Patient Experience of Head and Neck Surgery With Free Flap Reconstruction.

Importance: Major head and neck surgery with microvascular free tissue transfer reconstruction is complex, with considerable risk of morbidity. Little is known about patients' experiences, including decision-making prior to, and regret following, free flap surgery.

Objective: To characterize patient experiences and decision regret of patients undergoing head and neck reconstructive free flap surgery.

The relationship between safety-net hospital status and outcomes among elderly head and neck cancer patients.

Background: The impact of safety-net status, case volume, and outcomes among geriatric head and neck cancer patients is unknown.

Methods: Chi-square tests and Student's t tests to compare head and neck surgery outcomes of elderly patients between safety-net and non-safety-net hospitals. Multivariable linear regressions to determine predictors of outcome variables including mortality index, ICU stays, 30-day readmission, total direct cost, and direct cost index.

Roid Rage: Historical Perspective on the Emergence of Oral Steroids as a Treatment of Idiopathic Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss.

Objectives: To review the historical circumstances that led to the emergence of corticosteroid therapy for idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss (ISSNHL) and to discuss how this history has influenced current perspectives on the condition.

Methods: PubMed and Google scholar were used to identify articles of ISSNHL and oral corticoid steroid use. Historical articles accessed through our institutional medical library were also reviewed.

Cancer-Related Activity Limitations Among Head and Neck Cancer Survivors.

Objectives/hypothesis: To characterize self-reported cancer-related activity limitations among a broad population of head and neck (HNC) survivors and identify sociodemographic factors associated with these limitations.

Study Design: Cross-sectional analysis of data from the National Health Interview Survey.

Methods: The study population included individuals who completed the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) from 1997 to 2018 and self-reported a cancer diagnosis.

Patterns of Technology Use Among Patients With Head and Neck Cancer and Implications for Telehealth.

Objective: To describe baseline technology use within the head and neck cancer (HNC) population prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Study Design: Cross-sectional analysis of National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data.

Setting: The NHIS is a survey of population health administered in person annually to a nationally representative sample of noninstitutionalized US residents via a complex clustered sampling design.

Development and content validation of the Safe Surgery Organizational Readiness Tool: A quality improvement study.

Background: Recent efforts to increase access to safe and high-quality surgical care in low- and middle-income countries have proven successful. However, multiple facilities implementing the same safety and quality improvement interventions may not all achieve successful outcomes. This heterogeneity could be explained, in part, by pre-intervention organizational characteristics and lack of readiness of surgical facilities.

A lack of crowding? Body size does not decrease with density for two behavior-manipulating parasites.

For trophically transmitted parasites that manipulate the phenotype of their hosts, whether the parasites do or do not experience resource competition depends on such factors as the size of the parasites relative to their hosts, the intensity of infection, the extent to which parasites share the cost of defending against the host's immune system or manipulating their host, and the extent to which parasites share transmission goals. Despite theoretical expectations for situations in which either no, or positive, or negative density-dependence should be observed, most studies document only negative density-dependence for trophically transmitted parasites. However, this trend may be an artifact of most studies having focused on systems in which parasites are large relative to their hosts.