Catalonia

BACKGROUND: Since 2008, children in Catalonia (Spain) have suffered a period of great economic deprivation. This situation has generated broad-ranging health inequalities in a variety of diseases. It is not known how these inequalities have changed over time. The aim of the present study is to determine trends in inequalities over this period in ten relevant diseases in children according to sex and age. METHODS: A retrospective cross-sectional population-based study of all children under 15 years old resident in Catalonia during the 2014-2021 period (over 1...

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has been extensively discussed in the context of its effect on mental health. Although global suicide rates have remained stable during the pandemic, the specific effect on non-fatal suicide behaviours during and after the pandemic remains underexplored. This study aims to investigate patterns of non-fatal suicide behaviours before, during, and after the pandemic. METHODS: In this cohort study, we used data from all hospitals in Catalonia, Spain, collected through the Catalan Suicide Risk Code, which is a specifically designed suicide attempt surveillance protocol, involving a face-to-face, in-depth psychiatric evaluation, after a Catalan resident presents any suicide risk behaviour in any public health-care setting...

BACKGROUND: Age, multimorbidity, immunodeficiency and frailty of older people living in nursing homes make them vulnerable to COVID-19 and overall mortality. OBJECTIVE: To estimate overall and COVID-19 mortality parameters and analyse their predictive factors in older people living in nursing homes over a 2-year period. METHOD: Design: A 2-year prospective longitudinal multicentre study was conducted between 2020 and 2022. SETTING: This study involved five nursing homes in Central Catalonia (Spain)...

INTRODUCTION: The increase in suicidal behavior among adolescents under 17 years of age in Catalonia between 2019 and 2022 has gone from 473 to 1425 cases, which entails a new healthcare challenge. The objective of the article is to explain the procedure and intervention of the Rapid Response Unit (RRU) for children and adolescents at risk of suicide. The RRU is a multidisciplinary unit designed to prevent relapse and increase link-up to treatment. The cases attended in its 14 months of operation are described...

OBJECTIVE: To assess the cost-effectiveness of Fracture Liaison Service (FLS) compared to the standard of care for secondary prevention of fragility fractures form the perspective of the Catalan Health Service. METHODS: Cost-utility assessment through a Markov model that simulated disease progression of a patients' cohort candidates to initiate antiosteoporotic treatment after a fragility fracture. A time horizon of 10 years and a 6-month duration per cycle was established...

Leishmania infantum is a zoonotic protozoan parasite distributed worldwide that is transmitted by phlebotomine sandflies. Dogs are the main reservoir for human infections. However, in recent years, the capacity of lagomorphs to contribute to Leishmania transmission has been confirmed. The present study aimed to assess Leishmania spp. exposure and infection in lagomorphs and sympatric domestic dogs in NE Spain. Sera from European hares, European rabbits, and rural dogs were tested for antibodies against L. infantum using an in-house indirect ELISA...

An increasing body of work has shown how the selection of names shapes patterns of ethnic and racial discrimination in hiring observed in correspondence audit studies. A clear limitation of the existing research on name perceptions and ethnic discrimination in employment is that is predominantly based in the US, which limits its applicability to contexts with high linguistic diversity among the majority population. These territories confront a reality where language preferences and uses, social class, and ancestry are associated with specific names among the native majority group...

In the Rhône Valley's Middle Neolithic gathering site of Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux (France), the positioning of two females within a structure aligned with the solstices is atypical. Their placement (back and prone) under the overhang of a silo in front of a third in a central position suggests a ritualized form of homicidal ligature strangulation. The first occurrence dates back to the Mesolithic, and it is from the Early Neolithic of Central Europe that the practice expands, becoming a sacrificial rite associated with an agricultural context in the Middle Neolithic...

Livestock farming has a detrimental effect on the environment since it generates a lot of gas emissions. In pig farming, the use of feed is among the substantial sources of animal farm emissions among the European Union. Nevertheless, the use of Low Dietary Crude Protein (LCP) may reduce the environmental impacts of pig farming and provide diverse ecosystem services (ESs). Concurrently, these pig diets alternatives may result more expensive than the conventional ones, which may negatively affect farmers' intention to adopt these alternatives...

OBJECTIVES: To analyse the differences between nurses with and without substance use disorders (SUDs) admitted to a specialised mental health programme. DESIGN: Retrospective, observational study. SETTING: Specialised mental health treatment programme for nurses in Catalonia, Spain. PARTICIPANTS: 1091 nurses admitted to the programme from 2000 to 2021. INTERVENTIONS: None. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOMES: Sociodemographic, occupational and clinical variables were analysed...

