Publications by authors named "Heeju Sohn"

Article Synopsis
  • The article examines how historical health disparities among African American families lead to differing family structures across generations, particularly focusing on the impacts of healthy life expectancies.
  • It highlights that non-Hispanic Black adults face earlier parental illness and death, resulting in less overlap with their healthy years, while non-Hispanic White adults generally experience longer healthy years with both parents.
  • The study indicates that these health inequities significantly affect family dynamics, with non-Hispanic Black women particularly suffering from health issues while raising children, reinforcing racial inequalities within family structures.
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Research in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status (SES) consistently shows that the SES of one generation benefits the next. Demographic processes shape the kin structures that serve as conduits for the transmission of SES. Few studies have examined these trends together to describe experiences in evolving kin structures throughout the life course and across generations.

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Newborn screening (NBS) aims to detect newborns with severe congenital diseases before the onset of clinical manifestations. Advancements in genomic technologies have led to proposals for the development of genomic-based NBS (G-NBS) in concert with traditional NBS. Proponents of G-NBS highlight how G-NBS could expand the number of diseases screened at birth to thousands and spur the development of new drugs and treatments for rare diseases.

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Background: Carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA 19-9) is a representative tumor marker used for the diagnosis of pancreatic and biliary tract cancers. There are few published research results that can be applied to actual clinical practice for ampullary cancer (AC) alone. This study aimed to demonstrate the relationship between the prognosis of AC and the level of CA 19-9, and to determine the optimal thresholds.

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This study examines changes in the sociodemographic patterns of deportation and voluntary return of undocumented immigrants from the United States to Mexico during three US presidential administrations (2001 to 2019) with different immigration policies. Most previous studies examining these migration flows for the United States as a whole have relied exclusively on counts of deportees and returnees, thereby ignoring changes over the past 20 y in the characteristics of the undocumented population itself, i.e.

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Background: Bismuth-Corlette type IV Klatskin tumors have conventionally been considered unresectable. This retrospective study aimed to demonstrate the survival improvement of patients with type IV Klatskin tumors when resected and suggest possible radiological features for R0 resectability.

Methods: Data on type IV Klatskin tumors diagnosed between 2008 and 2019 were reviewed retrospectively.

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Racial/ethnic disparities in childhood cancer survival persist despite advances in cancer biology and treatment. Survival rates are consistently lower among non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic children as compared with non-Hispanic White children across a range of hematologic cancers and solid tumors. We provide a framework for considering complex systems and social determinants of health in research examining the drivers of racial/ethnic disparities in childhood cancer survival, given that pediatric patients' interactions with the healthcare system are filtered through their caregiver, family, and societal structure.

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Objective: To quantify COVID-19 vulnerabilities for Californian residents by their legal immigration status and place of residence.

Design: Secondary data analysis of cross-sectional population-representative survey data.

Data: All adult respondents in the restricted version of the California Health Interview Survey (2015-2020, n=128 528).

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Background/purpose: Surgical indications of main duct-involved intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm (IPMN), especially for main pancreatic duct (MPD) of 5-9 mm, remain controversial. We aimed to predict malignancy risk of main duct-involved IPMN.

Methods: Total 258 patients with main duct-involved IPMN between 2000 and 2017 in our institute were retrospectively analyzed.

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Background: A history of familial pancreatic cancer (FPC) increases the incidence of pancreatic cancer (PC) among first-degree relatives. We aimed to determine the incidence of FPC and analyze its clinical characteristics.

Methods: Between 2010 and 2014, 1159 patients with PC were included in the study.

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Objectives: We integrated major theories in immigrant health and assimilation into a single analytical framework to quantify the degrees to which demographic composition, pathways to citizenship, and socioeconomic assimilation account for physical and mental health disparities between naturalized immigrants by region of origin.

Methods: Using the restricted data from the 2015-2016 California Health Interview Survey, we decomposed differences in physical and mental health into demographic factors, path to citizenship, and socioeconomic characteristics by region of origin using the Karlson, Holm, and Breen (KHB) method.

Results: Differences in socioeconomic status mediated most of the disparity in physical health between naturalized immigrants from different regions.

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Backgrounds/aims: Surgical resection is the only curative treatment for biliary tract cancers; however, most patients undergo palliative chemotherapy because they are contraindicated for surgery. Conversion surgery, a treatment strategy for downsizing chemotherapy and subsequent surgical resection, is feasible for initially unresectable biliary tract cancers following the introduction of effective chemotherapeutic agents.

