Displaying publications 1 - 20 of 8649 in total

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  1. Tan DS
    Med J Malaya, 1967 Jun;21(4):358-61.
    PMID: 4230504
    Matched MeSH terms: Infectious Mononucleosis/epidemiology*
  2. Assunta M, Fields N, Knight J, Chapman S
    Tob Control, 2004 Dec;13 Suppl 2:ii4-12.
    PMID: 15564219
    STUDY OBJECTIVE: To review the tobacco industry's Asian environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) consultants programme, focusing on three key nations: China, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.
    METHODS: Systematic keyword and opportunistic website searches of formerly private internal industry documents.
    MAIN RESULTS: The release of the 1986 US Surgeon General's report on second hand smoke provoked tobacco companies to prepare for a major threat to their industry. Asian programme activities included conducting national/international symposiums, consultant "road shows" and extensive lobbying and media activities. The industry exploited confounding factors said to be unique to Asian societies such as diet, culture and urban pollution to downplay the health risks of ETS. The industry consultants were said to be "..prepared to do the kinds of things they were recruited to do".
    CONCLUSIONS: The programme was successful in blurring the science on ETS and keeping the controversy alive both nationally and internationally. For the duration of the project, it also successfully dissuaded national policy makers from instituting comprehensive bans on smoking in public places.
  3. Root R
    Med Anthropol, 2008 Oct-Dec;27(4):405-34.
    PMID: 18958787 DOI: 10.1080/01459740802427737
    Since the early 1990s, the Malaysian government has identified factories as high risk for HIV and AIDS. Signaling epidemiological concerns over the rising rates of HIV among factory workers, a significant proportion of whom are women, the label also appeared to reconstitute stereotypes of factory women as dangerously sexual and of factories as immoral spaces. Drawing on ethnographic research in the export processing zones of Penang, Malaysia in the mid-1990s, I examine the meanings and experiences of HIV risk among factory women themselves. Data were analyzed using discourse and grounded theory methods, the former to identify women's multiple modes of rationalizing HIV risks, and the latter to theorize the sources and significance of women's HIV risk assemblages. The heuristic of assemblages as localized knowledge spaces helped to show that biomedical and socioreligious risk lexica operated not as fixed epistemological categories but as situational resources in women's risk scripts. Overall, women desired multiple risk knowledges to help them "control themselves by themselves," a project of reflexive self-shaping mediated by the diverse and discordant discourses of gender, ethnicity, and modernity in Malaysia that shaped how HIV risks were engendered and experienced.
    Matched MeSH terms: Malaysia/epidemiology
  4. Saimon R, Choo WY, Bulgiba A
    Asia Pac J Public Health, 2015 Mar;27(2):NP2079-92.
    PMID: 23513006 DOI: 10.1177/1010539513480229
    Understanding the factors influencing physical activity (PA) in the Asia-Pacific region is critical, given the high prevalence of inactivity in this area. The photovoice technique explores the types of PA and factors influencing PA among adolescents in Kuching, Sarawak. A total of 160 photographs were collected from participants (adolescents, n = 22, mean age = 14.27 ± 0.7 years, and parents, n = 8, mean age = 48 ± 6.8 years). Data analysis used constant comparison methods of a grounded theory. The Analysis Grid for Environments Linked to Obesity was used to categorize PA factors. Study findings were centered on the concept of safety, facilities, parental restriction, friends, cultural traits, media, community cohesiveness, and weather. The central theme was "feeling unsafe" when being outdoors. To promote PA behavior, provision of PA facilities needs to be supported by other programs that build on peer support, crime prevention, and traffic safety, together with other educational campaigns.
    Matched MeSH terms: Obesity/epidemiology
  5. Tiew PY, Ko FWS, Narayana JK, Poh ME, Xu H, Neo HY, et al.
    Chest, 2020 07;158(1):145-156.
    PMID: 32092320 DOI: 10.1016/j.chest.2020.01.043
    BACKGROUND: COPD is a heterogeneous disease demonstrating inter-individual variation. A high COPD prevalence in Chinese populations is described, but little is known about disease clusters and prognostic outcomes in the Chinese population across Southeast Asia. We aim to determine if clusters of Chinese patients with COPD exist and their association with systemic inflammation and clinical outcomes.