Non-binary people face numerous stressors in their daily lives, including personal, interpersonal, and environmental. These stressors gain strength when such individuals access healthcare services, and discrimination and cisgenderism become the main barrier to obtaining gender-affirming healthcare. This study aimed to describe the experiences of non-binary people regarding the care and medical attention received in Catalonia (Spain). A qualitative phenomenological study was conducted with 21 non-binary people recruited using snowball sampling in 2022...

The systematic status of the small-bodied catarrhine primate Pliobates cataloniae, from the Miocene (11.6 Ma) of Spain, is controversial because it displays a mosaic of primitive and derived features compared with extant hominoids (apes and humans). Cladistic analyses have recovered Pliobates as either a stem hominoid or as a pliopithecoid stem catarrhine (i.e., preceding the cercopithecoid-hominoid divergence). Here, we describe additional dental remains of P. cataloniae from another locality that display unambiguous synapomorphies of crouzeliid pliopithecoids...

BACKGROUND: Effective antiretroviral therapy (ART) has substantially reduced acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)-related deaths, shifting the focus to non-AIDS conditions in people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (PLWH). We examined mortality trends and predictors of AIDS- and non-AIDS mortality in the Population HIV Cohort from Catalonia and Balearic Islands (PISCIS) cohort of PLWH from 1998 to 2020. METHODS: We used a modified Coding Causes of Death in HIV protocol, which has been widely adopted by various HIV cohorts to classify mortality causes...

Monitoring SARS-CoV-2 spread is challenging due to asymptomatic infections, numerous variants, and population behavior changes from non-pharmaceutical interventions. We developed a Digital Twin model to simulate SARS-CoV-2 evolution in Catalonia. Continuous validation ensures our model's accuracy. Our system uses Catalonia Health Service data to quantify cases, hospitalizations, and healthcare impact. These data may be under-reported due to screening policy changes. To improve our model's reliability, we incorporate data from the Catalan Surveillance Network of SARS-CoV-2 in Sewage (SARSAIGUA)...

The social and cultural representations of food are essential when it comes to understanding the perception of risk and the trust/distrust that people place on it. In this paper, we analyse the attributes and categories that non-dependent older people aged 65 and over living in Spain use when talking about trust/distrust in relation to food. In order to explore how they manifest different social meanings, we have conducted a study based on an analysis of cultural domains. The results of examining free-listing and pile-sort techniques were triangulated with the narratives obtained from interviews, life histories, food diaries and participatory workshops...

BACKGROUND: Predicting stroke recurrence for individual patients is difficult, but individualized prediction may improve stroke survivors' engagement in self-care. We developed PRERISK: a statistical and machine learning classifier to predict individual risk of stroke recurrence. METHODS: We analyzed clinical and socioeconomic data from a prospectively collected public health care-based data set of 41 975 patients admitted with stroke diagnosis in 88 public health centers over 6 years (2014-2020) in Catalonia-Spain...

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of awake video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery on postoperative pulmonary complications among patients with different risk scores using the Assess Respiratory Risk in Surgical Patients in Catalonia (ARISCAT). METHODS: Between January 2011 and August 2021, a total of 246 patients (158 males, 88 females; mean age: 59.1±13.6 years; range, 25 to 84 years) who underwent awake video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery were retrospectively analyzed...

Background: Our study aimed to evaluate the performance of primary healthcare physicians (PCPs) in managing glycemia, lipids, and blood pressure in people with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in Catalonia, Spain. Methods: We included 3267 PCPs with 367,132 T2DM subjects in a cross-sectional analysis of the SIDIAP (Sistema d'Informació per al Desenvolupament de la Investigació en Atenció Primària) database for the year 2017. Results : 63.1% of PCPs were female, with an average practice size of 1512 subjects...

The aim of this study was to identify factors associated with non-adherence to tuberculosis (TB) preventive treatment among contacts with latent TB infection for new cases of pulmonary TB cases reported in Catalonia in 2019-2021. All contacts aged 18 years or older with a latent TB infection who received a TB preventive treatment were included in the study. The Chi square test and the odds ratios (OR) were used to assess the association between non-adherence to TB preventive treatment and the study variables; a p < 0...

BACKGROUND: The outbreak of COVID-19 has turned the care model of health systems around the world upside down. The health care crisis has led to opportunities for digital health to deliver quality care, and the system has been redirected toward telemedicine. In Catalonia, Spain, as of March 2020, the pattern of visits in primary care pediatric consultations changed, such that face-to-face visits decreased in favor of non-face-to-face visits. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to analyze variations in the types of pediatric visits in primary care centers in Catalonia before and after the onset of COVID-19...