Publications by authors named "Heather Bush"

Article Synopsis
  • The study examines a community-based intervention aimed at reducing opioid-related overdose deaths by increasing the adoption of evidence-based practices including overdose education and naloxone distribution, medication treatment for opioid use disorder, and prescription safety.
  • In a cluster-randomized trial, 67 communities across Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio were assigned to either receive the intervention or serve as a control group during a period marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and an increase in fentanyl overdoses.
  • Results showed no significant difference in opioid-related overdose death rates between the intervention and control groups, with both averaging similar rates, indicating that the community-engaged strategies did not have a measurable impact during the study period.
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Patient satisfaction and quality of life are integral to assessing oral health care quality. For many Americans still using conventional complete dentures (CDs) or implant-retained mandibular overdentures (IODs), it remains essential to consider improving their oral health outcomes and quality of life. Due to inexperienced student dentists providing dental care to dental school patients, patient grievances are generally considered a problem.

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Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic increased the risk of interpersonal violence. We investigated the association between lifetime interpersonal violence experience and risk of post-COVID-19 condition (the persistence of symptoms of COVID-19 and severity of health problems associated with COVID-19 that last a few weeks, months, or years) among women with lifetime interpersonal violence experience.

Methods: Women participants aged ≥18 years in Kentucky's Wellness, Health & You-COVID-19 study completed online quantitative surveys about the impacts of the pandemic, developing COVID-19, and symptoms of post-COVID-19 condition.

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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has had drastic effects on K-12 teachers. Researchers partnered with a teacher advisory board to identify factors associated with K-12 teachers' consideration of leaving teaching during Fall 2020.

Methods: A web-based survey focused on teachers' working experiences was emailed to school union membership listservs in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio.

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Patient satisfaction and quality of life are integral to assessing oral health care quality. For many Americans still using conventional complete dentures (CD) or Implant Retained-Overdentures (IOD), it remains essential to consider improving their oral health outcomes and quality of life. Due to inexperienced student dentists providing dental care to dental school patients, patient grievances are generally considered a problem.

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Circadian rhythms differ between young adult males and females. For example, males tend to be later chronotypes, preferring later timing of sleep and activity, than females. Likewise, there are sex differences in body composition and cardiorespiratory fitness.

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Bystander intervention programs have established efficacy to increase bystander behaviors to prevent interpersonal violence (IPV). Little research has investigated intervention efficacy among latent risk classes among high school students. Data from a five-year randomized control trial were used to conduct multigroup path analyses to assess the association between type of training received and bystander outcomes moderated by risk groups identified via latent profile analysis (LPA).

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Article Synopsis
  • Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a major cause of death in the U.S., impacting patients and healthcare systems significantly.
  • Researchers developed AI-based models for OUD prediction that outperform current clinical tools, demonstrating better prediction capabilities from a dataset of over 474,000 patients.
  • The study suggests that integrating AI algorithms into healthcare could improve risk assessment and patient management for those on opioid therapy.
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Background: Underage drinking and related risky sexual behavior (RSB) are major public health concerns on United States college campuses. Although technology-delivered personalized feedback interventions (PFIs) are considered a best practice for individual-level campus alcohol prevention, there is room for improving the effectiveness of this approach with regard to alcohol-related RSB.

Objective: The aims of this study are to (1) evaluate the impact of a brief PFI that integrates content on alcohol use and RSB and is adapted to include a novel cross-tailored dynamic feedback (CDF) component for at-risk first-year college students and (2) identify implementation factors critical to the CDF's success to facilitate future scale-up in campus settings.

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Purpose: Patients with cancer often have compromised immune system which can lead to worse COVID-19 outcomes. The purpose of this study is to assess the association between COVID-19 outcomes and existing cancer-specific characteristics.

Patients And Methods: Patients aged 18 or older with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 between June 1, 2020, and December 31, 2020, were identified (n = 314 004) from the Optum® de-identified COVID-19 Electronic Health Record (EHR) derived from more than 700 hospitals and 7000 clinics in the United States.

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Background: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of blindness worldwide, despite easy detection and effective treatment. Annual screening rates in the USA remain low, especially for the disadvantaged, which telemedicine-based DR screening (TDRS) during routine primary care has been shown to improve. Screening rates from such programs have varied, however, pointing to inconsistent implementation and unaddressed barriers.

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Article Synopsis
  • Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) is a major public health issue in the US, leading to significant financial losses in healthcare, workplace productivity, and crime.
  • Researchers propose a new model, MUPOD, which uses multi-stream transformer technology to analyze different healthcare data types concurrently for better OUD identification.
  • Testing on a dataset of over 392,000 patients with chronic back pain, MUPOD outperformed both traditional and newer deep learning models in recognizing OUD.
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Introduction: Youth who witness parental intimate partner violence are at increased risk for sexual violence. Existing data from a cluster RCT were used to determine the effectiveness of Green Dot bystander intervention to reduce sexual violence among high-school students who did and did not witness parental intimate partner violence.

