Oral health-related quality of life in elderly: an umbrella review of systematic reviews from a multidisciplinary rehabilitation point-of-view.

Background: Poor oral health is highly prevalent among elderlies and may impact quality of life of elderly people. In this scenario, oral health has been often linked to general health and chronic disorders, including distinct features of frailty. The aim of the present umbrella review of systematic reviews was to assess the scientific literature on the correlation between oral health related quality of life (OHRQoL) and elderly to present a multidisciplinary approach to these complex patients. Methods: We performed a literature search of the databases Pub-Med/Medline, Scopus, Web of Science, and Physiotherapy Evidence Database electronic databases. Two independent reviewers performed the literature research from the inception to 25th November 2023 and screened the studies for eligibility. Results: The search resulted in a total of 676 results eligible articles. After removal of duplicates and full-text screening, a total of 3 systematic reviews were considered to meet the inclusion criteria and were included for this review. Conclusions: Frailty is very common in elderly such as a poor oral health. In this scenario, malnutrition and bad lifestyle habits may affect not only the determinism of many systemic non-communicable diseases but also oral health quality. Taken together, the findings of this umbrella review of systematic reviews showed a strict correlation between the frailty, typical condition of ageing people, and a poor OHRQoL. Therefore, it is mandatory to implement the oral health prevention with specific protocols of oral rehabilitation to improve the OHRQoL in elderly.

Intra-articular hyaluronic acid injections for hip osteoarthritis.

Although viscosupplementation has been used in the past few years both for knee and hip osteoarthritis (OA), the number of intra-articular injections and the interval between doses still remains an undetermined subject. The aim of this open retrospective study was to evaluate the clinical and functional outcome in patients with mild-moderate hip OA treated with a course of 1, 2 or 3 Hyaluronic Acid (HA) intra-articular injections. Ninety-six patients were included: 19 patients received only one injection, 24 received two injections, and 44 received three injections. Age, sex, VAS for pain and WOMAC score before each intra-articular injection, number of intra-articular injections, reasons for interrupting the treatment, adverse events, time between HA injections, and number of patients who had a total hip replacement were retrieved from the medical records of each patient. VAS and WOMAC scores were obtained from all patients also at a mean follow-up of 7 months after the last hip injection. All patients who received 1, 2 or 3 hip injections improved in VAS and WOMAC score. Three intra-articular injections provided a better outcome in terms of pain reduction compared to 1 or 2 injections. Intrarticular injections for mild-moderate hip OA were demonstrated to be effective in reducing pain and improving function. A full course of three injections provided the best result in pain control.

ValWorkBench: an open source Java library for cluster validation, with applications to microarray data analysis.

The prediction of the number of clusters in a dataset, in particular microarrays, is a fundamental task in biological data analysis, usually performed via validation measures. Unfortunately, it has received very little attention and in fact there is a growing need for software tools/libraries dedicated to it. Here we present ValWorkBench, a software library consisting of eleven well known validation measures, together with novel heuristic approximations for some of them. The main objective of this paper is to provide the interested researcher with the full software documentation of an open source cluster validation platform having the main features of being easily extendible in a homogeneous way and of offering software components that can be readily re-used. Consequently, the focus of the presentation is on the architecture of the library, since it provides an essential map that can be used to access the full software documentation, which is available at the supplementary material website [1]. The mentioned main features of ValWorkBench are also discussed and exemplified, with emphasis on software abstraction design and re-usability. A comparison with existing cluster validation software libraries, mainly in terms of the mentioned features, is also offered. It suggests that ValWorkBench is a much needed contribution to the microarray software development/algorithm engineering community. For completeness, it is important to mention that previous accurate algorithmic experimental analysis of the relative merits of each of the implemented measures [19,23,25], carried out specifically on microarray data, gives useful insights on the effectiveness of ValWorkBench for cluster validation to researchers in the microarray community interested in its use for the mentioned task.