Introduction: Heart failure (HF) is a common chronic disease with high morbidity and mortality rates. Besides HF treatments aimed to improve patients’ quality of life and health status, health education interventions for behavioral changes ensuring their adherence to treatment are very important. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the effect of behavioral health education interventions on knowledge, treatment adherence, and quality of life of patients with HF.

Methods: This was a randomized controlled trial. A total of 330 patients were selected and randomly distributed into intervention and control groups (n = 165 per group). Data were collected at the time points before the intervention and three months after the intervention using the Dutch Heart Failure Knowledge Scale (DHFKS), Revised Heart Failure Compliance Scale (RHFCS), and quality of life (EQ-5D-5L v2.1, Vietnamese version).

Results: There were no significant differences between the two groups in HF knowledge or quality of life at baseline. After three months of health education intervention, intervention group significant increase to 1.68 times (95%CI: 1.05 – 2.69; p=0.03) in overall HF knowledge; 1.91 times (95%CI: 1.25 – 2.92; p=0.003) in general HF knowledge and 1.59 times (95%CI: 1.03 – 2.45; p=0.038) in behavior of exercise when compare to control group.  However, the quality of life did not change significantly after the intervention.

Conclusions: Although the health education intervention had no impact on the quality of life of patients with HF, it was effective in improving their HF knowledge and treatment adherence.

Introduction: Heart failure (HF) is one of the most common diseases worldwide, with a high prevalence and mortality, creating a significant cost burden on patients, society, and the healthcare system. As a result, extensive research has been conducted to investigate advanced treatment methods for heart failure, and patient adherence plays a crucial role in optimizing treatment effectiveness. This study aims to describe the current status of patients’ knowledge, treatment adherence, and quality of life among outpatients with heart failure visiting for routine treatment at Nhan Dan Gia Dinh Hospital.

Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional survey was conducted on 330 outpatients with heart failure who were visited for routine treatment at Nhan Dan Gia Dinh Hospital. All data were collected through face-to-face interviews using constructed questionnaires.

Results: The study showed the limit of heart failure knowledge among patients, with a mean score of 5.2 ± 2.3. Only 4.8% of patients were adequate overall heart failure knowledge. The treatment adherence was limited, with an overall adherence rate of 20.9%. The patient’s quality of life was generally stable at a high level, with a mean of 0.871 for the descriptive system score and 0.697 for the standardized VAS score.

Conclusion: The adherence rate of patients with HF was low, particularly among those with non-drug adherence. Very few patients with heart failure have adequate knowledge of heart failure. More support and health education programs on heart failure treatment adherence are needed for patients to increase their knowledge, adherence and improve their quality of life.

Background: The use of non-invasive ventilation (NIV) in preterm infants is becoming increasingly common. The use of cannula in NIV can cause ulceration of the nasal bridge with the current practices using the thin foam patches. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of hydrocolloid nasal dressing pads in preventing nasal ulceration comparing to that of the thin foam patches.

Methods: A prospective cohort study using hydrocolloid dressing pads (1 November to 30 April 2020) was compared to that of a historical control group using thin foam dressing (1 April to 15 October 2019) to evaluate the effectiveness of hydrocolloid dressing pads. All participants were preterm infants (less than 37 weeks of gestational age) and used nasal cannula NIV at the Department of Neonatal Intensive Care (NICU), Children's Hospital 1.

Results: 71 infants used hydrocolloid dressing pads, and 42 used ordinary thin foam nasal dressings. In the hydrocolloid dressings group, two infants (2.8%) had nasal ulcers; among them, one was mild, and the other was moderate. In comparison, ten infants (23.8%) using thin foam dressings developed ulcers, of which seven were mild, two were moderate, and one was severe. Using hydrocolloid nasal dressings significantly reduced nasal ulceration compared to thin foam dressings (OR = 0.09, 95%CI = 0.02 – 0.45).

Conclusion: Using hydrocolloid nasal dressings for preterm infants on nasal cannula NIV significantly reduced nasal ulceration compared to ordinary thin foam dressings.

Background: The dengue infection cases are increasing in Ho Chi Minh city (HCMC), Vietnam. Previous studies have demonstrated the correlation between dengue cases and weather factors, which then are used to built prediction models for dengue outbreaks. However, the association between dengue and weather varies greatly between regions and locations. In HCMC, a tropical climate city in Vietnam, there is no such a weather-based prediction model for dengue outbreaks.

Objectives: This study aims to determine the correlation between weather factors and a weekly number of dengue cases and to develop a scoring scheme prediction model for dengue outbreaks using weather factors in HCMC, Vietnam. 

Methods: An ecological study was conducted on the evaluation of weekly time-series data from 1999 to 2017. A Poisson regression model coupled with Distributed Lag Non-Linear Model (DLNM) was constructed to evaluate the effects of weather factors (i.e., temperature, relative humidity, cumulative rainfall, wind speed) and the weekly dengue cases in HCMC with lag 1-12 weeks.

Results: The predictive model was based on the following weather factors: wind speed at lag 5-8 and 9-12 weeks; temperature amplitude and humidity at lag 5-8 weeks; rainfall at lag 1-4, 5-8, and 9-12 weeks. The predictive model using climate predictors explained about 80% of the variance in dengue cases with a small value of the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE= 0.17). The scoring scheme was then developed from the predictive model; it had a good prediction power – with the accuracy rate = 81%, sensitivity = 1, and specificity = 0.80. In summary, our study indicated that weather factors significantly influence and are predictors for the variation of dengue cases in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam. We recommend applying this model to improve the prevention of dengue outbreak.

Background: Phantom vibration (PV) is an illusionary perception in which people perceive their mobile phone vibrates while it actually does not. Recently, PV has attracted attention in psychology and medical field. There are several studies investigating the prevalence and risk factors associated with this phenomenon. However, the findings are inconsistent. The prevalence of PV fluctuates from 21% to 89% among different groups and its mechanism remains unclear. Further understanding is necessary to identify the settings in which PV may harm the population and warrant further exploration.

Objectives: This study aims to explore the prevalence of PV among medical students in Ho Chi Minh City and settings that PV can risk people’s health. Relationships between PV and phone usage habits as well as psychiatric disturbance also are investigated.

Methods: By using online questionnaire on 377 undergraduate medical students in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the cross-sectional study explored factors associated with PV, including demographic, behavioral phone usage, and mental/emotional factors using the Self Reporting Questionaire - 20 (SRQ-20). The descriptive and association analyses were employed using R software.

Results: The study found a significant association between mental/emotional factors (i.e. mental disturbance and phone attachment) and PV (OR=2.15, 95% CI=1.21-3.81, p value=0.009; OR=1.75, 95% CI=1.02-3.01, p value=0.043 respectively), which suggests an important role of mental/emotional factors in explaining the potential mechanism of PV. A high proportion of participants also experienced PV while driving (55.5%) within the last month. This implies the impact of PV possibly becomes significant, causing an increase in the risk of traffic accident due to distracted driving.

The issue of causation is one of the major challenges for epidemiologists who aim to understand the association between an exposure and an outcome to explain disease patterns and potentially provide a basis for intervention. Suitably designed experimental studies can offer robust evidence of the causal relationships. The experimental studies, however, are not popular, difficult or even unethical and impossible to conduct; it would be desirable if there is a methodology for reducing bias or strengthening the causal inferences drawn from observational studies. The traditional approach of estimating causal effects in such studies is to adjust for a set of variables judged to be confounders by including them in a multiple regression. However, which variables should be adjusted for as confounders in a regression model has long been a controversial issue in epidemiology. From my observation, the adjustments using only "statistical artifacts" methods such as the p-value<0.2 in univariate analysis, stepwise (forward/backward) are widely used in research and teaching in Epidemiology and Statistics but without appropriated notice on the biological or clinical relationships between exposure and outcome which may induce the bias in estimating causal effects. In this mini-review, we introduce an interesting method, namely Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), which can be used to reduce the bias in estimating causal effects; it is also a good application for Epidemiology and Biostatistics teaching.