Introduction: Stroke is one of the top causes of adult-acquired disabilities and the fifth most prominent cause of death worldwide. Working-age populations contribute about 40% of the stroke cases which occur annually in Malaysia. The modified Barthel Index (MBI) score has been used for self-care assessment to determine if stroke patients can meet their fundamental needs. The study was designed to compare the trend of MBI scores of workers who had a stroke and underwent robotic rehabilitation therapy to those who had conventional therapy.Methodology: A cohort study was conducted among workers who had a stroke in northeastern Malaysia. They were assigned either to undergo robotic or conventional rehabilitation therapy. The robotic therapy is performed three times per day for four weeks. Meanwhile, conventional therapy involved walking exercises five days per week for two weeks. Data were collected for both therapies on the admission, at week 2 and week 4. The MBI, modified Rankin Scale (mRS) and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) trends were examined one month after the therapies. The R (version 4.2.1) (R Core Team, Vienna, Austria) and RStudio (R Studio PBC, Boston, USA) were applied to perform the descriptive analyses on the respective platforms. Repeated measures of analysis of variance were performed to evaluate the outcomes trend and the effectiveness of the two therapies was also compared.Results: A total of 54 stroke patients participated in this study of which 30 (55.6%) of them received robotic therapy. The age of the subjects ranged from 24 to 59 years and the majority (74.1%) were male. Stroke outcomes were evaluated using mRS, HADS, and MBI scores. Except for their age, the individuals' characteristics did not significantly differ between those undergoing conventional therapy and those receiving robotic therapy. After four weeks, it was found that the good mRS had increased, whereas the poor mRS had decreased. Comparing the therapy groups, the MBI scores improved significantly with time, although there were no significant differences between the therapy groups. However, the interaction term between the treatment group (p=0.031) and improvements over time was significant (p=0.001), indicating that robotic was more effective than conventional therapy in improving the MBI scores. For HADS score, there was a significant difference between the therapy groups (p=0.001), with those receiving robotic therapy having higher HADS score.Conclusion: Functional recovery occurs in acute stroke patients when the mean Barthel Index score rises from the baseline (on admission) to week 2 (during therapy) and subsequently on discharge (week 4). Based on these findings, it appears that there was not one therapy superior to the other; nevertheless, robotic therapy may be better tolerated and more effective in certain individuals.

Many stroke survivors suffer with varying degrees of disability and require assistance. Family members commonly act as informal caregivers, caring for these stroke survivors and ensuring care adherence. However, many caregivers reported a poor quality of life and physical and psychological distress. Due to these issues, multiple studies have been conducted to understand the experience of caregivers, the outcomes of caregiving, and interventional studies among caregivers. This study aims to explore the intellectual landscape of studies on stroke caregivers using bibliometric analysis. Studies with “stroke” and “caregiver” terms in the title were extracted from the Web of Sciences (WOS) database. The resulting publications were analysed using the ‘bibliometrix’ package in R. There were 678 publications analysed, dating from 1989 to 2022. The USA has the highest number of publications (28.6%), followed by China (12.1%) and Canada (6.1%). The most productive institution, journal and author were The University of Toronto (9.5%), ‘Topics in Stroke Rehabilitation’ journal (5.8%) and Tamilyn Bakas (3.1%), respectively. Co-occurrences keywords analysis revealed mainstream research on stroke survivors, burden, quality of life, depression, care, and rehabilitation, reflecting the timeless hotspot in the field. This bibliometric analysis helps us understand the current state of stroke caregiver research and its recent developments. This study can be used to evaluate research policies and promote international cooperation.

Background: Understanding the risks of COVID-19 mortality helps in the planning and prevention of the disease. This study aimed to determine the risk factors for COVID-19 mortality in Malaysia. Methods: Secondary online data provided by the Ministry of Health, Malaysia and Malaysia’s national COVID-19 immunisation programme were used: i) COVID-19 deaths data; ii) vaccination coverage data and iii) population estimate data. Quasi-Poisson regression was performed to determine the risk factors for COVID-19 mortality. Results: Four risk factors were identified: i) vaccination status (partial versus unvaccinated, incidence rate ratio [IRR]: 0.59; 95% CI: 0.54, 0.64; complete versus unvaccinated, IRR: 0.50; 95% CI: 0.45, 0.56; booster versus unvaccinated, IRR: 0.13; 95% CI: 0.05, 0.26); ii) age group (19 years old–59 years old versus above 60 years old, IRR: 0.90; 95% CI: 0.84, 0.97; 13 years old–18 years old versus above 60 years old, IRR: 0.09; 95% CI: 0.04, 0.19; 6 years old–12 years old versus above 60 years old, IRR: 0.09; 95% CI: 0.03, 0.22; below 5 years old versus above 60 years old, IRR: 0.11; 95% CI: 0.04, 0.23); iii) gender (male versus female, IRR: 1.23; 95% CI: 1.14, 1.32) and iv) comorbidity (yes versus no, IRR: 2.13; 95% CI: 1.96, 2.32). Conclusion: This study highlighted the risk factors for COVID-19 mortality and the benefit of COVID-19 vaccination, especially of booster vaccination, in reducing the risk of COVID-19 mortality in Malaysia.

In December 2019, the first cases of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) were detected in Wuhan, China. Since then, COVID-19 begun to spread rapidly all over the world. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a pandemic. As of September 7, 2021, there were over 220 million confirmed COVID-19 cases globally, with more than 4.6 million deaths. Malaysia reported 2,067,327 confirmed cases with 22,743 deaths. Given the severity of the pandemic, the Ministry of Health Malaysia has stepped up in its efforts in handling the pandemic locally by sharing the COVID-19 related data on the GitHub, enabling transparent data sharing. This enables timely data analysis and quick decision to better understand the COVID-19 situation in this country. This article aims to provide a quick analysis of the death and vaccination data provided by the Malaysian Ministry of Health and to provide useful insight into the analysis.

Background Post-stroke complications affect the informal caregivers equally as the stroke survivors, especially those who have a moderate to worst prognosis in functional capacity recovery. Caregiver Assessment of Function and Upset (CAFU) is one of the common tools used in both research and clinical practice to measure the patient’s dependency level and the stroke caregivers' upset level. Objective This study aimed to translate and validate the CAFU instrument into the Malay language and test the validity and reliability of the CAFU among informal stroke caregivers in Malaysia. Methods A standard forward-backward translation method was employed to translate CAFU. Subsequently, 10 expert panels were included in the validation process, and thereafter reliability testing was conducted among 51 stroke caregivers. The validation of the instrument was determined by computing the content validity indices (CVIs), and we used the Cronbach’s alpha method to explore the internal consistency of the overall score and subscales scores of the Malay-CAFU. Finally, the explanatory factor analysis used principal component extraction and a varimax rotation to examine construct validity. Results All items of the Malay-CAFU had satisfactory item-level CVI (I-CVI), with values greater than 0.80, and the scale-level CVI (S-CVI) was 0.95. These results indicate that the Malay-CAFU had good relevancy. The internal consistency for the reliability test showed a Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.95 for the overall score. The eigenvalues and scree plot supported a two-factor structural model of the instrument. From the explanatory factor analysis, the factor loadings ranged from 0.82 to 0.90 and 0.56 to 0.83, respectively. Conclusion The Malay-CAFU questionnaire is a valid and reliable instrument to assess the dependence level of stroke survivors and the upset level of informal stroke caregivers in Malaysia.