Alexandra Csongor

(1) Background and Objectives: Morbid obesity significantly increases the prevalence of comorbidities, such as heart disease, restrictive lung disease, stroke, diabetes mellitus and more. (2) Methods: Patients undergoing gastric sleeve surgery were divided into three groups with BMI between 30–34.9 kg/m² (Group I), 35–39.9 kg/m² (Group II), and over 40 kg/m² (Group III). Preoperative examinations included cardiac ultrasound, respiratory function and laboratory tests, and preoperative comorbidities were also recorded. Following a one-year follow-up, we compared the rate of weight loss in the three groups at six months and one year following surgery, specifically, the effect of surgery on preoperative comorbidities at one year. (3) Results: The weight loss surgeries performed were successful in all three groups. Preoperative laboratory examinations, an echocardiogram and respiratory function results showed no clinically significant difference, except moderate elevations in blood lipid levels. Hypertension was the most common comorbidity. (4) Conclusions: In our patient population, hypertension and diabetes were the only comorbidities with a high prevalence. It can be explained by the relatively younger age among the patients (mean age 44.5 years) and the fact that they had not yet developed the pathological consequences of severe obesity. Consequently, while performing the surgery at a relatively younger age, it seems far more likely that the patient will return to a more active and productive life and enjoy a better quality of life. Additionally, the perioperative risk is lower, and the burden upon health systems and health expenditure is reduced by preventing comorbidities, in particular, multimorbidity. On this basis, it may be advisable to direct patients who do not exhaust the classical indications for bariatric surgery toward the surgical solution at a younger age. Our results suggest it is not worth waiting for comorbidities, especially multimorbidity, to appear.

In 2020, breast cancer was the most frequent type of cancer in 158 countries. To advise the population about risk factors and the importance of preventive measures, celebrities can be of great help, acting as spokespersons for reliable scientific information. The goal of this study is to analyse the content of news stories about breast cancer shared on different social media, examining how stories with celebrity presence are constructed. We performed a quali-quantitative multidimensional analysis of news stories in English that addressed breast cancer on the following social media platforms: Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Reddit. We compared news stories with and without the presence of celebrities. Our sample consists of 1594 news stories that had at least 1000 total shares across all analysed social media; 262 news stories mention a celebrity (16.44%), while 1332 stories do not (83.56%). Nevertheless, the ones that feature celebrities are, as a rule, more shared. The percentage of stories with celebrities addressing breast cancer prevention is quite low (1.9%). The same can be said for mentions of scientific papers/specialist quotes (3.4%). This research may help outline some possible paths that healthcare organizations and communication professionals can take to improve breast cancer content available online.

Introduction: The aim of this study is to investigate the process of rewriting medical research papers for the lay public. The latest findings of medical research often appear in the popular media. It is interesting to see what happens to a scientific text when it is transmitted to a new audience. Hedging is usually interpreted as a characteristic feature of scientific discourse. This study focuses on hedging, which also tends to be applied in popularized articles in the field of medicine. Material and method: Five medical research articles on prenatal vitamins and their online popularizations were examined by means of a text analyzing software, focusing on lexical items considered as hedges. The frequency and the overall percentage of hedging devices with respect to the total number of words were recorded in the five popularizations. Results: The results of the present study suggest that the linguistic strategy of hedging is applied in popular articles. Approximators, auxiliaries, epistemic verbs and adverbs expressing tentativeness, possibility and politeness were used in the corpus. The overall percentage of the lexical items commonly regarded as hedges, with respect to the total number of words, was 1-2.2% in the five articles. The writers also use linguistic techniques that can be interpreted as attribution shields. These defense tools convey the meaning that it is the researcher, rather than the writer, who is responsible for the truth of the information. Conclusions: Hedging as a means of uncertainty and negative politeness technique is used in the popularizations analyzed. The present study should be extended to investigate tendencies in popularization of scientific information.