Publications by authors named "Iris Demmer"

Background: Health promotion (HP) is a complex, politically required task. The quality of implementation correlates with the effectiveness of health promotion initiatives. Successful implementation requires consideration of contextual conditions, which tend to be neglected in effectiveness studies.

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Background: International and national frameworks and initiatives call for strengthening the training of health professionals in the public health service (PHS) through cooperation with universities. The German Medical Licensing Regulations of 21st Sep 2021 provides for an integration of PHS into undergraduate medical training in the final year since 1st May 2022. The present study presents the procedure and results of the final year elective Public Health (PH) implementation for medical students at the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG) in cooperation with the local PHS.

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Background: Early information and support in dementia (FIDEM) is a cross-sectoral, general practitioner-centered network model for the improvement of community-based care of people with dementia and their caregivers by systematically assigning them to non-physician healthcare providers.

Objective: To describe the implementation of FIDEM in Göttingen, Germany and to exploratorily evaluate satisfaction and relief vs. additional workload.

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Objectives It is difficult to obtain longitudinal 'real world' data from ambulatory medical care in Germany in a systematic way. Our vision is a large German research data repository featuring representative, anonymized patient and outpatient health care data, longitudinal, continuously updated and across different providers, offering a perspective of linking secondary care data or additional data obtained from research cohorts, for example patient reported data or biodata, and will be accessible for other researchers. Here we report specific methods and results from the RADAR project.

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General practitioners play a major role in the health care of the population. Only a small proportion of patients receives care from specialised consultants, in a hospital or in a university hospital. Most of the patients consult a general practitioner.

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A competency-based training of medical students that is adapted to the realities of care is required internationally and is being intended in Germany with the Master Plan for Medical Studies 2020. In order to test these competencies, the German National Institute for state examinations in Medicine, Pharmacy and Psychotherapy (IMPP) has developed a concept for the redesign of the final part of the medical licensing examination in Germany. It focuses on general and interprofessional healthcare in the examination with outpatients.

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The Masterplan Medizinstudium 2020 (Masterplan for Medical Studies 2020) focuses on practice-oriented undergraduate training with increased involvement of rural teaching practices. The demand for teaching practices for the final year will increase at all medical faculties in Germany. The project medPJplus at the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG) presents an approach for successfully acquiring general medical teaching practices in local rural areas.

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Background: Medical data from family doctors are of great importance to health care researchers but seem to be locked in German practices and, thus, are underused in research. The RADAR project (Routine Anonymized Data for Advanced Health Services Research) aims at designing, implementing and piloting a generic research architecture, technical software solutions as well as procedures and workflows to unlock data from family doctor's practices. A long-term medical data repository for research taking legal requirements into account is established.

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Background And Objectives: The use of primary care data gathered from electronic health records in local practices could be an important building block for the future of health services research. However, the risks and reservations associated with using this data for research purposes should not be underestimated. We show the data protection and privacy problems that may arise through secondary analysis of routine primary care data and describe the technical solutions that are available to address these concerns - as a trust-building measure.

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Purpose: To assess the use of visual evoked potentials (VEPs) for the in vivo detection of impaired visual function in a marmoset model of multiple sclerosis. The sensitivity of the VEP recordings was determined by comparison with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and histopathology.

Methods: Baseline VEPs were recorded in six healthy marmoset monkeys in response to light-flash stimulation.

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Neuritis of the optic nerve is one of the most frequent early symptoms of multiple sclerosis. There are only scarce data correlating magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast alterations with the underlying pathology, that is inflammation, demyelination, and axonal damage. Here we studied optic neuritis in a rat model of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis by comparing in vivo MRI findings from multiple techniques (T1, T2, proton density, magnetization transfer) to histopathology.

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Axonal degeneration is now recognized as an important pathological feature of multiple sclerosis (MS). Acute axonal damage happens early in the disease course, and therefore early changes might occur in markers in body fluids, such as cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood. In our study we investigated the relevance of serum and CSF markers for axonal damage in patients with clinically isolated syndrome indicative for MS.

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Interferon-beta-1a (IFN-beta-1a) is an approved treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS). It improves the disease course by reducing the relapse rate as well as the persistent neurological deficits. Recent MRI and post-mortem studies revealed that neuronal and axonal damage are most relevant for chronic disability in MS patients.

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In patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), non-remitting deficits are mainly caused by axonal and neuronal damage. We demonstrated previously that myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG)-induced experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis in rats provokes severe axonal and neuronal injury even before clinical manifestation of the disease. In our present study, we investigated effects of simvastatin treatment on degeneration of retinal ganglion cell (RGC) bodies as well as their axons during MOG-induced optic neuritis.

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Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory disease of the CNS which leads to demyelination, axonal destruction and neuronal loss in the early stages. Available therapies mainly target the inflammatory component of the disease but fail to prevent neurodegeneration. To investigate the effect of ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) on the survival of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), the neurons that form the axons of the optic nerve, we used a rat model of myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein-induced experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis.

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Neurodegenerative processes determine the clinical disease course of multiple sclerosis, an inflammatory autoimmune CNS disease that frequently manifests with acute optic neuritis. None of the established multiple sclerosis therapies has been shown to clearly reduce neurodegeneration. In a rat model of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, we recently demonstrated increased neuronal apoptosis under methylprednisolone therapy, although CNS inflammation was effectively controlled.

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Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a noninvasive technique for direct stimulation of the neocortex. In the last two decades it is successfully applied in the study of motor and sensory physiology. TMS uses the indirect induction of electrical fields in the brain generated by intense changes of magnetic fields applied to the scalp.

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