Study Design: A secondary analysis was conducted in 2021 of extant data from a 5-year cluster RCT.

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Youth who witness parental intimate partner violence (IPV) are at increased risk of teen dating violence (DV). This analysis of secondary data investigated whether a bystander intervention program, was effective at reducing physical and psychological DV victimization and perpetration among youth who had and had not previously witnessed parental IPV. The parent RCT assigned 13 schools to control and 13 schools to the intervention.

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K-12 school staff from Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio were asked about their use of disinfectants to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in schools. Survey participants (n = 1,555) reported frequent use of disinfectants, often using unknown products, and were provided little to no training on safe and effective use. Participant concerns included student involvement in disinfection, inadequate ventilation, surface contact time, and potential health effects.

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Purpose: Cluster randomized controlled trials (cRCTs) are popular in school-based research designs where schools are randomized to different trial arms. To help guide future study planning, we provide information on anticipated effect sizes and intra-cluster correlation coefficients (ICCs), as well as school sizes, for dating violence (DV) and interpersonal violence outcomes based on data from a cRCT which evaluated the bystander-based violence intervention .

Methods: We utilized data from 25 schools from the Green Dot High School study.

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Introduction: In the US, approximately 8% of pregnant women smoke, and 5-11.9% currently use ENDS products. The health effects of ENDS use are debated; however, most contain nicotine which is known to cause adverse perinatal outcomes.

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The availability of large healthcare datasets offers the opportunity for researchers to navigate the traditional clinical and translational science research stages in a nonlinear manner. In particular, data scientists can harness the power of large healthcare datasets to bridge from preclinical discoveries (T0) directly to assessing population-level health impact (T4). A successful bridge from T0 to T4 does not bypass the other stages entirely; rather, effective team science makes a direct progression from T0 to T4 impactful by incorporating the perspectives of researchers from every stage of the clinical and translational science research spectrum.

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Current best practice approaches suggest that to address secondary traumatic stress (STS) a two-pronged perspective that considers individual and organizational factors over time is warranted. However, research documenting the impact of organizational efforts on individual experience with STS is lacking. In this study, it was hypothesized that as an organization becomes more STS informed, there would be decreases in reported levels of STS and burnout (BO) in individuals over time; and these changes would be associated with higher levels of implementation activity and increased use of interventions to improve physical and psychological safety.

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Bystander interventions are recognized as "promising" programming to reduce sexual violence. Gaps in current evaluations include limited follow-up post-training (beyond 24 months) and knowledge of additional bystander training during follow-up.In this prospective cohort study, nested in a cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT), three cohorts of high school (HS) seniors were recruited (Fall 2013-2015) and followed through Spring 2018 ( = 1,831).

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Introduction: To slow the spread of COVID-19 in the United States, businesses shutdown in Spring 2020. Research has indicated the impact on frontlines workers, yet little is known about the impact on those who were not working outside the home or switched to working remotely.

Purpose: The purpose of this report is to identify the financial and healthcare issues and mental health impact of the COVID-19 shutdown on Appalachians by worker categories.

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Engaged bystander interventions are recognized as "promising" programming to reduce sexual violence (SV), yet little is known of the long-term (>12-month) impact of programming on SV and related forms of gender-based violence. Funded by NIH as a prospective cohort study, recruited and followed three waves of high school seniors who had participated in a large high-school cluster-randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of the bystander intervention. This report provides the study design, recruitment methodology, recruitment and retention rates, survey items, and psychometric properties of measures included in the initial and annual electronic surveys with 24-48 months follow-up.

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The opioid crisis has disproportionately affected women, but research on approaches to increase initiation of medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) among women is limited. The Kentucky Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN) will implement a type 1 hybrid effectiveness and implementation trial to examine an innovative MOUD pretreatment model using telehealth (alone and in combination with peer navigators) for justice-involved women in transition from jail to the community. The overall goal of the project is to increase initiation and maintenance of MOUD among high-risk justice-involved women during community reentry to reduce opioid relapse and overdose.

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Data from a campus climate/violence survey (CCS) include psychometric information for survey items/scales plus findings from a large state university to promote its usefulness for assessment of interpersonal violence/harassment. This CCS can thus be evaluated for its measurement and documented findings, allowing for benchmarking purposes. An innovative measurement strategy is introduced to comprehensively capture incidence of victimization types through streamlined questioning.

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Context: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the leading cause of incident blindness among working-age adults in the United States. Federally designated safety-net clinics (FDSC) often serve as point-of-contact for patients least likely to receive recommended DR screenings, creating opportunity for targeted interventions to increase screening access and compliance.

Study Design And Methods: With such a goal, we implemented and assessed the longitudinal performance of an FDSC-based telemedicine DR screening (TDRS) network of 22 clinical sites providing nonmydriatic fundus photography with remote interpretation and reporting.

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