Background: Public health recommendations and governmental measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in numerous restrictions on daily living including social distancing, isolation and home confinement. While these measures are imperative to abate the spreading of COVID-19, the impact of these restrictions on health behaviours and lifestyles at home is undefined. Therefore, an international online survey was launched in April 2020, in seven languages, to elucidate the behavioural and lifestyle consequences of COVID-19 restrictions. This report presents the results from the first thousand responders on physical activity (PA) and nutrition behaviours. Methods: Following a structured review of the literature, the “Effects of home Confinement on multiple Lifestyle Behaviours during the COVID-19 outbreak (ECLB-COVID19)” Electronic survey was designed by a steering group of multidisciplinary scientists and academics. The survey was uploaded and shared on the Google online survey platform. Thirty-five research organisations from Europe, North-Africa, Western Asia and the Americas promoted the survey in English, German, French, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese and Slovenian languages. Questions were presented in a differential format, with questions related to responses “before” and “during” confinement conditions. Results: 1047 replies (54% women) from Asia (36%), Africa (40%), Europe (21%) and other (3%) were included in the analysis. The COVID-19 home confinement had a negative effect on all PA intensity levels (vigorous, moderate, walking and overall). Additionally, daily sitting time increased from 5 to 8 h per day. Food consumption and meal patterns (the type of food, eating out of control, snacks between meals, number of main meals) were more unhealthy during confinement, with only alcohol binge drinking decreasing significantly. Conclusion: While isolation is a necessary measure to protect public health, results indicate that it alters physical activity and eating behaviours in a health compromising direction. A more detailed analysis of survey data will allow for a segregation of these responses in different age groups, countries and other subgroups, which will help develop interventions to mitigate the negative lifestyle behaviours that have manifested during the COVID-19 confinement.

Since the emergence of the first cases in Wuhan, China, the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infection has been quickly spreading out to other provinces and neighboring countries. Estimation of the basic reproduction number by means of mathematical modeling can be helpful for determining the potential and severity of an outbreak and providing critical information for identifying the type of disease interventions and intensity. A deterministic compartmental model was devised based on the clinical progression of the disease, epidemiological status of the individuals, and intervention measures. The estimations based on likelihood and model analysis show that the control reproduction number may be as high as 6.47 (95% CI 5.71–7.23). Sensitivity analyses show that interventions, such as intensive contact tracing followed by quarantine and isolation, can effectively reduce the control reproduction number and transmission risk, with the effect of travel restriction adopted by Wuhan on 2019-nCoV infection in Beijing being almost equivalent to increasing quarantine by a 100 thousand baseline value. It is essential to assess how the expensive, resource-intensive measures implemented by the Chinese authorities can contribute to the prevention and control of the 2019-nCoV infection, and how long they should be maintained. Under the most restrictive measures, the outbreak is expected to peak within two weeks (since 23 January 2020) with a significant low peak value. With travel restriction (no imported exposed individuals to Beijing), the number of infected individuals in seven days will decrease by 91.14% in Beijing, compared with the scenario of no travel restriction.

Obesity represents an urgent problem that needs to be properly addressed, especially among children. Public and global health policy- and decision-makers need timely, reliable quantitative information to develop effective interventions aimed at counteracting the burden generated by high body mass index (BMI). Few studies have assessed the high-BMI-related burden on a global scale. Following the methodology framework and analytical strategies used in the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) 2017, the global deaths and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) attributable to high BMI were analyzed by age, sex, year, and geographical location and by Socio-demographic Index (SDI). All causes of death and DALYs estimated in GBD 2017 were organized into 4 hierarchical levels: level 1 contained 3 broad cause groupings, level 2 included more specific categories within the level 1 groupings, level 3 comprised more detailed causes within the level 2 categories, and level 4 included sub-causes of some level 3 causes. From 1990 to 2017, the global deaths and DALYs attributable to high BMI have more than doubled for both females and males. However, during the study period, the age-standardized rate of high-BMI-related deaths remained stable for females and only increased by 14.5% for males, and the age-standardized rate of high-BMI-related DALYs only increased by 12.7% for females and 26.8% for males. In 2017, the 6 leading GBD level 3 causes of high-BMI-related DALYs were ischemic heart disease, stroke, diabetes mellitus, chronic kidney disease, hypertensive heart disease, and low back pain. For most GBD level 3 causes of high-BMI-related DALYs, high-income North America had the highest attributable proportions of age-standardized DALYs due to high BMI among the 21 GBD regions in both sexes, whereas the lowest attributable proportions were observed in high-income Asia Pacific for females and in eastern sub-Saharan Africa for males. The association between SDI and high-BMI-related DALYs suggested that the lowest age-standardized DALY rates were found in countries in the low-SDI quintile and high-SDI quintile in 2017, and from 1990 to 2017, the age-standardized DALY rates tended to increase in regions with the lowest SDI, but declined in regions with the highest SDI, with the exception of high-income North America. The study’s main limitations included the use of information collected from some self-reported data, the employment of cutoff values that may not be adequate for all populations and groups at risk, and the use of a metric that cannot distinguish between lean and fat mass. In this study, we observed that the number of global deaths and DALYs attributable to high BMI has substantially increased between 1990 and 2017. Successful population-wide initiatives targeting high BMI may mitigate the burden of a wide range of diseases. Given the large variations in high-BMI-related burden of disease by SDI, future strategies to prevent and reduce the burden should be developed and implemented based on country-specific development status.

