges were higher in the CPPD group (OR: 1.04; 95 % CI 1.01-1.10)., Conclusion: ACS in CPPD patients is associated with higher healthcare utilization, including cost and length of hospital stay, and lower in-hospital mortality than non-CPPD patients., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Introduction: We aim to understand the factors that drive citizens of different countries to adhere to recommended self-protective behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic., Methods: Survey data was obtained through the COVID-19 Impact project. We selected countries that presented a sufficiently complete time series and a statistically relevant sample for running the analysis: Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. To identify country-specific differences in self-protective behaviors, we used previous evidence and change-point detection analysis to establish variations across participating countries whose effect was then assessed by means of interrupted series analysis., Results: A high level of compliance with health and governmental authorities' recommendations were generally observed in all included countries. The level of stress decreased near the period when countries such as Cyprus, Greece or the United Kingdom relaxed their prevention behavior recommendations. However, this relaxation of behaviors did not occur in countries such as Germany, Ireland, or the United States. As observed in the change-point detection analysis, when the daily number of recorded COVID-19 cases decreased, people relaxed their protective behaviors (Cyprus, Greece, Ireland), although the opposite trend was observed in Switzerland., Discussion: COVID-19 self-protective behaviors were heterogeneous across countries examined. Our findings show that there is probably no single winning strategy for exiting future health crises, as similar interventions, aimed to promote self-protective behaviors, may be received differently depending on the specific population groups and on the particular geographical context in which they are implemented., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Alvarez-Galvez et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Suboptimal effort is a threat to the validity of neuropsychological evaluations. Numerous papers have been devoted to this subject and a large number of measures have been developed in an attempt to detect suboptimal effort. To date, however, the clinical literature has focused almost exclusively on identifying suboptimal effort in adults, whereas suboptimal effort among children has not been addressed thoroughly in the clinical neuropsychological literature. The present study investigated whether or not already established effort measures could be used with children. The Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM) and the Rey-15-item test were administered to 128 children in two sites, the USA and Cyprus. The results indicated that the TOMM has the potential to be used as a measure for identifying children who do not put forth maximal effort during neuropsychological evaluations. In contrast, the Rey-15-item test does not appear to be a promising measure of effort for use with children, especially younger children.