Publications by authors named "Elliott Christian"

Background: As Alzheimer disease (AD) and AD-related dementias (ADRD) progress, individuals increasingly require assistance from unpaid, informal caregivers to support them in activities of daily living. These caregivers may experience high levels of financial, mental, and physical strain associated with providing care. CareVirtue is a web-based tool created to connect and support multiple individuals across a care network to coordinate care activities and share important information, thereby reducing care burden.

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Background And Objectives: Rural caregivers of people living with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) face unique caregiving challenges. Current interventions do not address many of the systemic barriers experienced by rural ADRD caregivers, including barriers related to geography, healthcare services access, and financial insecurity. The objective of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of rural ADRD caregivers' needs, strengths, and strategies in obtaining caregiving support, and to represent these attributes in the form of personas that can be used to design interventions for rural ADRD caregivers.

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Background: Digital health interventions are a promising method for delivering timely support to underresourced family caregivers. The uptake of digital health interventions among caregivers may be improved by engaging caregivers in participatory design (PD). In recent years, there has been a shift toward conducting PD remotely, which may enable participation by previously hard-to-reach groups.

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Objective: Care partners of persons living with dementia perform significant financial planning in partnership with the person for whom they care. However, research is scarce on care partners' confidence and experiences with financial planning. The purpose of this study was, first, to quantify care partners' confidence across different financial planning topics.

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To understand the glaciers holding back meters of sea level rise, climate scientists swoop in to extract ice from Antarctica's remote west coast.

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Background And Objectives: Care partners of persons living with dementia perform complex legal planning tasks. The purpose of this study was to survey care partners in the United States to understand their confidence and experience in performing legal planning tasks.

Research Design And Methods: This study used a parallel mixed-methods research design.

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Lucky low tide helped Anchorage dodge catastrophic 1964 tsunami, first analysis of location's risk finds.

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Background And Objectives: Care partners of people living with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) are faced with substantial legal and financial planning related to their care partner role. However, many care partners lack the legal and financial support needed to manage this role. The purpose of this study was to engage ADRD care partners in a remote participatory design process to create a technology-based financial and legal planning tool that meets care partner needs.

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Fossil fuel subsidies are a market distortion commonly identified as an obstacle to decarbonization. Yet  due to trenchant political economic risks, reform attempts can be fraught for governments. Despite these concerns, an institutionally and economically diverse group of states included references to fossil fuel subsidy reform (FFSR) in their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) under the Paris Agreement.

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Objective: To explore the use of a shared communication and coordination platform-the CareVirtue journal feature-for care networks of people living with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias to inform the design of care network support technologies.

Materials And Methods: In the primary study, care networks comprised the primary caregiver and other caregivers they invited to participate (eg, family members, in-home aides) used CareVirtue, for 60 days followed by a semistructured interview to explore primary caregivers' perceptions of usefulness. This secondary analysis focused on use of the shared journal feature of CareVirtue, which allowed care networks to communicate through posts that were shared with the network and to which network members could respond.

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Background: People living with Alzheimer disease and related dementias (ADRD) require prolonged and complex care that is primarily managed by informal caregivers who face significant unmet needs regarding support for communicating and coordinating across their informal care network. To address this unmet need, we developed CareVirtue, which provides (1) the ability to invite care network members; (2) a care guide detailing the care plan; (3) a journal where care network members can document, communicate, and coordinate; (4) a shared calendar; and (5) vetted geolocated caregiver resources.

Objective: This study aims to evaluate CareVirtue's feasibility based on: (1) Who used CareVirtue? (2) How did caregivers use CareVirtue? (3) How did caregivers perceive the acceptability of CareVirtue? (4) What factors were associated with CareVirtue use?

Methods: We conducted a feasibility study with 51 care networks over a period of 8 weeks and used a mixed methods approach that included both quantitative CareVirtue usage data and semistructured interviews.

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The latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) bridges a significant gap in psychiatric nosology by providing trait-based characterizations of psychopathy along with antisocial personality disorder within the Section III alternative model for personality disorders (AMPD). However, the representation of psychopathy in the AMPD has met with some criticisms (Crego & Widiger, 2014; Few, Lynam, Maples, MacKillop, & Miller, 2015). The current study was undertaken to establish an improved means for characterizing psychopathy in DSM-5 Section III terms, by creating scale measures of triarchic psychopathy dimensions using items from the best-established assessment instrument for the AMPD, the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5).

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The goal of this study ( = 432 participants from a community sample) is to report on the psychometric properties of a French adaptation of the Expanded Version of the Three-Factor Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (E-LSRP), which was developed to alleviate some shortcomings of the original LSRP. A three correlated factor exploratory structural equation modeling model showed the best fits and attained satisfactory indices. There were significant, conceptually meaningful associations with measures of Dark Triad traits, pathological narcissism, empathy, impulsivity, substance misuse, and social desirability.

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In the current investigation, we examined the association between psychopathy and attachment styles in several specific attachment relationships (i.e., romantic, mother, father, friend).

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The association between individual differences in general attachment styles and psychopathy is currently unclear, despite the potential utility attachment theory could provide regarding the interpersonal characteristics of psychopathy and the etiology of this construct. The purpose of the current investigation was to clarify these associations. For this purpose, we analyzed responses from an Australian community sample (N = 249) and a U.

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The Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP; Levenson, Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995 ) is a brief self-report questionnaire frequently used in psychopathy research. Although the scale has many desirable properties such as brevity and being available in the public domain, there are also several psychometric concerns associated with it, including low internal consistency, problematic construct validity, and incomplete conceptual coverage of several components of psychopathy. In 2 studies, we provide evidence that additional items can augment the LSRP to address the aforementioned concerns.

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Background: An obesity surgery mortality risk score derived from a single clinical series can be used to stratify the mortality risk of patients undergoing gastric bypass. However, such a scoring system does not take into account 2 important factors in contemporary bariatric surgery--increased use of the laparoscopic approach and laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding. The present study analyzed the preoperative factors that might predict in-hospital mortality after bariatric surgery using data from academic medical centers and proposes a classification system for predicting mortality.

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Background: Esophagectomy can be associated with significant morbidity such as leaks and strictures. Preoperative gastric ischemic conditioning is a concept aimed at inducing an ischemic insult to the gastric fundus and cardia prior to esophagectomy, thus leading to improvement of gastric perfusion.

Methods: This retrospective study compared outcome data from 81 patients who underwent esophagectomy after laparoscopic gastric ischemic conditioning with that from 71 patients who underwent esophagectomy without conditioning.

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Laparoscopic resection of gastric submucosal tumors has been described, but the role of laparoscopy for tumors within the esophagus or near the gastroesophageal junction is not clearly defined. The aim of this study was to examine the outcomes of laparoscopic or thoracoscopic enucleation or wedge resection of benign gastric tumors. The charts of 44 patients who underwent minimally invasive resection of benign esophagogastric tumors were reviewed.

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Background: Laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding is gaining in popularity in the United States. Our objective was to examine the outcomes of laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding and the prevalence of band revision and explantation at academic medical centers.

Methods: Using the "International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision," diagnosis and procedure codes, data were obtained from the University Health System Consortium Clinical Database for all laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding procedures performed from 2006 to 2009.

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