    RESEARCH QUESTION: We aim to determine if clusters of Chinese patients with COPD exist and their association with clinical outcomes and inflammation.

    STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: Chinese patients with stable COPD were prospectively recruited into two cohorts (derivation and validation) from six hospitals across three Southeast Asian countries (Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong; n = 1,480). Each patient was followed more than 2 years. Clinical data (including co-morbidities) were employed in unsupervised hierarchical clustering (followed by validation) to determine the existence of patient clusters and their prognostic outcome. Accompanying systemic cytokine assessments were performed in a subset (n = 336) of patients with COPD to determine if inflammatory patterns and associated networks characterized the derived clusters.

    RESULTS: Five patient clusters were identified including: (1) ex-TB, (2) diabetic, (3) low comorbidity: low-risk, (4) low comorbidity: high-risk, and (5) cardiovascular. The cardiovascular and ex-TB clusters demonstrate highest mortality (independent of Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease assessment) and illustrate diverse cytokine patterns with complex inflammatory networks.

    INTERPRETATION: We describe clusters of Chinese patients with COPD, two of which represent high-risk clusters. The cardiovascular and ex-TB patient clusters exhibit high mortality, significant inflammation, and complex cytokine networks. Clinical and inflammatory risk stratification of Chinese patients with COPD should be considered for targeted intervention to improve disease outcomes.

