Publications by authors named "Emily Wasserman"

Background: Patients with cancer should engage in decision-making throughout the course of their illness and treatment. Current guidelines recommend early, frequent advance care planning (ACP) conversations among clinicians, patients, and care partners (CPs) and advance directive (AD) completion. However, only 55% of patients with cancer have completed such directives, suggesting the need for interventions to increase rates of ACP.

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Adolescent/young adult cancer survivors (AYACS) are diagnosed with cancer between 15 and 39 years of age. Improving AYACS' survivorship quality is crucial-including improving social connectedness, a construct describing the quality, structure and function of social relationships. With better understanding of AYACS' social connectedness, network-based interventions can be developed to foster social health.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to explore how the quality of communication between patients and clinicians affects colorectal cancer screening behavior.
  • Conducted between 2011 and 2016 in Michigan, it involved audio-recorded consultations, with trained coders assessing specific features of communication quality through surveys and follow-ups.
  • Results showed that patient-clinician focus on "identity goals" (e.g., attention to face) was a significant predictor of whether patients underwent screening, indicating that improving this aspect of communication may be more effective than solely focusing on the content of screening discussions.
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Purpose: Adolescent and young adult cancer survivors (AYACS) are patients diagnosed with cancer between 15 and 39 years of age. AYACS are often derailed from planned educational and occupational endeavors due to disruption from cancer treatment and its consequences. The study objective was to examine how a personal cancer diagnosis impacted AYACS' experiences related to these endeavors.

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  • The study explores the use of glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs), specifically liraglutide, as a non-opioid treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD), addressing the high rates of relapse despite existing treatments.
  • It involves a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial with 40 participants in residential treatment, assessing the medication's safety and effectiveness in reducing cravings through various measurements at different stages.
  • The findings aim to inform future research and improve strategies for treating OUD, potentially influencing healthcare practices and policies.
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Background: With the future epidemiology and evolution of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) uncertain, the use of safe and effective coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines in pediatric populations remains important.

Methods: We report data from two open-label substudies of an ongoing phase 1/2/3 master study (NCT05543616) investigating the safety and immunogenicity of a variant-adapted bivalent COVID-19 vaccine encoding ancestral and Omicron BA.4/BA.

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Rationale And Objectives: To assess the feasibility of using an art history tool of formal analysis in resident education for interpretations of mammography and chest radiographs METHODS: In a pre-post study design, residents were shown pre-selected 10 mammograms and 10 chest radiographs for a total of 20 unique anonymized patient cases. After the pretest, residents attended four formal analysis art history lessons. The formal elements included line, light, dark, shade, proportion and balance.

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  • - COVID-19 has significantly increased distress among healthcare workers, with research often focusing on specific aspects or groups rather than a comprehensive view.
  • - A large-scale survey was conducted with nearly 2,000 staff from a major medical center, revealing high rates of moral injury (40.9%), burnout (35.3%-60.6%), depression (25.4%), and anxiety (24.8%).
  • - Alarmingly, 8.1% of respondents reported experiencing self-harm thoughts for several days or more, indicating that healthcare workers in various roles are facing critical, unsustainable levels of distress.
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Family members of intensive care unit (ICU) patients often report poor communication, feeling unprepared for ICU family meetings, and poor psychological outcomes after decision-making. The objective of this study was to create a tool to prepare families for ICU family meetings and assess feasibility of using Communication Quality Analysis (CQA) to measure communication quality of family meetings. This observational study was conducted at an academic tertiary care center in Hershey, PA from March 2019 to 2020.

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Children's hospitals are discharging patients to home with increasingly complex outpatient needs, making safe transitions of care (ToCs) of vital importance. Our study involved a survey of both outpatient providers and pediatric hospitalists associated with our medical center to better describe providers' views on the ToC process. The survey included questions assessing views on patient care responsibilities, resource availability, our hospitalist-run postdischarge clinic (PDC), and comfort with telemedicine.

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Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFAs) are essential nutrients that can affect inflammatory responses. While n-3 PUFAs are generally considered beneficial for cardiovascular disease and obesity, the effects on asthma, the most common inflammatory lung disease are unclear. While prenatal dietary n-3 PUFAs decrease the risk for childhood wheezing, postnatal dietary n-3 PUFAs can worsen allergic airway inflammation.

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Background: Advance care planning (ACP) is a process involving conversations between patients, loved ones, and healthcare providers that consider patient preferences for the types of medical therapies received at the end of life. Underserved populations, including Black, Hispanic, rural, and low-income communities are less likely to engage in ACP than other communities, a health inequity that results in lower-quality care and reduced hospice utilization. The purpose of this trial is to compare efficacy of two interventions intended to motivate ACP (particularly advance directive completion) for those living in underserved communities.

