Publications by authors named "Kirsten Ziesemer"

Objectives: To investigate the acute (directly post-stretching) and long-term (≥1 week of treatment) effects of stretching type, duration, and intensity on joint range of motion (ROM) and stiffness in ankle contractures.

Data Sources: PubMed, Embase.com, Clarivate Analytics/Web of Science Core Collection, EBSCO/SPORTDiscus, and EBSCO/CINAHL were searched for studies published in English from inception until September 12, 2023.

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  • A systematic review was conducted to better understand the adverse health outcomes and risk factors affecting military and law enforcement personnel.
  • The review analyzed 34 systematic reviews, encompassing data from 43 countries, identifying 26 adverse health outcomes and 220 underlying risk factors.
  • Key findings included various health issues such as PTSD, depression, obesity, and injuries, highlighting the importance of addressing these factors for improved prevention strategies.
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  • An umbrella review was conducted to evaluate existing evidence on optimal antibiotic treatment durations for various respiratory tract infections, focusing on whether shorter courses are as effective as longer ones.
  • The review included systematic reviews of conditions like community-acquired pneumonia and acute sinusitis, assessing factors like clinical outcomes and the quality of the studies using established criteria.
  • Findings indicated that most systematic reviews were of low quality, but there was some support for a 5-day treatment duration for community-acquired pneumonia and acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; however, reliable evidence for other conditions and shorter durations is lacking.
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Background: Electronic health records (EHRs) contain patients' health information over time, including possible early indicators of disease. However, the increasing amount of data hinders clinicians from using them. There is accumulating evidence suggesting that machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) can assist clinicians in analyzing these large-scale EHRs, as algorithms thrive on high volumes of data.

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Background: Personal Health Monitoring (PHM) has the potential to enhance soldier health outcomes. To promote morally responsible development, implementation, and use of PHM in the armed forces, it is important to be aware of the inherent ethical dimension of PHM. In order to improve the understanding of the ethical dimension, a scoping review of the existing academic literature on the ethical dimension of PHM was conducted.

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Objectives: Digital transformation in healthcare is a necessity considering the steady increase in healthcare costs, the growing ageing population and rising number of people living with chronic diseases. The implementation of digital health technologies in patient care is a potential solution to these issues, however, some challenges remain. In order to navigate such complexities, the perceptions of healthcare professionals (HCPs) must be considered.

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Objective: The aim of this scoping review on infant oral mutilation (IOM) was to study the prevalence, dental complications, and immediate and long-term effects of this practice, in addition to providing a systematic overview on existing knowledge and analysis of identified knowledge gaps on IOM.

Methods: Five electronic bibliographic databases (OVID/Medline, Embase.com, Clarivate Analytics/Web of Science Core Collection, SCOPUS, and Global Index Medicus) were searched for relevant studies.

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  • Reinforcement learning (RL) has potential applications in ICU settings for improving decision-making, and a systematic review was conducted to evaluate its impact on critically ill patients.
  • A total of 1,033 articles were screened, resulting in 18 journal articles and 18 conference papers focused on RL techniques; however, all studies only showed RL outperforming clinicians based on retrospective data.
  • The review concluded that while RL techniques reported better decision-making than clinicians, there were no studies proving actual improvements in patient outcomes, and there was a high risk of bias in the evaluation procedures.
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Context: The negative effects of socioeconomic, environmental and ethnic inequalities on childhood respiratory diseases are known in the development of persistent asthma and can result in adverse outcomes. However, little is known about the effects of these disparities on pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) outcomes in respiratory diseases.

Objective: The purpose of this systematic review is to evaluate the literature on disparities in socioeconomic, environmental and ethnic determinants and PICU outcomes.

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Oral-functioning impairment can negatively affect the quality of life (QoL) of head and neck cancer (HNC) patients after receiving radiotherapy (RT). Assessment of patient-reported oral functioning throughout treatment can improve patient care. This scoping review aims to propose a definition for oral functioning for HNC patients and to map out the available questionnaires measuring patient-reported oral functioning in RT-treated HNC patients.

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Dental calculus preserves oral microbes, enabling comparative studies of the oral microbiome and health through time. However, small sample sizes and limited dental health metadata have hindered health-focused investigations to date. Here, we investigate the relationship between tobacco pipe smoking and dental calculus microbiomes.

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Objective: This scoping review aims to identify complex health interventions (CHI's) to prevent early childhood caries (ECC), explore the level of complexity of the identified CHI's, and explore the details of their development, evaluation, and implementation.

Introduction: Many interventions to prevent ECC have multiple interacting components and can be seen as CHI's. Recent reviews on these interventions have found inconclusive effects, which may be due to differences in the development, evaluation, and implementation of CHI's.

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Background: There is increasing evidence that the food environment, i.e. the availability, accessibility, price and promotion of foods and beverages, has a significant influence on oral health through food consumption.

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Rationale: The blood is a rich source of potential biomarkers for the diagnosis of idiopathic and hereditary pulmonary arterial hypertension (iPAH and hPAH, referred to as "PAH"). While a lot of biomarkers have been identified for PAH, the clinical utility of these biomarkers often remains unclear. Here, we performed an unbiased meta-analysis of published biomarkers to identify biomarkers with the highest performance for detection of PAH.

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Objective: As data science and artificial intelligence continue to rapidly gain traction, the publication of freely available ICU datasets has become invaluable to propel data-driven clinical research. In this guide for clinicians and researchers, we aim to: 1) systematically search and identify all publicly available adult clinical ICU datasets, 2) compare their characteristics, data quality, and richness and critically appraise their strengths and weaknesses, and 3) provide researchers with suggestions, which datasets are appropriate for answering their clinical question.

Data Sources: A systematic search was performed in Pubmed, ArXiv, MedRxiv, and BioRxiv.

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Background: Almost half of all colorectal cancer (CRC) patients will experience metastases at some point, and in the majority of cases, multiple organs will be involved. If the peritoneum is involved in addition to the liver, the current guideline-driven treatment options are limited. The reported overall survival ranges from 6 to 13 months for the current standard of care (systemic treatment).

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Objectives: Dental calculus is among the richest known sources of ancient DNA in the archaeological record. Although most DNA within calculus is microbial, it has been shown to contain sufficient human DNA for the targeted retrieval of whole mitochondrial genomes. Here, we explore whether calculus is also a viable substrate for whole human genome recovery using targeted enrichment techniques.

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Article Synopsis
  • Dental calculus, a hardened form of dental plaque found in archaeological specimens, is shown to be a valuable source for studying ancient DNA and microbiomes.
  • This study reveals that DNA extracted from dental calculus is not only more abundant but also less contaminated compared to DNA from dentin samples, indicating its potential for better preservation of genetic material.
  • While most DNA in dental calculus comes from oral bacteria, a tiny portion is host DNA, which is highly fragmented, whereas dentin has a more variable amount of host DNA and sometimes a significant contribution from oral microbes.
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To date, characterization of ancient oral (dental calculus) and gut (coprolite) microbiota has been primarily accomplished through a metataxonomic approach involving targeted amplification of one or more variable regions in the 16S rRNA gene. Specifically, the V3 region (E. coli 341-534) of this gene has been suggested as an excellent candidate for ancient DNA amplification and microbial community reconstruction.

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