    Matched MeSH terms: Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive/epidemiology*
  6. Pallie W
    Med J Malaya, 1968 Sep;23(1):67-72.
    PMID: 4237562
    Matched MeSH terms: Hypertrichosis/epidemiology*
  7. Root R
    Med Anthropol Q, 2006 Sep;20(3):321-44.
    PMID: 16937620
    Minah Karan, the stigmatizing label appended to Malay factory women in the 1980s, signaled a dangerous female sexuality that risked spreading beyond the factory gates and infecting Malaysia's idea(l)s of its traditional kampung culture. This article narrates how Minah Karan, as the former antihero of development, was reconstituted in the 1990s, with the government's labeling of factories as "high-risk settings" for HIV/AIDS. This is an ethnoetiology based not on any evidential epidemiological data but on the racial and gendered "mixing" that transpires behind factory walls: a fear that the "mixing of the sexes" means ipso facto "sexual mixing" among the races. The article demonstrates how importation of the high-risk label articulates at the local level the new and contested linkages, economic, religious, and scientific, constitutive of globalization. The pragmatic nature and imperatives of this high-risk process are discerned in factory women's accounts of how they negotiate the interactional imperatives of factory work, because transnational structures of productivity violate the social boundaries that have long connoted political stability, moral integrity, ethnic community, and individual safety. The article concludes by questioning whether ethnoetiologies, especially when they concern sexual networks, become social etiologies, because this would locate ethnoetiologies as central to conventional public health praxis rather than as ethnographic exotica in the margins.
    Matched MeSH terms: Malaysia/epidemiology
  8. Stein Z, Durkin M, Belmont L
    Ann N Y Acad Sci, 1986;477:8-21.
    PMID: 3468840
    In this paper we first present methods and preliminary results of pilot surveys of "serious" mental retardation (IQ less than or equal to 55); the surveys included screening and diagnostic components and were carried out in the less-developed world. Next we discuss two problems raised by these surveys: one is the diagnosis of a case and its clinical dimensions, and the other is the interpretation of prevalence. In the next section we illustrate epidemiological approaches to the analysis of such data, in particular their relevance to prevention. Lastly, we propose that the two-stage survey approach developed in the course of the pilot work can provide a valuable basis for planning and prevention, if certain key conditions can be met.
    Matched MeSH terms: Intellectual Disability/epidemiology*
  9. Hamid TA, Pakgohar M, Ibrahim R, Dastjerdi MV
    Arch Gerontol Geriatr, 2015 May-Jun;60(3):514-21.
    PMID: 25662038 DOI: 10.1016/j.archger.2015.01.003
    UI is a worldwide chronic condition among postmenopausal women. Little is known about the meaning of lived experiences of urinary incontinence of these women's viewpoints in their context.
    Matched MeSH terms: Iran/epidemiology; Urinary Incontinence/epidemiology
  10. Bromberg DJ, Tate MM, Alaei A, Rozanova J, Karimov S, Saidi D, et al.
    AIDS Behav, 2021 Oct;25(10):3115-3127.
    PMID: 34195912 DOI: 10.1007/s10461-021-03359-w
    Tajikistani migrants who work in Russia and acquire HIV seldom receive HIV treatment while in Russia. Barriers to engagement in the HIV care cascade were identified from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with purposefully sampled Tajikistani migrants (n = 34) with HIV who had returned from Russia. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis, drawing from Putnam's theory of social capital, showing how bridging and bonding social capital relate to poor engagement in HIV care. We identified three barriers to Tajikistani migrants' movement through the HIV care cascade: (1) Russia's migration ban on people with HIV interrupts social capital accumulation and prevents access to HIV treatment within Russia; (2) mistrust of authority figures, including healthcare providers, leads to avoiding treatment and harm-reduction services upon their return to Tajikistan; and (3) because of pervasive discrimination, Tajikistani migrants form weak social ties while in Russia, which exacerbates risk, including with Russian citizens, and deters engagement with HIV care. Deploying a treatment as prevention strategy and abolishing Russia's ban on people with HIV would improve both individual and public health.
    Matched MeSH terms: Russia/epidemiology
  11. Saville M, McNally O
    Aust N Z J Obstet Gynaecol, 2018 Jun;58(3):265-266.
    PMID: 29864221 DOI: 10.1111/ajo.12813
    Matched MeSH terms: Australia/epidemiology; Uterine Cervical Neoplasms/epidemiology; New Zealand/epidemiology
  12. Chandrasekhar J, Kalkman DN, Aquino MB, Sartori S, Hájek P, Atzev B, et al.
    Int J Cardiol, 2020 05 15;307:17-23.
    PMID: 32111358 DOI: 10.1016/j.ijcard.2020.01.045
    BACKGROUND: The COMBO drug-eluting stent combines sirolimus-elution from a biodegradable polymer with an anti-CD34+ antibody coating for early endothelialization.

    OBJECTIVE: We investigated for geographical differences in outcomes after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) with the COMBO stent among Asians and Europeans.

    METHODS: The COMBO Collaboration is a pooled patient-level analysis of the MASCOT and REMEDEE registries of all-comers undergoing attempted COMBO stent PCI. The primary outcome was 1-year target lesion failure (TLF), composite of cardiac death, target vessel myocardial infarction (TV-MI) and target lesion revascularization (TLR).

    RESULTS: This study included 604 Asians (17.9%) and 2775 Europeans (82.1%). Asians were younger and included fewer females, with a higher prevalence of diabetes mellitus but lower prevalence of other comorbidities than Europeans. Asians had a higher prevalence of ACC/AHA C type lesions and received longer stent lengths. More Asians than Europeans were discharged on clopidogrel (86.5% vs 62.8%) rather than potent P2Y12 inhibitors. One-year TLF occurred in 4.0% Asians and 4.1% of Europeans, p = 0.93. The incidence of cardiac death was higher in Asians (2.8% vs. 1.3%, p = 0.007) with similar rates of TV-MI (1.5% vs. 1.2%, p = 0.54) and definite stent thrombosis (0.3% vs. 0.5%, p = 0.84) and lower incidence of TLR than Europeans (1.0% vs. 2.5%, p = 0.025). After adjustment, differences for cardiac death and TLR were no longer significant.

