Mountain medicine

Coxiella burnetii is the etiologic agent of Q fever, a worldwide zoonosis. Cattle, sheep and goats are considered the main reservoirs of the disease. Transmission to humans occurs mainly through the inhalation of infectious aerosols from milk, faeces, urine, and birth products from infected ruminants. In this study, a 2-year longitudinal approach was performed to ascertain the excretion of C. burnetii in bulk tank milk samples of sheep from a mountain plateau in central Portugal, with sampling conducted during the years 2015 and 2016...

OBJECTIVE: With the accelerated population aging, multimorbidity has become an important healthcare issue. However, few studies have examined multimorbidity and its impact on the use of medical and long-term care services in Japan. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the association between multimorbidity and the use of medical and long-term care services among older adults living in the depopulated mountainous areas of Japan. PATIENTS AND METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted using insurance claims data from late-stage medical insurance and long-term care insurance (April 2017 to March 2018) for older adults ≥75 years residing in a mountainous area in the Tottori prefecture...

Infectious causes of fever and rash pose a diagnostic challenge for the emergency provider. It is often difficult to discern rashes associated with rapidly progressive and life-threatening infections from benign exanthems, which comprise the majority of rashes seen in the emergency department. Physicians must also consider serious noninfectious causes of fever and rash. A correct diagnosis depends on an exhaustive history and head-to-toe skin examination as most emergent causes of fever and rash remain clinical diagnoses...

Ticks are responsible for the vast majority of vector-borne illnesses in the United States. The number of reported tick-borne disease (TBD) cases has more than doubled in the past 20 years. The majority of TBD cases occur in warm weather months in individuals with recent outdoor activities in wooded areas. The risk of contracting a TBD is also highly dependent on geographic location. Between 24 and 48 hours of tick attachment is required for most disease transmission to occur. Only 50% to 70% of patients with a TBD will recall being bitten by a tick, and TBDs are often initially misdiagnosed as a viral illness...

Grimm, Mirjam, Lucie Ziegler, Annina Seglias, Maamed Mademilov, Kamila Magdieva, Gulzada Mirzalieva, Aijan Taalaibekova, Simone Suter, Simon R. Schneider, Fiona Zoller, Vera Bissig, Lukas Reinhard, Meret Bauer, Julian Müller, Tanja L. Ulrich, Arcangelo F. Carta, Patrick R. Bader, Konstantinos Bitos, Aurelia E. Reiser, Benoit Champigneulle, Damira Ashyralieva, Philipp M. Scheiwiller, Silvia Ulrich, Talant M. Sooronbaev, Michael Furian, and Konrad E. Bloch. SARS-CoV-2 Transmission during High-Altitude Field Studies...

INTRODUCTION: Outdoor activities offer physical and mental health benefits. However, incidents can occur requiring ambulance transport to hospital. This study aimed to describe the epidemiology and severity of traumatic and medical incidents for mountain bikers and hikers transported by ambulance within Western Australia. METHODS: This was a retrospective cohort study of ambulance-transported mountain bikers and hikers within Western Australia from 2015 to 2020...

BACKGROUND: Simien Mountain National Park is a world heritage site with spectacular landscapes and rich in floral diversity. Exploring the plethora of conventional wisdom regarding therapeutic flora for sustainable use and drug development is a timely endeavor. Thus, the present study was aimed at investigating therapeutic plant uses and conservation practices by the local communities dwelling in the vicinity of the Park. METHODS: Eighty randomly selected general informants and 20 purposefully selected key informants were used to collect the traditional lore from 10 purposefully selected kebeles that border the Park...

In Nepal, visceral leishmaniasis (VL) has been targeted for elimination as a public health problem by 2026. Recently, increasing numbers of VL cases have been reported from districts of doubtful endemicity including hills and mountains, threatening the ongoing VL elimination program in Nepal. We conducted a multi-disciplinary, descriptive cross-sectional survey to assess the local transmission of Leishmania donovani in seven such districts situated at altitudes of up to 1,764 meters in western Nepal from March to December 2019...

Our research occurred in the Andean region, one of the eight global centers of domestication of plant species grown for agriculture. The shores of Lake Titicaca (located between Peru and Bolivia), at 3800 meters above sea level, are recognized as the center of origin of quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.). In this region, complex societies have emerged, thanks to the development of water and soil management technologies. They have managed to overcome high mountain territories' extreme and variable climatic conditions...

BACKGROUND: Sleep is a critical component of recovery, but it can be disrupted following prolonged endurance exercise. The objective of this study was to examine the capacity of male and female professional cyclists to recover between daily race stages while competing in the 2022 Tour de France and the 2022 Tour de France Femmes, respectively. The 17 participating cyclists (8 males from a single team and 9 females from two teams) wore a fitness tracker (WHOOP 4.0) to capture recovery metrics related to night-time sleep and autonomic activity for the entirety of the events and for 7 days of baseline before the events...

