INTRODUCTION Electronic cigarettes (ECs) have generated extensive discussion about their role in smoking cessation. The Slovenia National Institute of Public Health's recommendations state that ECs are not to be recommended for smoking cessation or reduction. The aim of this study was to explore how healthcare professionals working in the field of preventive healthcare and smoking cessation in Slovenia communicate with and counsel patients regarding electronic cigarettes and smoking cessation or reduction. METHODS A cross-sectional, web-based survey was conducted among healthcare professionals working in the field of preventive healthcare and smoking cessation in Slovenia. A total of 479 healthcare professionals were included in the analysis. RESULTS While a minority of participants (12.7%) do or would recommend electronic cigarettes for smoking cessation or reduction in general, a higher proportion of participants (33.1%) would recommend electronic cigarettes to specific groups of patients. Knowledge on electronic cigarettes was the key determinant of differences in recommendations. Only a minority of participants (9.1%) reported availability of workplace guidelines/recommendations regarding counselling about electronic cigarettes. CONCLUSIONS Training programmes, educational materials and existing guidelines/ recommendations regarding counselling about electronic cigarette use should be provided and distributed among healthcare professionals, together with efforts to ensure compliance to official guidelines/recommendations.

BackgroundDifferent tobacco and related products, like waterpipe, e-cigarettes, are gaining popularity among adolescents in different countries; the data for Slovenia is currently limited. The purpose of this paper is to present the latest data on the use of different tobacco and related products, with or without flavours, among 15-year old students in Slovenia.MethodsData for 15-year-old students were drawn from 2014 Slovene database of the cross-national survey Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children. The survey sample was selected with stratified two-stage sampling method. The survey was performed in schools with a self-administered web questionnaire. The survey questionnaire included international compulsory, selected optional and national questions, all on a variety of topics related to youth health behaviour.Results25.2% of 15-year-old students reported current (past 30-day) use of any tobacco related product, mainly cigarettes (93.1% of users), followed by waterpipe (11.7%) and cigars, cigarillos and pipes (9.4%). Exclusive use of unconventional products is low (5.1% of users). 85.5% of users of any product used one product, 48.5% of users used products with flavours. The use of different products, one or more products, and flavoured products was related to gender.ConclusionA comprehensive tobacco control and prevention must address all tobacco and related products.

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Introduction: Monitoring of health behaviours, especially of adolescents, is essential for the future of each nation. Over the last decades, many changes have occurred in all aspects of our lives, affecting the health and quality of life of all people, including children and adolescents.Methods: The study is based on a quantitative research method. The survey was conducted on a representative sample of Slovenian 11-, 13- and 15-year-old adolescents, using a standardised international questionnaire (HBSC study – Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children). The survey was carried out with the assistance of school counsellors in the spring of 2002, 2006 and 2010 (n = 15.080). For determining the correlation between two individual years, the chi-square test (c2) was used. The significance level was calculated using the statistical significance value of p ≤ 0.05. Through the Cochran-Armitage trend test, it was established whether a trend existed  for the selected indicators in the period between 2002 and 2010.Results: There are some favourable trends, e.g. eating breakfast (p = 0.000), tooth brushing (p = 0.000), lower proportion of individuals who rate their health as poor (p = 0.002) and experience several psychosomatic symptoms (p = 0.000), but also unfavourable trends, e.g. decrease in physical activity (p = 0.023), increase in early alcohol consumption (p = 0.000), dissatisfaction with school (p = 0.000) and bullying others (p = 0.000).Discussion and conclusion: The conclusions of the analyses can serve as a useful basis for further work and development of systemic measures to promote healthy behaviours and prevent risky and unhealthy behaviours among children and adolescents.

BackgroundMultimorbidity presents an increasingly common problem in older population, and is tightly related to polypharmacy, i.e., concurrent use of multiple medications by one individual. Detecting polypharmacy from drug prescription records is not only related to multimorbidity, but can also point at incorrect use of medicines. In this work, we build models for predicting polypharmacy from drug prescription records for newly diagnosed chronic patients. We evaluate the models’ performance with a strong focus on interpretability of the results.MethodsA centrally collected nationwide dataset of prescription records was used to perform electronic phenotyping of patients for the following two chronic conditions: type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D) and cardiovascular disease (CVD). In addition, a hospital discharge dataset was linked to the prescription records. A regularized regression model was built for 11 different experimental scenarios on two datasets, and complexity of the model was controlled with a maximum number of dimensions (MND) parameter. Performance and interpretability of the model were evaluated with AUC, AUPRC, calibration plots, and interpretation by a medical doctor.ResultsFor the CVD model, AUC and AUPRC values of 0.900 (95% [0.898–0.901]) and 0.640 (0.635–0.645) were reached, respectively, while for the T2D model the values were 0.808 (0.803–0.812) and 0.732 (0.725–0.739). Reducing complexity of the model by 65% and 48% for CVD and T2D, resulted in 3% and 4% lower AUC, and 4% and 5% lower AUPRC values, respectively. Calibration plots for our models showed that we can achieve moderate calibration with reducing the models’ complexity without significant loss of predictive performance.DiscussionIn this study, we found that it is possible to use drug prescription data to build a model for polypharmacy prediction in older population. In addition, the study showed that it is possible to find a balance between good performance and interpretability of the model, and achieve acceptable calibration at the same time.