Methods: Patients initially diagnosed with unresectable biliary tract cancers, and treated with conversion surgery after palliative chemotherapy between 2013 and 2019, were reviewed retrospectively.

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Due to the lack of appropriate tumor markers with optimal cut-off values to predict the prognosis of gallbladder cancer (GBC), this study aimed to demonstrate the relationship between prognosis and the levels of carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA 19-9), and to determine optimal thresholds. In total, 539 patients diagnosed with GBC were examined. The relationship between tumor marker levels and overall survival (OS) was analyzed.

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Background: In the United States, immigration policy is entwined with health policy, and immigrants' legal statuses determine their access to care. Yet, policy debates rarely take into account the health needs of immigrants and potential health consequences of linking legal status to healthcare. Confounding from social and demographic differences and lack of individual-level data with sensitive immigration variables present challenges in this area of research.

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We examined family isolation, economic hardship, and long-distance migration as potential patterns of an extreme outcome of a lonely death: bodily remains that remain unclaimed and are left to the state. This paper combines a unique dataset-Los Angeles County's records of unclaimed deaths-with the Vital Statistics' Mortality data and the Annual Social and Economic Survey (ASEC) to examine 1) whose remains are more likely to become unclaimed after death and, 2) whether population-level differences and trends in family isolation, economic hardship, and long-distance migration explain the differences in the rates of unclaimed deaths. We employ multivariate Poisson models to estimate relative rates of unclaimed deaths by social and demographic characteristics.

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Health insurance coverage for working-age adults in the United States is still predominantly determined by their jobs or their spouse's jobs. This article revealed that SES disparities in access to a spouse's coverage as a safety-net significantly contributed to the inequities in coverage loss during economic instability. Using the longitudinal Survey of Income and Program Participation (1996-2012), this article examines insurance transitions between socioeconomic groups during the two most recent recessions in the United States.

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Newborn Screening (NBS) is a State-run program that mandates all newborns to be screened for a panel of medical conditions to reduce infant mortality and morbidity. Medicaid is a public health insurance program that expanded access to care for low-income infants. NBS mandates and Medicaid rolled out state-by-state in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, which are considered significant programs that improved infant health in the latter half of the 20th Century.

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The article [Fraying Families: Demographic Divergence in the Parental Safety Net] written by [Heeju Sohn], was originally published electronically on the publisher's internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on [1 July 2019] without open access.

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Parents are increasingly supporting their children well into adulthood and often serve as a safety net during periods of economic and marital instability. Improving life expectancies and health allows parents to provide for their children longer, but greater union dissolution among parents can weaken the safety net they can create for their adult children. Greater mortality, nonmarital childbearing, and divorce among families with lower socioeconomic status may be reinforcing inequalities across generations.

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Do public health policy interventions result in pro-social behaviors? The Affordable Care Act (ACA)'s Medicaid expansions were responsible for the largest gains in public insurance coverage since its inception in 1965. These gains were concentrated in states that opted to expand Medicaid eligibility and provide a unique opportunity to study not just medical but also social consequences of increased public health coverage. This article examines the association between Medicaid and volunteer work.

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Health insurance coverage varies substantially between racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Compared to non-Hispanic whites, African Americans and people of Hispanic origin had persistently lower insurance coverage rates at all ages. This article describes age- and group-specific dynamics of insurance gain and loss that contribute to inequalities found in traditional cross-sectional studies.

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This article examines lasting mortality improvements associated with availability of Medicaid at time and place of birth. Using the US Vital Statistics (1959-2010), I exploit the variation in when each of the 50 states adopted Medicaid to estimate overall infant mortality improvements that coincided with Medicaid participation. 0.

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Most American adults under 65 obtain health insurance through their employers or their spouses' employers. The absence of a universal healthcare system in the United States puts Americans at considerable risk for losing their coverage when transitioning out of jobs or marriages. Scholars have found evidence of reduced job mobility among individuals who are dependent on their employers for healthcare coverage.

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How do proficiency-based accountability systems affect inequality in academic achievement? This paper reconciles mixed findings in the literature by demonstrating that three factors jointly determine accountability's impact. First, by analyzing student-level data from a large urban school district, we find that when educators face accountability pressure, they focus attention on students closest to proficiency. We refer to this practice as , and show that the difficulty of the proficiency standard affects whether lower or higher performing students gain most on high-stakes tests used to evaluate schools.

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