Do It to Them, Not to Me: Doctors' and Nurses' Personal Preferences Versus Recommendations for End-of-Life Care.

Background: The emotional toll and financial cost of end-of-life care can be high. Existing literature suggests that medical providers often choose to forego many aggressive interventions and life-prolonging therapies for themselves. To further investigate this phenomenon, we compared how providers make medical decisions for themselves versus for relatives and unrelated patients.

An Evolving Clinical Need: Discordant Oxygenation Measurements of Intubated COVID-19 Patients.

Since the first appearance of the severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) earlier this year, clinicians and researchers alike have been faced with dynamic, daily challenges of recognizing, understanding, and treating the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) due to SARS-CoV-2. Those who are moderately to severely ill with COVID-19 are likely to develop acute hypoxemic respiratory failure and require administration of supplemental oxygen. Assessing the need to initiate or titrate oxygen therapy is largely dependent on evaluating the patient's existing blood oxygenation status, either by direct arterial blood sampling or by transcutaneous arterial oxygen saturation monitoring, also referred to as pulse oximetry.

Is Opioid Prescribing Driving Trauma Recidivism or Is Trauma Driving Opioid Use?

In the past 30 years, opioid prescription rates have quadrupled and hospital admissions for overdose are rising. Previous studies have focused on alcohol use and trauma recidivism, however rarely evaluating recidivism and opioid use. We hypothesized there is an association between opioid use and trauma recidivism.

Validation of predictive equations to assess energy expenditure in acute spinal cord injury.

Background: Acute spinal cord injury (SCI) is devastating with morbidities compounded by inadequate nutrition. The American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition recommends indirect calorimetry (IC) to evaluate energy needs in SCI because no predictive energy equations have been validated. We sought to determine the accuracy of predictive equations to predict measured energy expenditure (MEE).

Geriatric nursing home falls: A single institution cross-sectional study.

Background: Falls are the leading cause of fatal injury in geriatric patients. Nursing home falls occur at twice the rate of community falls, yet few studies have compared these groups. We hypothesized that nursing home residents admitted for fall would be sicker than their community counterparts on presentation and have worse outcomes.

A biological basis for depression in pancreatic cancer.

Background: Patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma frequently present with depression the symptoms of which may precede cancer diagnosis, suggesting that the pathophysiology of depression in pancreatic adenocarcinoma may result from biological changes that are induced by the presence of the tumour itself. The present study was conducted to test a hypothesized relationship with the kynurenine pathway, which has been implicated in both depression and tumour-induced immunosuppression.

Methods: 17 patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma were recruited and completed mood questionnaires (Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy -Pancreatic Cancer, Beck Depression Inventory and the Beck Anxiety Inventory) and blood testing for serum levels of tryptophan, kynurenine, kynurenic acid and quinolinic acid.

Routine intraoperative hepatic sonography does not affect staging or postsurgical hepatic recurrence in pancreatic adenocarcinoma.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the utility of intraoperative sonography of the liver in the staging of pancreatic adenocarcinoma and its impact on the rate of postoperative tumor recurrence in the liver.

Methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of the rate in which intraoperative sonography of the liver changed surgical management in 470 surgical candidates with pancreatic adenocarcinoma. In postsurgical patients, we performed a χ(2) analysis to examine whether the patients who underwent hepatic intraoperative sonography had a lower rate of recurrent disease in the liver within the first 6 months of surgery compared to patients who did not undergo the procedure.

Atrial fibrillation and delayed gastric emptying.

Background: Atrial fibrillation and delayed gastric emptying (DGE) are common after pancreaticoduodenectomy. Our aim was to investigate a potential relationship between atrial fibrillation and DGE, which we defined as failure to tolerate a regular diet by the 7(th) postoperative day.

Methods: We performed a retrospective chart review of 249 patients who underwent pancreaticoduodenectomy at our institution between 2000 and 2009.