Browsing by Subject "patient age"

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    Inferring the patient’s age from implicit age clues in health forum posts
    (Elsevier, 2022-01) Black, Christopher M.; Meng, Weilin; Yao, Lixia; Ben Miled, Zina; Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    Broader patient-reported experiences in oncology are largely unknown due to the lack of available information from traditional data sources. Online health community data provide an exploratory way to uncover these experiences at a large scale. Analyzing these data can guide further studies towards understanding patients’ needs and experiences. However, analysis of online health data is inherently difficult due to the unstructured nature of these data and the variety of ways information can be expressed over text. Specifically, subscribers may not disclose critical information such as the age of the patient in their posts. In fact, the number of health forum posts that explicitly mention the age of the patient is significantly lower than the number of posts that do not include this information in the Reddit r/Cancer health forum under consideration in the present paper. Health-focused studies often need to consider or control for age as a confounder, hence the importance of having sufficient age data. This paper presents a methodology that can help classify health forum posts according to four age groups (0–17, 18–39, 40–64 and 65 + years) even when the posts do not contain explicit mention of the age of the patient. First, the subset of the posts that include explicit mention of the age of the patient is identified. Second, the explicit age clues are removed from these posts and used to train the proposed age classifier. The resulting classifier is able to infer the age of the patient using only implicit age clues with an average true positive rate (TPR) of 71%. This TPR is comparable to the average TPR of 69% obtained from human annotations for the same set of posts.
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    Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy in the 80 Years of Age and Older Population
    (Elsevier, 2019) Abedali, Zain A.; Large, Tim; Heiman, Joshua M.; Bandali, Elhaam; Anderson, Blake B.; Lingeman, James E.; Krambeck, Amy E.; Urology, School of Medicine
    Objective To evaluate feasibility of percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PCNL) for complex nephrolithiasis in patients 80 years of age and older compared to younger individuals. Methods From an institutional IRB-approved database, 1,647 patients were identified who underwent PCNL from 1999 to 2019. Patients were stratified by age: group 1 (20-59), group 2 (60-79), and group 3 (>80). Statistics were performed using chi-square and ANOVA to compare outcomes. Results Of the 1,647 patients, median age was 46, 66, and 83, respectively ( P <0.0001). Three patients within group 3 were 90 or older. Females made up 54%, 46%, 56% of patients ( P = 0.02). Average stone size with SD was 2.6 ± 2.2, 2.5 ± 2.3, 2.2± 1.9 cm for each group ( P = 0.06). Mean preoperative hemoglobin (Hgb) was significantly lower in the 80+ group (13.8, 13.4, 13.1 g/dL, P <.0001). Change in Hgb was not significantly different. There were more Clavien II-IV complications (10.4, 14.4, 28.8%; P = 0.02) and transfusions (2.3, 4.7, 10.2%; P <0.001) in the elderly. The most common complications in the 80+ group were bleeding related (10.1%). No difference in readmission rates or ICU admissions was noted. Conclusion PCNL is feasible in the extremely elderly; however with a higher rate of complications and longer hospitalizations. No long-term sequelae or deaths in the 80 and older cohort were seen. This study allows us to appropriately counsel older patients on a realistic postoperative course and supports use of PCNL as the best means of long-term survival.