Aim: To assess whether stroke diagnoses in national health registers are sufficiently correct and complete to replace manual collection of endpoint data for the Tromsø Study, a population-based epidemiological study.<p> <p>Method: Using the Tromsø Study Cardiovascular Disease Register for 2013–2014 as the gold standard, we calculated correctness (defined as positive predictive value, PPV) and ...

Background - Caring for an individual with an eating disorder involves guilt, distress and many extra burdens and unmet needs. This qualitative study explored the experiences of parents with adult daughters suffering from anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa and the strategies they adopted. A subsidiary aim of the study was to explore the relationship between the caregivers’ perceived need for ...

Patients with chronic fatigue receive advice to improve symptom management and well-being. This advice is based on ideas of self-management and is conveyed during clinical assessment as “activity regulation.” Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a hospital clinic in Norway, we show how these patients attempt to demonstrate their competences and everyday concerns, and how the ideology of self-management ...

Background - Medical uncertainty is a pervasive and important problem, but the strategies physicians use to manage it have not been systematically described.<p> <p>Objectives - To explore the uncertainty management strategies employed by physicians practicing in acute-care hospital settings and to organize these strategies within a conceptual taxonomy that can guide further efforts to understand ...

Active smoking has been linked to modulated gene expression in blood. However, there is a need for a more thorough understanding of how quantitative measures of smoking exposure relate to differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in whole-blood among ever smokers. This study analysed microarray-based gene expression profiles from whole-blood samples according to smoking status and quantitative measures ...

Background: The Patient-Centered Team (PACT) focuses on the transitional phase between hospital and primary care for older patients in Northern Norway with complex and long-term needs. PACT emphasizes a person-centered care approach whereby the sharing of power and the patient’s response to “What matters to you?” drive care decisions. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, videoconferencing was the ...

<p>Background: Sarcopenia is an age-related muscle disease primarily characterized by reductions in muscle strength that increases the risk of falls, fractures, cognitive impairment, and mortality. Exercise is currently preferred in prevention and treatment, but it is unknown how different habitual physical activity and sedentary behaviour patterns associate with sarcopenia status. The purpose of ...

<p>Purpose: To investigate the association between blood volume, hemoglobin mass (Hb_mass), and peak oxygen uptake (VO_2peak) in healthy older adults. <p>Methods: Fifty fit or unfit participants from the prospective randomized Generation 100 Study (<i>n</i> = 1,566) were included (age- and sex-specific VO_2peak above or below average values). Blood, plasma, and erythrocyte ...

Background - Body mass index (BMI) increases while cardiometabolic risk factors decrease in individuals in high-income countries. This paradoxical observation raises the question of whether current measures of overweight and obesity properly identify cardiometabolic risk.<p> <p>Methods - A total of 3675 participants (59% women) aged 40–84 years with whole-body dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry ...

Objective - The aim of the study is to assess changes in heart structure and function associated with heavy alcohol use by comparing echocardiographic indices in a population-based sample to those in patients admitted to an inpatient facility with severe alcohol problems.<p> <p>Methods and results - We used data from the Know Your Heart study (2015–2017) which is a cross-sectional study that ...