Publications by authors named "G Rhoads"
Educational Attainment of Grandmothers and Preterm Birth in Grandchildren.
Matern Child Health J
February 2021
Background: Maternal education has been shown repeatedly to be inversely associated with preterm birth. Both preterm birth and educational level of families are correlated across generations, but it is not clear if educational level of grandparents affects the risk of preterm delivery of their grandchildren, and, if so, if the association with grandmother's education is independent of mother's education.
Methods: We used New Jersey birth certificates to create a transgenerational dataset to examine the effect of grandmother's education on risk of PTB in White, Black and Hispanic grandchildren.
Article Synopsis
- The study examines the survival rates of elderly women with breast cancer, focusing on those with preexisting severe mental illness.
- Nearly 3% of the studied cohort had severe mental illness, which was linked to a two-fold increase in all-cause mortality compared to those without mental illness.
- While breast cancer-specific mortality also showed some increase, it wasn't statistically significant; patients with severe mental illness tended to have more advanced cancer and associated health risks, highlighting the need for tailored medical support.
Purpose: This study aimed to compare diagnosis and treatment delays in elderly breast cancer patients with and without pre-existing mental illness.
Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted using the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results-Medicare data including 16,636 women 68+ years, who were diagnosed with stage I-IIIa breast cancer in the United States from 2005 to 2007. Mental illness was identified using International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification codes recorded on inpatient and outpatient claims during the 3 years prior to breast cancer diagnosis.
Article Synopsis
- The study investigates how comorbidity impacts breast cancer survival rates across different races, focusing on women diagnosed with breast cancer.
- A retrospective analysis examined data from over 68,000 women aged 66 and older, assessing their health conditions prior to cancer diagnosis and tracking survival until 2010.
- Results indicated that while comorbid conditions did not negatively affect survival for black women, diabetes was linked to higher mortality and worse tumor characteristics in white women, highlighting the need for further research on the diabetes-breast cancer relationship.