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Introduction: Burnout in healthcare providers begins early, with about half of medical students experiencing symptoms of burnout, and as many as one-quarter experiencing depression. While organizational, systemic-level changes certainly contribute to mitigation, organizationally sponsored individual-level changes may also play a significant role. Although the nature of the burnout epidemic and its impact on trainee wellness is fairly well understood, and interventions have been studied, there remains a gap in the empirical research examining the impact of the arts on medical student well-being.

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Purpose: The effectiveness of evidence-based guidelines (EBGs) and clinical decision support (CDS) is significantly hampered by widespread clinician resistance to it. Our study was designed to better understand the reasons for this resistance to CDS and explore the factors that drive it.

Methods: We used a mixed-methods approach to explore and identify the drivers of resistance for CDS among clinicians, including a web-based multispecialty survey exploring clinicians' impressions of the strengths and weaknesses of CDS, two clinician focus groups, and several one-on-one focused clinician interviews in which individual participants were asked to comment on their rationale for choosing imaging utilization that might not be supported by EBGs.

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Communication Quality Analysis (CQA) is a rigorous transcript-based coding method for assessing clinical communication quality. We compared the resource-intensive transcript-based version with a streamlined real-time version of the method with respect to feasibility, validity, reliability, and association with traditional measures of communication quality. Simulated conversations between 108 trainees and 12 standardized patients were assessed by 7 coders using the two versions of CQA (transcript and real-time).

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Childhood asthma derives from complex host-environment interactions occurring in the perinatal and infant period, a critical time for lung development. Sphingolipids are bioactive molecules consistently implicated in the pathogenesis of childhood asthma. Genome wide association studies (GWAS) initially identified a link between alleles within the 17q21 asthma-susceptibility locus, childhood asthma, and overexpression of the ORMDL sphingolipid biosynthesis regulator 3 (ORMDL3), an inhibitor of de novo sphingolipid synthesis.

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The 17q21 asthma susceptibility locus includes asthma risk alleles associated with decreased sphingolipid synthesis, likely resulting from increased expression of ORMDL3. ORMDL3 inhibits serine-palmitoyl transferase (SPT), the rate-limiting enzyme of sphingolipid synthesis. There is evidence that decreased sphingolipid synthesis is critical to asthma pathogenesis.

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Background: Underserved and minority populations are often reluctant to engage in advance care planning and/or research often due to distrust in healthcare and/or research institutions.

Aim: To determine if use of a community-based delivery model can facilitate recruitment of individuals from underserved communities in research about advance care planning.

Design: Recruitment data are presented from a prospective, mixed methods observational cohort study that examined the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of a community-based delivery model involving an end-of-life conversation game to motivate participants to complete advance care planning behaviors.

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Introduction: Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis dysregulation may contribute to the symptom burden in bipolar disorder (BD). Further characterization of cortisol secretion is needed to improve understanding of the connection between mood, sleep, and the HPA axis. Here, we observe diurnal cortisol patterns in individuals with BD and healthy controls (HCs) to determine time points where differences may occur.

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Objective: To investigate the preliminary efficacy of a high n-3 plus low n-6 (H3-L6) dietary intervention in improving mood stability in Bipolar Disorder (BD) when compared to dietary intervention with usual U.S. levels of n-6 and n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) intakes (control diet, CD).

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Purpose: To explore public knowledge, understanding of public health recommendations, perceptions, and trust in information sources related to COVID-19.

Methods: A cross-sectional survey of central Pennsylvanian adults evaluated self-reported knowledge, and a convergent, mixed methods design was used to assess beliefs about recommendations, intended behaviors, perceptions, and concerns related to infectious disease risk, and trust of information sources.

Results: The survey was completed by 5,948 adults.

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Objective: During the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans have increasingly relied on internet versus television news. The extent to which this change in health news consumption practice impacts health knowledge is not known. This study investigates the relationship between most trusted information source and COVID-19 knowledge.

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Purpose: To compare COVID-19 related knowledge, perceptions, and preferred information sources between healthcare workers and non-healthcare workers.

Design: Cross-sectional survey.

Setting: Web-based.

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Article Synopsis
  • The FDA is proposing a new standard for nicotine levels in cigarettes, focusing on very low nicotine content (VLNC) to reduce addiction.
  • A study involving adult smokers assessed the impact of reduced nicotine content (RNC) cigarettes versus usual nicotine content (UNC) cigarettes, measuring outcomes like smoker attrition and tobacco dependence.
  • Results showed that RNC smokers had higher dropout rates, lower nicotine levels, and smoked fewer cigarettes, indicating support for implementing VLNC standards despite challenges in transitioning for some smokers.
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