Publications by authors named "Hess E"

Background: Acute ischemic lesions seen on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are associated with poor intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) outcomes, but drivers for these lesions are unknown. Rapid hemoglobin decrements occur in the initial days after ICH and may impair brain oxygen delivery. We investigated whether acute hemoglobin decrements after ICH are associated with MRI ischemic lesions and poor long-term ICH outcomes.

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  • Multiple myeloma (MM) is a type of cancer that starts in plasma cells and is divided into two main genetic subtypes: hyperdiploid and non-hyperdiploid.
  • This study used human myeloma cell lines (HMCLs) to investigate protein expression of cell surface markers relevant to MM treatment, finding that some markers were consistently expressed while others showed variation.
  • Analysis revealed that some HMCLs closely matched the characteristics of patient-derived samples, highlighting the need for careful selection of cell lines to best model MM for research and therapeutic purposes.
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  • Striatal dysfunction is linked to various types of dystonia, such as idiopathic and inherited forms, with the striatum housing different types of GABAergic neurons that control movement.
  • Research using a model of DOPA-responsive dystonia (DRD) revealed that dSPNs and iSPNs exhibit distinct molecular changes that contribute to the disorder, highlighting a specific dysregulation in glutamatergic signaling for both neuron types.
  • The differences in how these neurons adapt due to dopamine deficiencies suggest potential biochemical targets for therapies, emphasizing that the impact of dopamine loss on movement disorders varies depending on the timing and the specific neuron type affected.
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Objective: To evaluate sociodemographic and clinical factors associated with clinical outcomes in patients hospitalized with neuroinfectious diseases at three tertiary care centers in New York City.

Methods: This retrospective cohort study was conducted at three large urban tertiary care centers between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2017. Poor clinical outcome was defined as length of hospital stay (LOS) ≥2 weeks and/or discharge to a location other than home.

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Introduction: Few rural hospital medicine programs include workforce development training that provides social and professional support for interdisciplinary teams. Even fewer include training that creates supportive learning environments that result in higher staff satisfaction, lower burnout, and reduced turnover. The Acute Inpatient Medicine-High Reliability, Learning Environment, and Workforce Development Initiative (AIM-HI) aims to create supportive learning environments in Veterans Health Administration (VA) rural hospital medicine teams.

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Objective: The authors sought to assess the prosocial, entactogen effects of ketamine.

Methods: Pleasure from social situations was assessed in a sample of participants with treatment-resistant depression from randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies, using four items of the Snaith-Hamilton Pleasure Scale (SHAPS) at five time points over 1 week following treatment with ketamine (0.5 mg/kg intravenously) or placebo.

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Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by the degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in the striatum, predominantly associated with motor symptoms. However, non-motor deficits, particularly sensory symptoms, often precede motor manifestations, offering a potential early diagnostic window. The impact of non-motor deficits on sensation behavior and the underlying mechanisms remains poorly understood.

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Background: Prior studies have indicated that female individuals outnumber male individuals for certain types of dystonia. Few studies have addressed factors impacting these sex differences or their potential biological mechanisms.

Objectives: To evaluate factors underlying sex differences in the dystonias and explore potential mechanisms for these differences.

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  • The Veterans Health Administration is striving to create supportive learning environments within healthcare teams to reduce burnout and improve care consistency but struggles with reliable implementation of these strategies.
  • The authors conducted a mixed-methods study involving 81 VA cardiac catheterization labs, leading to the development of a Relational Playbook focusing on evidence-based interventions to enhance team dynamics and learning.
  • The Playbook includes 50 interventions organized into categories like teamwork and communication, aimed at helping healthcare managers integrate these practices into their current training and meetings to foster employee well-being and enhance patient safety.
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Despite the benefits of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), there is lower use of this technology among non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic people with type 1 diabetes compared with their non-Hispanic White counterparts. The T1D Exchange Quality Improvement Collaborative recruited five endocrinology centers to pilot an equity-focused quality improvement (QI) study to reduce racial inequities in CGM use. The centers used rapid QI cycles to test and expand interventions such as provider bias training, translation of CGM materials, provision of CGM education in multiple languages, screening for social determinants of health, and shared decision-making.

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Importance: More than 80% of patients who present to the emergency department (ED) with acute heart failure (AHF) are hospitalized. With more than 1 million annual hospitalizations for AHF in the US, safe and effective alternatives are needed. Care for AHF in short-stay units (SSUs) may be safe and more efficient than hospitalization, especially for lower-risk patients, but randomized clinical trial data are lacking.

