Publications by authors named "Chrastek J"

Bereavement during childhood impacts children's wellbeing and biopsychosocial development. Research examining impacts and outcomes of childhood bereavement and supportive interventions has highlighted a myriad of factors that influence children's unique, complex experiences of grief, necessitating a personalized, child-centred approach. Children's grief support is underpinned by well-established grief theories studied primarily in adult populations, and stage-based developmental theories that characterise child development as "normative" and universal.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Professional and personal development has always been important in the field of palliative care nursing. Now as patients are increasingly culturally diverse, the ability to understand and connect across cultures is also vital. In light of this, a homecare hospice in Singapore collaborated with a nurse consultant based in the United States to pilot a 10-month cross-cultural bidirectional, distance mentoring project.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: The associations of spiritual and religious factors with patient-reported outcomes among adolescents with cancer are unknown.

Objective: To model the association of spiritual and religious constructs with patient-reported outcomes of anxiety, depressive symptoms, fatigue, and pain interference.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cross-sectional study used baseline data, collected from 2016 to 2019, from an ongoing 5-year randomized clinical trial being conducted at 4 tertiary-referral pediatric medical centers in the US.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Health care in the United States is increasingly delivered in cross-cultural contexts. Empathy, mutual regard, respect, and compassionate communication are necessary to achieve the highest standard of care for each individual. Moral and ethical perspectives on life and death, health, and health care are not universal but rather have their origins within culture and societal norms.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cancer is the leading cause of disease-related death in children and adolescents. Pediatric patients with cancer suffer greatly at the end of life. However, palliative care interventions can reduce suffering and significantly improve the care of these patients and their families.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Pediatric palliative care (PPC) aims to promote quality of life for children and their families through prevention and relief of physical and psychosocial symptoms. Little is known about how PPC/hospice services impact health care resource utilization in an uncertain financial landscape.

Objective: The study objective was to compare pediatric hospital health care resource utilization before and after enrollment in a home PPC/hospice program.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Although a number of successful adult combined pain and palliative care programmes exist worldwide, integrated paediatric pain and palliative care services are rare. This article reviews epidemiology, definition, symptom prevalence and myths in paediatric palliative care. It then describes the development of the Pediatric Pain and Palliative Care Programme at the Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, USA.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Hypokinesia (lack of exercise)--a disease caused by lack of physical activity leads among others to a predominance of the sympathetic nerve in the circulation. Its manifestations are briefly described according to Kraus-Raab's hypothesis of 1961. The opposite of a hypokinetic man are trained (hyperkinetic) sportsmen, in particular long-distance runners.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Among 77 hypertensive subjects with a previous predominantly sedentary way of life we followed the changes of several cardiovascular and biochemical parameters during a 5-week physical training course. A highly significant drop in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure (BP) was observed in 58 subjects (75%, p less than 0.001).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In a group of 60 men and 17 women aged 54 +/- 9 yrs. suffering from mild and moderate arterial hypertension (i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The effect of training on dilatation capacity in the lower limbs was evaluated by studying the blood flow and vascular resistance in the calf in 10 young athletes aged 19-29 years and 15 trained middle-aged subjects aged 52-58 years during post-ischaemic reactive hyperaemia. The control groups comprised untrained subjects of approximately the same ages, i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF