Potential therapeutic effect and methods of traditional Chinese medicine on COVID-19-induced depression: A review

COVID‐19 (coronavirus) has spread all over the world with a high infection rate. Currently, there are no targeted therapeutic drugs for COVID‐19 as well as for stress induced by COVID‐19. The unpredictable events of COVID‐19 can trigger feelings of fear, worry, or unease in people, leading to stress‐related disorders such as depression and anxiety. It has been reported that individuals, including COVID‐19 patients, medical staff, and ordinary people, are under both physical and psychological pressure, and many of them have developed depression or anxiety during this pandemic. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been widely used in treating depression with relatively better safety and efficacy and may have an important role in treating stress‐related disorders induced by COVID‐19. In this review, we collected the common TCM treatment methods including Qigong, Acupuncture, Five Elements Musical Therapy, Five Elements Emotional Therapy, and Chinese herbal medicine from the databases of PubMed and the China National Knowledge Internet to illustrate the effect of TCM on depression. The better knowledge of TCM and implementation of TCM in COVID‐19 clinics may help to effectively improve depression induced by COVID‐19, may assist people to maintain a healthy physical and mental quality, and may alleviate the current shortage of medical resources.

Comparison of different prognostic models for predicting cancer-specific survival in bladder transitional cell carcinoma

OBJECTIVE

To construct the newly valuable nomogram which can compare the predictive performance with American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging system in bladder transitional cell carcinoma (BTCC).

METHODS

BTCC patients were screened (2004-2015) from the SEER database. The nomogram incorporating lymph node ratio was constructed to evaluate individualized cancer-specific survival.

RESULTS

The C-index of the nomogram for predicting cancer-specific survival was 0.743 (95% CI: 0.720-0.766), which was higher than C-index of the AJCC staging system.

CONCLUSION

Lymph node ratio can be a reliable prognostic indicator for BTCC. The proposed nomogram showed more satisfactory predictive accuracy and wider applicability than current AJCC staging system in individualized prediction of BTCC patients.

Prognostic nomograms based on log odds of positive lymph nodes for patients with renal cell carcinoma: A retrospective cohort study

OBJECTIVES

The aim of the current study is to build prognostic nomograms for patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and compare the predictive performance with the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging system.

METHODS

A total of 9453 patients were identified (2005-2015) from the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database. Propensity-score matching (PSM) was conducted to reduce selective bias. The matched cohort was further divided equally into the development and the validation cohort. Nomograms based on log odds of positive lymph nodes (LODDS) were formulated to predict individualized cancer-specific survival (CSS) and overall survival (OS) for RCC. Then, the performance of nomograms was internally and externally validated via the concordance index (C-index) and calibration plots. Decision curve analysis (DCA) was used to compare the clinical practicable between nomograms and AJCC staging system.

RESULTS

LODDS was identified as an independent prognostic indicator for CSS and OS using univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses. Two nomograms incorporating LODDS were formulated. The C-indices of the nomograms for predicting CSS and OS were 0.7561 (95% CI, 0.7356-0.7766) and 0.7140 (95% CI, 0.6936-0.7343) in the development cohort, which was higher than C-index of the AJCC staging system. The results were reproducible in the validation cohort. Moreover, internal and external calibration plots showed that the nomograms-predicted was consistent with the actual observation. Additionally, DCA demonstrated that the nomograms were superior to the AJCC staging system with obtaining more clinical net benefit.

CONCLUSIONS

LODDS could be considered as a reliable prognostic factor for patients with RCC. Two nomograms were able to more accurately and applicable than the AJCC staging system for predicting CSS and OS.