Introduction: Autoimmune diseases have increasing importance in modern medicine and cover increasing areas of medicine including rheumatoid arthritis interstitial lung disease. Aim: The main aims of this study are to evaluate the association of some autoimmune variables in patients with rheumatoid arthritis interstitial lung disease. Methods: A retrospective study was conducted from files of patients with rheumatoid arthritis interstitial lung disease. A total of 210 files of intended patients were included in this study. The study was conducted in rehabilitation clinics at Royal Medical Services. Study variables include some demographic variables such as age, and gender; clinical variables such as disease related factors such as duration, diagnostic criteria; predictive factors such as rheumatoid factors, smoking, and MTX treatment. Data were collected and entered into excel spreadsheet to create raw data. The analysis of data was carried out using the software SPSS version 21. Descriptive statistical parameters were used to describe data including means and standard deviations for continuous variables. Frequency and percentages were used to describe categorized variables such as gender. The relationships between study variables were computed using independent T test, and One Way ANOVA test. Significance was determined if α≤ 0.05. Results: The prevalence of RA-ILD was 3.70%. The study participants were subdivided into two groups according to MTX treatment, non-exposed group and exposed group. There were significant relationships between MTX treatment and study variables including gender, age of (rheumatoid arthritis) RA onset, smoking, and rheumatoid factor (RF). The progression of RA-ILD was impacted by gender, age of (rheumatoid arthritis) RA onset, smoking, rheumatoid factor (RF), and MTX treatment. Conclusion: Patients with RA and RA-ILD follow similar clinical characteristics in other studies except MTX treatment, but this can’t be generalized because of small number of RA-ILD patients.

Background: In health and medicine, people heavily use the Internet to search for information about symptoms, diseases, and treatments. As such, the Internet information can simulate expert medical doctors, pharmacists, and other health care providers. Aim: This article aims to evaluate a dataset of search terms to determine whether search queries and terms can be used to reliably predict skin disease breakouts. Furthermore, the authors propose and evaluate a model to decide when to declare a particular month as Epidemic at the US national level. Methods: A Model was designed to distinguish a breakout in skin diseases based on the number of monthly discovered cases. To apply this model, the authors correlated Google Trends of popular search terms with monthly reported Rubella and Measles cases from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Regressions and decision trees were used to determine the impact of different terms to trigger the occurrence of epidemic classes. Results: Results showed that the volume of search keywords for Rubella and Measles rises when the volume of those reported diseases rises. Results also implied that the overall process was successful and should be repeated with other diseases. Such process can trigger different actions or activities to be taken when a certain month is declared as “Epidemic.” Furthermore, this research has shown great interest for vaccination against Measles and Rubella. Conclusions: The findings suggest that the search queries and keyword trends can be truly reliable to be used for the prediction of disease outbreaks and some other related knowledge extraction applications. Also search-term surveillance can provide an additional tool for infectious disease surveillance. Future research needs to re-apply the model used in this article, and researchers need to question whether characterizing the epidemiology of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic waves in United States can be done through search queries and keyword trends.

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Introduction: Hyperglycemia and insulin resistance are common in critically ill patients, even if they have not previously had diabetes, and the risk of mortality or significant morbidity is high among those who are treated in the intensive care unit (ICU) for more than 5 days. Study objectives: To assess the effect of glucose management protocol on mortality and morbidity in a heterogeneous population of critically ill adult patients. Methods and materials: Study design: A randomized controlled trial. Study setting: Intensive care unit (ICU) for adult patients at King Hussein Medical Center, the Royal Medical Services. Study sample: A total of 50 patients were included in this study and assigned randomly into two groups, control group (N=25), and intervention group (N=25). Study protocol: The intervention group subjects were to undergo a glucose control protocol with insulin infusion titrated to maintain blood glucose level in a target range of 120-160 mg/dL; except septic patients, in whom the target was higher, 160- 180 mg/dL. Patients in the second group (control group) were treated by a conventional approach with reduction of blood glucose level only if the level was markedly elevated (>200 mg/dL) to maintain blood glucose level in a target range of 180-200 mg/dL Study findings: Although the difference in mortality between the two treatment groups was not significant at 28 days (p=0.370) and at 60 days (p=0.555), but it was to be considered for further improvements. No significant increase in hypoglycemia episodes was reported in our blood glucose level target. There was no significant difference in the development of new organ failure, new renal insufficiency, number of patients undergoing transfusion of packed red blood cells, use of antibiotics for more than 10 days, length of stay in the ICU and length of stay in the hospital. It was noticed that the rates of positive blood cultures were lower in the interventional group (8%) than in the control group (32), (p=0.068). Conclusion: The glucose management protocol resulted in significantly improved glycemic control and was not associated with increased rate of death or hypoglycemia.