Efficacy of cast immobilization versus surgical treatment for distal radius fractures in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

This articl e includes high-quality randomized controlled trials in recent years and updates the past meta-analysis. It has been proved that cast immobilization can achieve similar functional results, reduce economic burden in the long-term compared with surgery, and provide a basis for doctors to make treatment choices. PURPOSE: The efficacy of conservative and surgical treatment of distal radius fractures (DRFs) in adults is still controversial. Recently, some high-quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluated the efficacy of both treatments. We hypothesized that treatment of DRFs with closed reduction and cast immobilization would achieve functional outcomes similar to surgery. METHODS: This study is a systematic review and summary of RCTs comparing conservative and surgical management of DRFs from 2005 to March 2022. Patients were evaluated for functional and imaging outcomes and complications. RESULTS: A total of 11 studies [1-11] included 1775 cases of DRFs. At 1-year follow-up, the cast group had lower mean differences (MDs) in DASH scores than the surgery group by - 2.55 (95% CI = - 5.02 to - 0.09, P = 0.04); with an MD of 1.63 (95% CI = 1.08-2.45, P = 0.02), while the surgery group had a lesser complication rate than the cast group. CONCLUSIONS: At 1-year follow-up, the lower DASH scores of the cast group showed advantages of this treatment, but the complication rate was higher than that of the surgery group. There was no massive distinction in other scoring methods.

Information Diffusion on Social Media During Natural Disasters.

Social media analytics has drawn new quantitative insights of human activity patterns. Many applications of social media analytics, from pandemic prediction to earthquake response, require an in-depth understanding of how these patterns change when human encounter unfamiliar conditions. In this paper, we select two earthquakes in China as the social context in Sina-Weibo (or Weibo for short), the largest Chinese microblog site. After proposing a formalized Weibo information flow model to represent the information spread on Weibo, we study the information spread from three main perspectives: individual characteristics, the types of social relationships between interactive participants, and the topology of real interaction networks. The quantitative analyses draw the following conclusions. First, the shadow of Dunbar's number is evident in the "declared friends/followers" distributions, and the number of each participant's friends/followers who also participated in the earthquake information dissemination show the typical power-law distribution, indicating a rich-gets-richer phenomenon. Second, an individual's number of followers is the most critical factor in user influence. Strangers are very important forces for disseminating real-time news after an earthquake. Third, two types of real interaction networks share the scale-free and small-world property, but with a looser organizational structure. In addition, correlations between different influence groups indicate that when compared with other online social media, the discussion on Weibo is mainly dominated and influenced by verified users.