    CONCLUSIONS: In the COMBO collaboration, although 1-year TLF was similar regardless of geography, Asians experienced higher rates of cardiac death and lower TLR than Europeans, while incidence of TV-MI and ST was similar in both regions. Adjusted differences did not reach statistical significance. CLINICALTRIAL.

    GOV IDENTIFIER-NUMBERS: NCT01874002 (REMEDEE Registry), NCT02183454 (MASCOT registry).

    Matched MeSH terms: Asia/epidemiology; Europe/epidemiology
  13. Borhanuddin B, Mohd Nawi A, Shah SA, Abdullah N, Syed Zakaria SZ, Kamaruddin MA, et al.
    ScientificWorldJournal, 2018;2018:2979206.
    PMID: 30111990 DOI: 10.1155/2018/2979206
    Cardiovascular disease (CVD) leads to high morbidity and mortality rate worldwide. Therefore, it is important to determine the risk of CVD across the sociodemographic factors to strategize preventive measures. The current study consisted of 53,122 adults between the ages of 35 and 65 years from The Malaysian Cohort project during recruitment phase from year 2006 to year 2012. Sociodemographic profile and physical activity level were assessed via self-reported questionnaire, whereas relevant CVD-related biomarkers and biophysical variables were measured to determine the Framingham Risk Score (FRS). The main outcome was the 10-year risk of CVD via FRS calculated based on lipid profile and body mass index (BMI) associated formulae. The BMI-based formula yielded a higher estimation of 10-year CVD risk than the lipid profile-based formula in the study for both males (median = 13.2% and 12.7%, respectively) and females (median = 4.3% and 4.2%, respectively). The subgroup with the highest risk for 10-year CVD events (based on both FRS formulae) was the Malay males who have lower education level and low physical activity level. Future strategies for the reduction of CVD risk should focus on screening via BMI-based FRS in this at-risk subpopulation to increase the cost-effectiveness of the prevention initiatives.
    Study name: The Malaysian Cohort (TMC) project
    Matched MeSH terms: Cardiovascular Diseases/epidemiology*; Malaysia/epidemiology
  14. Allotey P, Amazigo U, Adjei S, Seddoh A, Lusamba-Dikassa PS
    Lancet, 2012 Oct 20;380(9851):1361-3.
    PMID: 23084441 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60723-5
    Matched MeSH terms: Onchocerciasis, Ocular/epidemiology; Africa South of the Sahara/epidemiology
  15. Ng LC, Chem YK, Koo C, Mudin RNB, Amin FM, Lee KS, et al.
    Am J Trop Med Hyg, 2015 Jun;92(6):1150-1155.
    PMID: 25846296 DOI: 10.4269/ajtmh.14-0588
    Characterization of 14,079 circulating dengue viruses in a cross-border surveillance program, UNITEDengue, revealed that the 2013 outbreaks in Singapore and Malaysia were associated with replacement of predominant serotype. While the predominant virus in Singapore switched from DENV2 to DENV1, DENV2 became predominant in neighboring Malaysia. Dominance of DENV2 was most evident on the southern states where higher fatality rates were observed.
    Matched MeSH terms: Dengue/epidemiology*; Malaysia/epidemiology; Singapore/epidemiology
  16. Tam LS, Wei JC, Aggarwal A, Baek HJ, Cheung PP, Chiowchanwisawakit P, et al.
    Int J Rheum Dis, 2019 Mar;22(3):340-356.
    PMID: 30816645 DOI: 10.1111/1756-185X.13510
    INTRODUCTION: Despite the availability of axial spondyloarthritis (SpA) recommendations proposed by various rheumatology societies, we considered that a region-specific guideline was of substantial added value to clinicians of the Asia-Pacific region, given the wide variations in predisposition to infections and other patient factors, local practice patterns, and access to treatment across countries.

    MATERIALS AND METHODS: Systematic reviews were undertaken of English-language articles published between 2000 and 2016, identified from MEDLINE using PubMed, EMBASE and Cochrane databases. The strength of available evidence was graded using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations (GRADE) approach. Recommendations were developed through consensus using the Delphi technique.

