Publications by authors named "Vidhyalakshmi Ramesh"

Apheresis is performed worldwide for an increasing number of indications. The development of common data elements (CDE) for apheresis related areas may facilitate conduct of new research, enhance quality initiatives including benchmarking, and improve patient care. This report describes the systematic development of the Uniform Apheresis Case Report Form (UACRF) as part of the Apheresis in the United States (ApheresUS) program.

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Background: mutations (m) define the most treatment-refractory acute myeloid leukemia (AML) subtype. Optimal treatment approaches have not been established in this setting. We reviewed our institutional experience to identify therapy sequencing, treatment response, and survival patterns in these patients.

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Frailty is a phenotype of decreased physiologic reserve associated with increased risk of toxicities and nonrelapse mortality (NRM) in hematopoietic cell transplant (HCT) recipients. The incidence, predictors, and adverse effects of pre-HCT frailty are not well known. We evaluated the association of pre-HCT frailty, defined using Fried's criteria, with age and baseline characteristics in patients ≥18 years undergoing autologous (auto) or allogeneic (allo) HCT for hematological malignancies.

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Introduction:: Patients with thoracic cancers have one of the highest mortality rates among patients with cancer and COVID-19. Data evaluating the impact of recent anti-cancer therapies on COVID-19 outcomes in patients with thoracic cancers are confined to heterogenous studies with limited follow-up data. We leveraged data from the COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium (CCC19) (NCT04354701) to analyze the impact of recent anti-cancer therapies on the clinical outcomes of COVID-19 in patients with thoracic cancers.

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Purpose: Frequent visits to health care facilities can be time intensive and all-consuming for people with cancer. We measured health care contact days (days with healthcare contact outside the home) among decedents with advanced GI cancer and examined sources of contact days, their associations with demographic and clinical factors, and their temporal patterns over the course of illness.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study using a tumor registry and electronic medical record data for decedents with stage IV GI cancer between 2011 and 2019 in a large health care network in MN.

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Background: Malignant melanoma is the leading cause of death due to cutaneous malignancy. Immunocompromised individuals have an elevated risk of developing melanoma. We aimed to provide histopathologic and statistical characterization of melanoma development in immunocompromised patients.

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Article Synopsis
  • A study examined opioid and benzodiazepine use in older adults (65+) and younger adults (40-64) who underwent allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplants (HCT) before and after the CDC's 2016 guidelines against prescribing these medications together.
  • Results showed that older adults had similar chances of receiving opioids as younger adults, but those who were treated after the guidelines were less likely to be prescribed opioids.
  • While the overall use of opioids decreased significantly after the guidelines, the use of benzodiazepines and the combination of opioids and benzodiazepines remained steady, with older adults receiving fewer of these medications compared to their younger counterparts.
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In the treatment of acute myelogenous leukemia with allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation, we previously demonstrated that there is a greater protection from relapse of leukemia when the hematopoietic cell transplantation donor has either the / genotype or a genotype having two or more gene segments. In those earlier analyses, genotyping could only be assessed at the low resolution of gene presence or absence. To give the analysis greater depth, we developed high-resolution sequence-based typing that defines all the alleles and distinguishes the expressed alleles from those that are not expressed.

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The use of potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs) using Beers criteria and its impact on older allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) recipients is not known. Here the use of any PIMs and their therapeutic classes in reduced-intensity conditioning allogeneic HCT recipients were compared between older (≥65 years; n = 114) and younger (40 to 64 years; n = 240) patients during their initial HCT admission, defined as the number of days that a patient received 1 or more PIMs between day -14 and day +28. Poisson regression was used to determine rate ratios (RRs) in the 2 groups.

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