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DYT1 dystonia is associated with decreased striatal dopamine release. In this study, we examined the possibility that ultrastructural changes of nigrostriatal dopamine terminals could contribute to this neurochemical imbalance using a serial block face/scanning electron microscope (SBF/SEM) and three-dimensional reconstruction to analyse striatal tyrosine hydroxylase-immunoreactive (TH-IR) terminals and their synapses in a DYT1(ΔE) knockin (DYT1-KI) mouse model of DYT1 dystonia. Furthermore, to study possible changes in vesicle packaging capacity of dopamine, we used transmission electron microscopy to assess the synaptic vesicle size in striatal dopamine terminals.

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Background: Health services researchers within the Veterans Health Administration (VA) seek to improve the delivery of care to the Veteran population, whose medical needs often differ from the general population. The COVID-19 pandemic and restricted access to medical centers and offices forced VA researchers and staff to transition to remote work. This study aimed to characterize the work experience of health service researchers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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  • * Researchers utilized RNA profiling to explore the gene expression patterns of SPNs across different areas of the dorsal striatum, focusing on over 98% of protein-coding genes.
  • * The findings reveal significant differences in gene expression related to synaptic function among SPNs in various striatal territories, enhancing our understanding of normal striatal functioning and potential dysfunction in related disorders.
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We present a new measurement of the positive muon magnetic anomaly, a_{μ}≡(g_{μ}-2)/2, from the Fermilab Muon g-2 Experiment using data collected in 2019 and 2020. We have analyzed more than 4 times the number of positrons from muon decay than in our previous result from 2018 data. The systematic error is reduced by more than a factor of 2 due to better running conditions, a more stable beam, and improved knowledge of the magnetic field weighted by the muon distribution, ω[over ˜]_{p}^{'}, and of the anomalous precession frequency corrected for beam dynamics effects, ω_{a}.

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Background: Narratives are effective tools for communicating with patients about opioid prescribing for acute pain and improving patient satisfaction with pain management. It remains unclear, however, whether specific narrative elements may be particularly effective at influencing patient perspectives.

Methods: This study was a secondary analysis of data collected for Life STORRIED, a multicenter RCT.

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Rationale: Empathy, or the ability to perceive, share, and act upon the emotions of another, is a crucial social skill and is dysfunctional in autism and schizophrenia. While the complexities of human empathy are difficult to model in rodents, behavioral paradigms utilizing rats which study decision-making in social contexts may provide a translational framework for assessing biological, pharmacotherapeutic, and environmental interventions.

Objectives: Modify and expand upon the three-session rat harm aversion task, which measures the willingness of rats to cease pressing a lever that earns them sucrose reward but delivers a shock to their cage mate.

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Dystonia is characterised as uncontrolled, often painful involuntary muscle contractions that cause abnormal postures and repetitive or twisting movements. These movements can be continuous or sporadic and affect different parts of the body and range in severity. Dystonia and its related conditions present a huge cause of neurological morbidity worldwide.

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The number of diabetic patients is rising globally and concomitantly so do the diabetes associated complications. The gut secretes a variety of proteins to control blood glucose levels and/or food intake. As the drug class of GLP-1 agonists is based on a gut secreted peptide and the positive metabolic effects of bariatric surgery are at least partially mediated by gut peptides, we were interested in other gut secreted proteins which have yet to be explored.

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  • The study aims to identify clinical markers and therapeutic targets that can predict survival in patients with pulmonary hypertension (PH) using data from U.S. Veterans Affairs and Vanderbilt University, focusing on those with elevated mean pulmonary artery pressure (mPAP).
  • Analysis of 4,737 patients revealed 21 distinct subgroups based on pulmonary arterial compliance (PAC), with higher PAC levels correlating with better survival rates, especially in patients with precapillary PH.
  • The findings suggest that maintaining PAC levels at or above 3.0 ml/mm Hg is associated with significantly improved survival rates in both discovery and validation cohorts, indicating its potential as a critical biomarker in managing PH.
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Medication errors are preventable events that lead to inappropriate medication use and potential patient harm. This is especially prevalent within the operating room (OR) where one practitioner is involved in the entire medication-use process. Despite recent implementation of BD Pyxis™ Anesthesia ES, Codonics Safe Label System, and Epic One Step at the University of Kentucky Healthcare (UKHC) to prevent medication errors, errors continue to be reported.

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Background: Erythema multiforme (EM) is an uncommon cutaneous reaction pattern characterised by panepidermal keratinocyte apoptosis with lymphocytic satellitosis, and is reported in domestic animal species, livestock and rarely ferrets.

Hypothesis/objectives: The aim of this study was to analyse the spectrum of cutaneous clinical and histological features in ferrets with EM and to evaluate history and treatment outcomes.

Animals: Five client-owned ferrets with biopsy-confirmed EM.

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