    RESULTS: Fourteen axial SpA treatment recommendations were developed based on evidence summaries and consensus. The first 2 recommendations cover non-pharmacological approaches to management. Recommendations 3 to 5 describe the following: the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs as first-line symptomatic treatment; the avoidance of long-term corticosteroid use; and the utility of conventional synthetic disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (csDMARDs) for peripheral or extra-articular manifestations. Recommendation 6 refers to the indications for biological DMARDs (bDMARDs). Recommendation 7 deals specifically with screening for infections endemic to Asia, prior to use of bDMARDs. Recommendations 7 to 13 cover the role of bDMARDs in the treatment of active axial SpA and include related issues such as continuing therapy and use in special populations. Recommendation 14 deals with the utility of surgical intervention in axial SpA.

    CONCLUSION: These recommendations provide up-to-date guidance for treatment of axial SpA to help meet the needs of patients and clinicians in the Asia-Pacific region.

    Matched MeSH terms: Asia/epidemiology; Spondylarthritis/epidemiology
  17. Lau CS, Chia F, Dans L, Harrison A, Hsieh TY, Jain R, et al.
    Int J Rheum Dis, 2019 Mar;22(3):357-375.
    PMID: 30809944 DOI: 10.1111/1756-185X.13513
    AIM: To update recommendations based on current best evidence concerning the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), focusing particularly on the role of targeted therapies, to inform clinicians on new developments that will impact their current practice.

    MATERIALS AND METHODS: A search of relevant literature from 2014 to 2016 concerning targeted therapies in RA was conducted. The RA Update Working Group evaluated the evidence and proposed updated recommendations using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations (GRADE) approach, to describe the quality of evidence and strength of recommendations. Recommendations were finalized through consensus using the Delphi technique.

    RESULTS: This update provides 16 RA treatment recommendations based on current best evidence and expert clinical opinion. Recommendations 1-3 deal with the use of conventional synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs. The next three recommendations (4-6) cover the need for screening and management of infections and comorbid conditions prior to starting targeted therapy, while the following seven recommendations focus on use of these agents. We address choice of targeted therapy, switch, tapering and discontinuation. The last three recommendations elaborate on targeted therapy for RA in special situations such as pregnancy, cancer, and major surgery.

    CONCLUSION: Rheumatoid arthritis remains a significant health problem in the Asia-Pacific region. Patients with RA can benefit from the availability of effective targeted therapies, and these updated recommendations provide clinicians with guidance on their use.

    Matched MeSH terms: Arthritis, Rheumatoid/epidemiology; Asia/epidemiology
  18. Kario K, Park S, Chia YC, Sukonthasarn A, Turana Y, Shin J, et al.
    J Clin Hypertens (Greenwich), 2020 03;22(3):351-362.
    PMID: 31816164 DOI: 10.1111/jch.13751
    Hypertension professionals from Asia have been meeting together for the last decade to discuss how to improve the management of hypertension. Based on these education and research activities, the Hypertension, brain, cardiovascular and renal Outcome Prevention and Evidence in Asia (HOPE Asia) Network was officially established in June 2018 and includes experts from 12 countries/regions across Asia. Among the numerous research and review papers published by members of the HOPE Asia Network since 2017, publications in three key areas provide important guidance on the management of hypertension in Asia. This article highlights key consensus documents, which relate to the Asian characteristics of hypertension, home blood pressure monitoring (HBPM), and ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM). Hypertension and hypertension-related diseases are common in Asia, and their characteristics differ from those in other populations. It is essential that these are taken into consideration to provide the best opportunity for achieving "perfect 24-hour blood pressure control", guided by out-of-office (home and ambulatory) blood pressure monitoring. These region-specific consensus documents should contribute to optimizing individual and population-based hypertension management strategies in Asian country. In addition, the HOPE Asia Network model provides a good example of the local interpretation, modification, and dissemination of international best practice to benefit specific populations.
    Matched MeSH terms: Asia/epidemiology
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