METHOD: Six hundred children aged 9-11 and 424 of their parents completely answered the child or parent versions of the SCAS.
RESULTS: Results indicated that the internal reliability of subscales were moderate to adequate. Significant correlations between child and parent reports supported the measure's concurrent validity. Additionally, anxiety levels in this Malaysian sample were lower than among South-African children and higher than among their Western peers. There were both similarities and differences between symptom items reported as often or always experienced by Malaysian students and by children from other cultures. Confirmatory factor analysis provided evidence of the existence of five inter-correlated factors for anxiety disorders based on SCAS-C.
CONCLUSION: Although some of the instrument's psychometric properties deviated from those observed in some other countries, it nevertheless appears to be useful for assessing childhood anxiety symptoms in this country.
METHODS: The selected subjects were patients of all ages with a chief complaint of snakebite who presented to participating emergency departments (EDs) between 1 January 2011 and 31 December 2016.
RESULTS: A total of 1335 patients were eligible for the study. There were an average of 223 snakebite cases reported each year. Most snakebites occurred during the summer months (55.9%) in patients aged 40-59 y (36.3%) and males (61.5%). Snakebites occurred most frequently on Mondays (22.9%) between 12:00 and 17:59 h (42.0%) outdoors (57.9%) and in farm areas (20.7%). Over 82% of the bites were by venomous snakes across all seasons, and 66% of the patients visited EDs without using emergency medical services. Based on the excess mortality ratio-adjusted injury severity score, 88, 9.2 and 2.8% had mild, moderate and severe injuries, respectively. There were 10 fatalities during the study period.
CONCLUSION: This study provides essential information to understand and assess the burden and distribution of snakebites in South Korea and provides valuable information for developing appropriate prevention and control interventions to address it.
METHODS: We analysed Demographic and Health Survey data on tobacco use collected from large nationally representative samples of men and women in 54 LMICs. We estimated the weighted prevalence of any current tobacco use (including smokeless tobacco) in each country for 4 educational groups and 4 wealth groups. We calculated absolute and relative measures of inequality, that is, the slope index of inequality (SII) and relative index of inequality (RII), which take into account the distribution of prevalence across all education and wealth groups and account for population size. We also calculated the aggregate SII and RII for low-income (LIC), lower-middle-income (lMIC) and upper-middle-income (uMIC) countries as per World Bank classification.
FINDINGS: Male tobacco use was highest in Bangladesh (70.3%) and lowest in Sao Tome (7.4%), whereas female tobacco use was highest in Madagascar (21%) and lowest in Tajikistan (0.22%). Among men, educational inequalities varied widely between countries, but aggregate RII and SII showed an inverse trend by country wealth groups. RII was 3.61 (95% CI 2.83 to 4.61) in LICs, 1.99 (95% CI 1.66 to 2.38) in lMIC and 1.82 (95% CI 1.24 to 2.67) in uMIC. Wealth inequalities among men varied less between countries, but RII and SII showed an inverse pattern where RII was 2.43 (95% CI 2.05 to 2.88) in LICs, 1.84 (95% CI 1.54 to 2.21) in lMICs and 1.67 (95% CI 1.15 to 2.42) in uMICs. For educational inequalities among women, the RII varied much more than SII varied between the countries, and the aggregate RII was 14.49 (95% CI 8.87 to 23.68) in LICs, 3.05 (95% CI 1.44 to 6.47) in lMIC and 1.58 (95% CI 0.33 to 7.56) in uMIC. Wealth inequalities among women showed a pattern similar to that of men: the RII was 5.88 (95% CI 3.91 to 8.85) in LICs, 1.76 (95% CI 0.80 to 3.85) in lMIC and 0.39 (95% CI 0.09 to 1.64) in uMIC. In contrast to men, among women, the SII was pro-rich (higher smoking among the more advantaged) in 13 of the 52 countries (7 of 23 lMIC and 5 of 7 uMIC).
INTERPRETATION: Our results confirm that socioeconomic inequalities tobacco use exist in LMIC, varied widely between the countries and were much wider in the lowest income countries. These findings are important for better understanding and tackling of socioeconomic inequalities in health in LMIC.
METHOD: A cross-sectional survey of two groups of participants was conducted using the Revised Patients' Attitudes Towards Deprescribing questionnaire. Descriptive results were reported for participants' characteristics and questionnaire responses from four factors (belief in medication inappropriateness, medication burden, concerns about stopping, and involvement) and two global questions. Correlation between participant characteristics and their responses was analyzed.
RESULTS: A total of 1,057 (615 older adults; 442 caregivers) participants were recruited from 10 institutions in Singapore. In which 511 (83.0%) older adults and 385 (87.1%) caregivers reported that they would be willing to stop one or more of their medications if their doctor said it was possible, especially among older adults recruited from acute-care hospitals (85.3%) compared with older adults in community pharmacies (73.6%). Individuals who take more than five medications and those with higher education were correlated with greater agreement in inappropriateness and involvement, respectively.
CONCLUSIONS: Clinicians should consider discussing deprescribing with older adults and caregivers in their regular clinical practice, especially when polypharmacy is present. Further research is needed into how to engage older adults and caregivers in shared decision making based on their attitudes toward deprescribing.