Université de Sherbrooke

About: Université de Sherbrooke is a education organization based out in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Receptor. The organization has 14922 authors who have published 28783 publications receiving 792511 citations. The organization is also known as: Universite de Sherbrooke & Sherbrooke University.

Multimorbidity and quality of life in primary care: a systematic review

Abstract: Many patients with several concurrent medical conditions (multimorbidity) are seen in the primary care setting. A thorough understanding of outcomes associated with multimorbidity would benefit primary care workers of all disciplines. The purpose of this systematic review was to clarify the relationship between the presence of multimorbidity and the quality of life (QOL) or health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of patients seen, or likely to be seen, in the primary care setting.

Increasing Risk of Relapse after Treatment of Clostridium difficile Colitis in Quebec, Canada

Abstract: Background. Clinicians who treat patients with Clostridium difficile–associated diarrhea (CDAD) in Quebec, Canada, have noted an apparent increase in the proportion of patients who experience relapse. Methods. To determine whether there was an increase in the frequency of treatment failure and of recurrence of CDAD after treatment, we reviewed data on cases that had been diagnosed in a hospital in the province of Quebec during the period 1991–2004. The frequency of recurrences within 60 days after the initial diagnosis was measured using Kaplan-Meier analysis, and Cox regression was used for multivariate analysis. Results. Among patients who had initially been treated with metronidazole, the proportion whose regimens were switched to vancomycin or for whom vancomycin was added because of a disappointing response did not vary between 1991 and 2002 (66 [9.6%] of 688 patients overall) but more than doubled in 2003–2004 (112 [25.7%] of 435; ). Among 845 patients treated with metronidazole only, the 60-day probability of recurrence P ! .001 increased dramatically in 2003–2004 (47.2%), compared with 1991–2002 (20.8%; ). During 1991–2002, P ! .001 the probabilities of recurrence were 20.0%, 13.8%, and 28.9% among individuals aged 0–17, 18–64, and 65 years, respectively; during 2003–2004, the probabilities were 25.0%, 27.1%, and 58.4%, respectively. Conclusion. In 2003–2004, there was an increase in the proportion of patients with CDAD believed, by their attending physicians, to have experienced metronidazole treatment failure, as well as an increase in the frequency of post–metronidazole therapy recurrences, especially among elderly persons.

How to make more out of community data? A conceptual framework and its implementation as models and software.

Abstract: Community ecology aims to understand what factors determine the assembly and dynamics of species assemblages at different spatiotemporal scales. To facilitate the integration between conceptual and statistical approaches in community ecology, we propose Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC) as a general, flexible framework for modern analysis of community data. While non-manipulative data allow for only correlative and not causal inference, this framework facilitates the formulation of data-driven hypotheses regarding the processes that structure communities. We model environmental filtering by variation and covariation in the responses of individual species to the characteristics of their environment, with potential contingencies on species traits and phylogenetic relationships. We capture biotic assembly rules by species-to-species association matrices, which may be estimated at multiple spatial or temporal scales. We operationalise the HMSC framework as a hierarchical Bayesian joint species distribution model, and implement it as R- and Matlab-packages which enable computationally efficient analyses of large data sets. Armed with this tool, community ecologists can make sense of many types of data, including spatially explicit data and time-series data. We illustrate the use of this framework through a series of diverse ecological examples.

From Plant Traits to Plant Communities: A Statistical Mechanistic Approach to Biodiversity

Abstract: We developed a quantitative method, analogous to those used in statistical mechanics, to predict how biodiversity will vary across environments, which plant species from a species pool will be found in which relative abundances in a given environment, and which plant traits determine community assembly. This provides a scaling from plant traits to ecological communities while bypassing the complications of population dynamics. Our method treats community development as a sorting process involving species that are ecologically equivalent except with respect to particular functional traits, which leads to a constrained random assembly of species; the relative abundance of each species adheres to a general exponential distribution as a function of its traits. Using data for eight functional traits of 30 herbaceous species and community-aggregated values of these traits in 12 sites along a 42-year chronosequence of secondary succession, we predicted 94% of the variance in the relative abundances.