Efstathios Karakasidis

This paper analyzes the impact of delaying the Hepatitis B vaccine beyond the first day of life following the recently updated guidelines of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarding universal neonatal vaccination. We discuss the potential effects that delaying the initial hepatitis B vaccine dose until 2 months will have on global health communities, the economy, well-being, and development. Despite the WHO 2030 elimination goals, shifts toward delaying the newborn “birth dose” and rising vaccine hesitancy pose a risk of a public health reversal resulting in hepatitis B (HBV) remaining a global threat. We argue that maintaining universal birth-dose recommendation should remain the most reliable strategy to mitigate systemic screening gaps and achieve the global elimination of hepatitis B, along with other forms of viral hepatitis.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. The association between lung and gut microbiomes in the pathogenesis of COPD has been recently uncovered. The goal of this study was to discuss the role of the lung and gut microbiomes in COPD pathophysiology. A systematic search of the PubMed database for relevant articles submitted up to June 2022 was performed. We examined the association between the lung and gut microbiome dysbiosis, reflected in bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL), lung tissue, sputum, and feces samples, and the pathogenesis and progression of COPD. It is evident that the lung and gut microbiomes affect each other and both play a vital role in the pathogenesis of COPD. However, more research needs to be carried out to find the exact associations between microbiome diversity and COPD pathophysiology and exacerbation genesis. Another field that research should focus on is the impact of treatment interventions targeting the human microbiome in preventing COPD genesis and progression.

Aims Endoscopy is a useful tool for the follow up of patients with ulcerative colitis given that mucosal healing is used as an indicator for response to treatment. Despite the presence of many evaluation systems of mucosal healing there is still the problem of intraobserver and interobserver variability during endoscopy that may be circumvented with the usage of artificial intelligence (AI) Methods A systematic literature search was performed in Pubmed using the keywords of artificial intelligence AND endoscopy AND ulcerative colitis. In this review only original articles were accessed and reviews were excluded Results We identified 12 papers published recently meeting the inclusion criteria. The majority of them(10 out of 12) employed Convolutional Neural Network(CNN),one used solely deep neural network (DNN) and one used deep neural network (DNN), support vector machine (SVM), and k-nearest neighbor (k-NN). As input data images were most frequently used (7/12) and less frequently videos were used (4/12) while in one case both video and images were used. Furthemore, 9/12 used Mayo score for evaluation of mucosal healing, one used Ulcerative Colitis Endoscopic Index of Severity (UCEIS) and PICaSSO, one used both UCEIS and Mayo score and one exclusively UCEIS. Approximately in all studies deep learning method approached the accuracy of specialists in evaluation of mucosal healing [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]. Conclusions AI seems to be a promising guide for the recognition of endoscopic remission and provides clinical information about response to therapy.However AI has some limitations that need to be overcome such as accessibility in developing world and bias in the training set Article published online: 14 April 2023 © 2023. European Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. All rights reserved. Georg Thieme Verlag KG Rüdigerstraße 14, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany