To assess awareness and use of evidence-based medicine (EBM) databases and The Cochrane Library among physicians in Croatia. A cross-sectional study with a telephone survey was performed among 573 physicians (88.6% response rate from 647 contacted physicians) from family practice and 4 major university hospital centers in Croatia. The main outcome measures were physicians' awareness of The Cochrane Collaboration, awareness and use of The Cochrane Library, access to EBM databases, and access to internet at work. Overall, 54% of respondents said they had access to EBM databases, but when asked which databases they used, they named mostly non-EBM databases. The question on the highest level of evidence in EBM was correctly answered by 53% respondents, 30% heard of The Cochrane Collaboration, and 34% heard about The Cochrane Library. They obtained information about The Cochrane Library mostly from colleagues and research articles, whereas the information about EBM was gained mainly during continuous medical education. There were more respondents who thought The Cochrane Library could help them in practice (58%) than those who heard about The Cochrane Library (30%). Only 20% of the respondents heard about the initiative for the establishment of the Croatian branch of The Cochrane Collaboration. Family physicians had significantly lower level of awareness, knowledge, and use of EBM and The Cochrane Library than physicians from university hospitals. There is low awareness about EBM and The Cochrane Library among physicians in Croatia, which creates a need for educational interventions about EBM for the benefit of health care in Croatia.

To evaluate daily-written 10-question quizzes in a medical anatomy course as a way to integrate assessment into the course and to evaluate their effect on the course success.Students answering correctly 8/10 or more questions were awarded 0.5 points per ...

Aim To evaluate the structure of the anatomy program in the first year medical curriculum of University of Split School of Medicine by comparing it with the recommendations by the Educational Affairs Committee of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists (AACA) and the Terminologia Anatomica (TA); we also quantitatively evaluated the organization of teaching material in contemporary topographical anatomy textbooks and matched them with the AACA recommendations, TA, and the curriculum of the anatomy course taught at Medical School in Split, Croatia. Methods TA, official recommendations of the AACA, 6 contemporary anatomy textbooks, and the structure of the anatomy course were analyzed for the proportion of the terms or text devoted to standard topographical regions of the body. The findings were correlated using Spearman. test. Results The curriculum outline correlated both with the AACA recommendations (Spearman rho = 0.83, P = 0.015) and TA (Spearman rho = 0.73, P = 0.046). Textbooks contained 8 distinct sections, 7 allocated to topographic anatomy regions and 1 to general anatomy concepts and principles. The structure of all textbooks correlated significantly with the course curriculum. However, 4 out of 6 textbooks did not correlate with TA and only a single textbook showed significant correlation with the AACA recommendations. Conclusion Anatomy textbooks vary in the amount of text dedicated to different parts of topographical anatomy and are not quite concordant with curriculum recommendations and standard anatomical terminology. Planning the structure of an anatomy course should not be based on a single book or recommendation but on evidence.

Acute ischemic stroke (AIS) is one of the leading causes of morbidity worldwide, thus, early recognition is essential to accelerate treatment. The only definite way to diagnose AIS is radiological imaging, which is limited to hospitals. However, two serum neuromarkers, glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) and ubiquitin C-terminal hydrolase-L1 (UCH-L1), have been proven as indicators of brain trauma and AIS. We aimed to investigate the potential utility of these markers in distinguishing between large vessel occlusion (LVO) and small vessel occlusion (SVO), considering differences in treatment. Sixty-nine AIS patients were included in our study and divided into LVO and SVO groups based on radiological imaging. Control group consisted of 22 participants without history of neurological disorders. Results showed differences in serum levels of both GFAP and UHC-L1 between all groups; control vs. SVO vs. LVO (GFAP: 30.19 pg/mL vs. 58.6 pg/mL vs. 321.3 pg/mL; UCH-L1: 117.7 pg/mL vs. 251.8 pg/mL vs. 573.1 pg/mL; p < 0.0001), with LVO having the highest values. Other prognostic factors of stroke severity were analyzed and did not correlate with serum biomarkers. In conclusion, a combination of GFAP and UCH-L1 could potentially be a valuable diagnostic tool for differentiating LVO and SVO in AIS patients.

In addition to respiratory symptoms, COVID-19 often causes damage to many other organs, especially in severe forms of the disease. Long-term consequences after COVID-19 are common and often have neurological symptoms. Cerebral vasoreactivity may be impaired after acute COVID-19 and in our study, we wanted to show how constant and reversible are the changes in brain vasoreactivity after infection. This cross-sectional observational study included 49 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and mild neurological symptoms 300 days after the onset of the disease. We used a transcranial color-coded Doppler (TCCD) and a breath-holding test (BHT) to examine cerebral vasoreactivity and brain endothelial function. We analyzed the parameters of the flow rate through the middle cerebral artery (MCA): peak systolic velocity (PSV), end-diastolic velocity (EDV), mean velocity (MV), resistance index (RI) and pulsatility index (PI), and we calculated the breath-holding index (BHI). Subjects after COVID-19 infection had lower measured velocity parameters through MCA at rest period and after BHT, lower relative increases of flow velocities after BHT, and lower BHI. We showed that subjects, 300 days after COVID-19, still have impaired cerebral vasoreactivity measured by TCCD and they have chronic endothelial dysfunction.