OBJECTIVE: Duration of untreated psychosis (DUP) is considered an important factor in outcome. Individual, familial and illness factors may prolong DUP. Little data on this issue is available from the country of Nepal. The purpose of the present study was to assess DUP in patients with first-episode psychosis and identify associations with patients' socio-demographic and clinical factors. METHODS: A cross-sectional, descriptive study was conducted in the department of psychiatry, of Tertiary Hospital in the Eastern part of Nepal...

Aconite poisoning refers to toxicity resulting from plants belonging to the Aconitum genus, which comprises over 350 different species of perennial flowering plants that grow in temperate mountainous areas of the northern hemisphere (North America, Europe, Asia). These plants contain a group of toxins known as aconite alkaloids, which encompass numerous closely related toxic compounds. Conventional teaching from toxicology textbooks has broadly classified these alkaloids based on their mechanism of action, often simplifying them as substances that prevent sodium channel inactivation...

Horakova, Lenka , Susi Kriemler, Vladimír Študent, Jacqueline Pichler Hefti, David Hillebrandt, Dominique Jean, Kastė Mateikaitė-Pipirienė, Peter Paal, Alison Rosier, Marija Andjelkovic, Beth Beidlemann, Mia Derstine, and Linda E. Keyes. Hormonal contraception and menstrual cycle control at high altitude: a scoping review-UIAA Medical Commission recommendations. High Alt Med Biol. 00:00-00, 2024. Background: Women who use hormonal contraception (HC) may have questions about their use during travel to high altitude...

AIMS: In order to explore new consumer demands for Chinese tea set products, propose an innovative tea set product design and evaluation method to improve the user experience and satisfaction of the produced tea sets, thereby promoting the development of the tea set market and the promotion of tea culture. METHODS: Firstly, grounded theory (GT) was used to analyze interview data to extract consumer demand indicators and construct a design evaluation hierarchical model...

Wu, Yu, Wenqi Zhao, Bao Liu, Jianyang Zhang, Zhifeng Zhong, Simin Zhou, Jiaxin Xie, Yuqi Gao, Peng Li, and Jian Chen. Assessment of Acute Mountain Sickness: Comparing the Chinese Ams Score to the Lake Louise Score. High Alt Med Biol 00:000-000, 2024. Objective: To compare the ability of the Chinese AMS Score (CAS) to detect acute mountain sickness (AMS) using the 2018 version of the Lake Louise Score (LLS) as reference. Methods: After flying from Chengdu (altitude: 500 m) to Lhasa (3,658 m), 2,486 young men completed a questionnaire...

This study examines the siting scenarios for renewable energy installations (REI) in a mountainous region of Europe (Switzerland), incorporating the external costs of ecosystem services and, innovatively, social preferences. This approach challenges the prevalent techno-economic siting paradigm, which often overlooks these externalities. To minimize the external costs of the scenarios while maximizing energy yield, Marxan, an optimization software, was employed. The energy target for all scenarios is set at 25 TWh/a, stemming from the energy gap anticipated due to the phase-out of Swiss nuclear reactors by 2050...

INTRODUCTION: Pacemaker (PPM) implantation is indicated for conduction abnormalities which can develop post-transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR). However, whether post-TAVR PPM risk is associated with the geographical location of the hospital and socioeconomic status of the patient is not well established. Our goal was to explore geographical and socioeconomic disparities in post-TAVR PPM implantation. METHODS: A retrospective cohort analysis was conducted using the National Inpatient Sample 2016-2020 with respective ICD-10 codes for TAVR and PPM implantation...

Debris flow is a sudden natural disaster in mountainous areas, which seriously threatens the lives and property of nearby residents. Therefore, it is necessary to predict the volume of debris flow accurately and reliably. However, the predictions of back propagation neural networks are unstable and inaccurate due to the limited dataset. In this study, the Cubic map optimizes the initial population position of the whale optimization algorithm. Meanwhile, the adaptive weight adjustment strategy optimizes the weight value in the shrink-wrapping mechanism of the whale optimization algorithm...

BACKGROUND: Sleep and physical performance are strongly related and mutually influence each other. Athletes, particularly in disciplines like offshore sailing and ultra-endurance sports, often suffer from sleep deprivation due to factors like irregular training times, travel, and the extended duration of events like 100-mile mountain races. Despite growing interest in sleep's role in sports science, few studies have specifically investigated the sleep patterns of ultramarathon runners...

Mountain caviar is a fruit of Kochia scoparia that contains momordin Ic as a major saponin constituent. Its extract (MCE) has been shown to suppress blood glucose elevations in the human oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) as well as increases in blood glucose in OGTT, gastric emptying (GE), and glucose incorporation in the small intestine in rats. However, the effects of MCE and momordin Ic on glucose absorption in mice and these action mechanisms have not been examined for more than 2 decades. Therefore, we herein investigated the effects of MCE, its saponin fraction, and momordin Ic on blood glucose elevations in mice...