Glenbrook Hospital

Background:The Mediterranean diet (MD) and low-fat diet (LFD) were well-known dietary interventions for cardiovascular disease prevention. However, there is an ongoing debate about the relative efficacy of improving cardiovascular (CV) risk factors and clinical outcomes between the 2. This systematic review aims to evaluate and summarize findings from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that directly compare the MD and LFD concerning CV risk factors and clinical outcomes.Methods:Per the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses guidelines, a comprehensive literature search was conducted across PubMed, Google Scholar, SCOPUS, Science Direct, and RCTs that compared MD and LFD in adults, and reported data on CV risk factors or clinical outcomes were included.Results:Our systematic review includes 11 RCTs with 5942 participants. MD significantly reduced the formation of procoagulant and prothrombotic microvesicles. Studies have also reported that MD has resulted in greater reductions in total cholesterol, cholesterol-high-density lipoproteins ratios, insulin levels, blood glucose levels, leukocyte count, and body mass index compared to LFD.Conclusion:MD demonstrates superior efficacy over LFD in improving CV risk factors and outcomes. These findings could support the preferential recommendation of MD over LFD for the secondary prevention of cardiovascular diseases. Further research should explore the long-term adherence and implementation of these dietary interventions in diverse populations.

The global demand for cybersecurity professionals continues to outpace the available workforce, creating a critical gap that must be addressed through early education. This paper presents a project-based teaching aid designed for secondary education to inspire students to learn cybersecurity in secondary school classrooms and pursue careers in cybersecurity. The teaching aid employs the Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SSDLC) as a lens to examine cyberattacks and includes three hands-on laboratory exercises that illustrate common cyberattacks and their countermeasures. While this paper focuses on three specific labs for illustration, the lab set is designed to be modular and expandable, enabling the integration of additional cybersecurity topics and attack scenarios. The project leverages free and open-source technologies, ensuring accessibility and equity by enabling web-based remote desktop connections to the lab infrastructure, making it easily implementable by secondary school educators. With most existing hands-on curricula designed for collegiate-level instruction and requiring significant technical setup, this work fills a crucial gap by providing age-appropriate and more accessible lab materials for secondary cybersecurity education.

Whether ChatGPT's answers to medical questions are accurate, reliable, and trustworthy, and whether the public, not having a health background, knows how to evaluate ChatGPT's answers remains unclear. This study assessed ChatGPT's performance in answering medical questions posed by the public. An existing clinical question dataset of consumer questions from the NIH Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center (GARD) was used for this study. API calls produced 1467 question-answer pairs for GPT-4-0613 (ChatGPT-4.0). 100 question-answer pairs were randomly selected as the sample of this study. They were evaluated on two criteria, Scientific Accuracy, and Comprehensiveness, with scales from 0 to 5. The results showed that ChatGPT-4.0 provided about 90% above average performance on scale points 4 and 5 on Scientific Accuracy, 84% on Comprehensiveness, and approximately 7% and 14% on average on scale point 3 on these two quality criteria. No statistical differences were found in the quality of answers to the questions following a question framework and those without. These study results indicate that healthcare consumers must consult healthcare providers and/or other reliable information resources to verify the answers and gauge the applicability to individual situations. Further studies can include investigating the impact of how the medical questions were asked on the quality of ChatGPT answers, comparing healthcare consumers' evaluations with healthcare and information professionals' evaluations, and so on.

This chapter covers deeper aspects and elements of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), describing advanced security concepts in GCP. The chapter also looks at the shared responsibility model between service providers and clients, which enables contemporary organizations to use GCP securely.

This chapter looks at security automation on GCP through Infrastructure as Code (IaC), locating better engagement of security features. The deployments can be used on either Deployment Manager or Terraform and they automate critical security needs.

There is currently no reference standard test for the detection of the extra-esophageal manifestations of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). The current suite of diagnostic tests principally assesses reflux events in the esophagus. A new scintigraphic technique has been developed and validated against reference standards. It allows direct visualization of refluxate in the laryngopharynx and lungs. Fifty patients were assessed by scintigraphy before and after fundoplication at a single nuclear medicine facility. Standardized reflux symptomindices (RSIs) were obtained from each patient before and after surgery. Patients were scanned after oral 99 m technetium Fyton administration with early dynamic images and delayed SPECT/CT images of the head, neck, and lungs. ANOVA, Spearman correlation, and the Student's t-test were utilized for analysis. The study population (35F, 15 M) had a mean age of 63.9 years. Mean BMI was 26.8 with 67% being overweight or obese. All patients had significant reflux. SPECT/CT showed LPR events in 45/50 and pulmonary micro-aspiration (PMA) in 45/50 preoperatively and in 36/50 and 20/50 postoperatively, respectively. The RSI, cough, and throat clearing indices showed a significant fall postoperatively (p < 0.001). Frequency of scintigraphic reflux events was reduced from a mean of 4.5 in 30 min to 2.9 (t = 9.1, p = 0.004). The novel scintigraphic test detects esophageal and extra-esophageal reflux events and permits direct visualization of refluxate in the head and neck structures and lungs. It correlates well with symptoms of reflux in the esophagus and extra-esophageal structures and the response to therapy. Although prospective, the study did not randomize patients and in effect each patient became their own control following an intervention (fundoplication). Thus, the study is Level 3 evidence Laryngoscope, 135:73-79, 2025.

University of Chicago (NorthShore) Family Medicine Program, Glenview, IL The corresponding author is Maryam Ahmad, MD; [email protected]. The author declares no conflicts of interest.