The basic reproduction number of an infectious agent is the average number of infections one case can generate over the course of the infectious period, in a naïve, uninfected population. It is well-known that the estimation of this number may vary due to several methodological issues, including different assumptions and choice of parameters, utilized models, used datasets and estimation period. With the spreading of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infection, the reproduction number has been found to vary, reflecting the dynamics of transmission of the coronavirus outbreak as well as the case reporting rate. Due to significant variations in the control strategies, which have been changing over time, and thanks to the introduction of detection technologies that have been rapidly improved, enabling to shorten the time from infection/symptoms onset to diagnosis, leading to faster confirmation of the new coronavirus cases, our previous estimations on the transmission risk of the 2019-nCoV need to be revised. By using time-dependent contact and diagnose rates, we refit our previously proposed dynamics transmission model to the data available until January 29th, 2020 and re-estimated the effective daily reproduction ratio that better quantifies the evolution of the interventions. We estimated when the effective daily reproduction ratio has fallen below 1 and when the epidemics will peak. Our updated findings suggest that the best measure is persistent and strict self-isolation. The epidemics will continue to grow, and can peak soon with the peak time depending highly on the public health interventions practically implemented.

Aims: To provide the first systematic analysis of the burden and underlying causes of heart failure (HF) in 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2017. Methods and results: We collected detailed information on prevalence, years lived with disability (YLDs), and underlying causes of HF from the Global Burden of Disease study 2017. Numbers and age-standardized rates of HF prevalence and YLDs were compared by age, sex, socio-demographic index (SDI), and location. The proportions of HF age-standardized prevalence rates due to 23 underlying causes were also presented. Globally, the age-standardized prevalence and YLD rates of HF in 2017 were 831.0 and 128.2 per 100 000 people, a decrease of −7.2% and −0.9% from 1990, respectively. Nevertheless, the absolute numbers of HF prevalent cases and YLDs have increased by 91.9% and 106.0% from 1990, respectively. There is significant geographic and socio-demographic variation in the levels and trends of HF burden from 1990 to 2017. Among all causes of HF, ischaemic heart disease accounted for the highest proportion (26.5%) of age-standardized prevalence rate of HF in 2017, followed by hypertensive heart disease (26.2%), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (23.4%). Conclusion: HF remains a serious public health problem worldwide, with increasing age-standardized prevalence and YLD rates in countries with relatively low SDI. More geo-specific strategies aimed at preventing underlying causes and improving medical care for HF are warranted to reduce the future burden of this condition.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is considered to be the gold standard manual for assessing the psychiatric diseases and is currently in its fourth version (DSM-IV), while a fifth (DSM-V) has just been released in May 2013. The DSM-V Anxiety Work Group has put forward recommendations to modify the criteria for diagnosing specific phobias. In this manuscript, we propose to consider the inclusion of nomophobia in the DSM-V, and we make a comprehensive overview of the existing literature, discussing the clinical relevance of this pathology, its epidemiological features, the available psychometric scales, and the proposed treatment. Even though nomophobia has not been included in the DSM-V, much more attention is paid to the psychopathological effects of the new media, and the interest in this topic will increase in the near future, together with the attention and caution not to hypercodify as pathological normal behaviors.