Publications by authors named "Lachs M"

Background: An emergency department (ED) visit or hospitalization provides an opportunity to identify elder mistreatment and initiate intervention, but this seldom occurs. To address this, we developed the Vulnerable Elder Protection Team (VEPT), a novel interdisciplinary consultation service. We explored the long-term trajectories of patients receiving VEPT evaluation and intervention.

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Introduction: Medication regimen complexity may be an important risk factor for adverse outcomes in older adults with heart failure. However, increasing complexity is often necessary when prescribing guideline-directed medical therapy at the time of a heart failure hospitalization. We sought to determine whether increased medication regimen complexity following a heart failure hospitalization was associated with worse post-hospitalization outcomes.

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Objectives: Our understanding of elder abuse (EA) phenomena has largely been shaped from the perspective of researchers and professionals whose conceptualizations often differ from the perceptions of older adults who experience mistreatment. This study sought to understand the most distressing aspects of EA victimization from the perspective of survivors.

Methods: Using a descriptive phenomenological approach, individual interviews were conducted with a diverse sample ( = 32) of EA survivors, recruited from EA support and Adult Protective Services programs in New York City and Los Angeles.

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Mistreatment of older adults is common and has serious health consequences but is underrecognized and underreported. Screening for mistreatment of older adults and initiation of intervention in primary care clinics may be helpful, but the value of existing tools is not supported by evidence. We argue that shifting the focus to individual subtypes of mistreatment of older adults can provide improved approaches to screening and ultimately to intervention.

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Background And Objectives: In conversations about expanding age-friendly ecosystems, the concept of "age-friendliness" has not been explored in relation to residential settings.

Research Design And Methods: This multiple-case study compared four residents' perspectives on the age-friendliness of a retirement and assisted living community, combining individual semi-structured interviews with observational data and organizational document analyses in a contextualist thematic examination.

Results: Three themes depict (A) existing experiences of the setting as "age-friendly" and the tension of the built design vs.

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Article Synopsis
  • N-of-1 trials provide a personalized way for patients to compare the effectiveness of treatments using their own health data, particularly in the context of managing heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF).
  • The study involved qualitative interviews with patients participating in these trials to refine a data visualization tool that helps them understand their treatment results, promoting informed decision-making about their medication.
  • Feedback from participants revealed key preferences for the visualization tool, including clear symptom scores, helpful reference images, and the use of descriptive language to convey changes in health instead of just numerical data.
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Article Synopsis
  • Physicians often struggle with underprescribing and patients not taking medications due to concerns about side effects, but there's little research on how to address these issues.
  • Interviews with doctors revealed that poor communication and conflicting information from families hinder discussions about side effects, while guiding questions and open communication improve the process.
  • The study identified major hurdles in determining the cause of side effects and suggested that improving communication and structured approaches can enhance heart failure medication management.
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This study examined the effects of exposure to resident aggression, self-efficacy, neuroticism, and attitudes toward dementia on burnout among direct care workers (DCWs) in nursing homes. A convenience sample of 800 DCWs from 70 randomly selected nursing homes in Hong Kong were recruited and individually interviewed. DCWs reported past-month experiences of resident aggression, levels of burnout, self-efficacy, neuroticism, attitudes toward dementia, and other personal and facility characteristics.

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Objectives: Resident-to-resident aggression (RRA) in long-term care facilities is gaining recognition as a serious problem. Racial/ethnic conflict may be a contributing factor to RRA incidents, but it remains insufficiently studied. Our goal was to explore overt racial/ethnic conflict in RRA.

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Objectives: Hearing loss (HL) (receptive communication impairment) is a known risk factor for depression. However, dysphonia (expressive communication impairment), has received little study. We study HL, self-reported voice disorder, and combined impairment as risk factors for depression in a large national cohort.

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Importance: Resident-to-resident aggression in assisted living facilities can result in physical and psychological harm, but its prevalence is unknown.

Objective: To estimate the prevalence of resident-to-resident aggression, including physical, verbal, and sexual, among residents in assisted living facilities.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This study used cross-sectional, observational data from a clinical trial, in which residents of assisted living facilities were monitored for events over a 1-month period.

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Objective: To describe types and outcomes of elective otolaryngological surgeries undergone by patients ≥90 years of age and to assess whether very old age is an independent risk factor for postsurgical complications and death.

Methods: The National Surgical Quality Improvement Program, a validated national prospective surgical outcomes database, was used to identify all patients aged 65 years and older who underwent elective otolaryngological procedures from 2011 to 2020. Study outcomes included minor complications, major life-threatening complications, and 30-day mortality.

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Objectives: Most prior advance care planning (ACP) interventions lack integration of the social context of patients' ACP process, which patients indicate is critically important. The current study developed the Planning Advance Care Together (PACT) website to foster inclusion of loved ones in the ACP process.

Methods: To provide feedback about the PACT website, patients with advanced cancer ( = 11), their caregivers ( = 11), and experts ( = 10) participated in semi-structured interviews.

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Background: Elder mistreatment (EM) is associated with adverse health outcomes and healthcare utilization patterns that differ from other older adults. However, the association of EM with healthcare costs has not been examined. Our goal was to compare healthcare costs between legally adjudicated EM victims and controls.

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Objectives: Staff shortages and the high turnover rate of nursing assistants pose great challenges to long-term care. This study examined the effects of aggression from residents of long-term care facilities, burnout, and fatigue on staff turnover intention. The findings will help managers to devise effective measures to retain their staff.

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Introduction: Although many programmes have been developed to address elder mistreatment, high-quality, rigorous evaluations to assess their impact are lacking. This is partly due to challenges in conducting programme evaluation for such a complex phenomenon. We describe here the development of a protocol to mitigate these challenges and rigorously evaluate a first-of-its-kind emergency department/hospital-based elder mistreatment intervention, the Vulnerable Elder Protection Team (VEPT).

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Background: Older adults hospitalized for heart failure (HF) are at risk for falls after discharge. One modifiable contributor to falls is fall risk-increasing drugs (FRIDs). However, the prevalence of FRIDs among older adults hospitalized for HF is unknown.

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Elder abuse (EA) is a pervasive problem with serious consequences. Previous population-based EA risk factor research has largely used cross-sectional designs that limit causal inferences, or agency records to identify victims, which threatens external validity. Based on a national, prospective, population-based cohort sample of older adults (n = 23,468) over a 3-year period from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, the current study sought to estimate the prevalence of EA and identify risk and protective factors.

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This is the protocol for a Campbell systematic review. The objectives are as follows: to produce a mega-map which identifies, maps and provides a visual interactive display, based on systematic reviews on all the main aspects of elder abuse in both the community and in institutions, such as residential and long-term care institutions.

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Importance: Elder mistreatment is common and has serious health consequences. Little is known, however, about patterns of health care utilization among older adults experiencing elder mistreatment.

Objective: To examine emergency department (ED) and hospital utilization of older adults experiencing elder mistreatment in the period surrounding initial mistreatment identification compared with other older adults.

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Background: Current protocols for bedside swallow evaluation have high rates of false negative results. Though experts are not consistently able to screen for aspiration risk by assessing vocal quality, there is emerging evidence that vocal acoustic parameters are significantly different in patients at risk of aspiration. Herein, we aimed to determine whether the presence of material on the vocal folds in an excised canine laryngeal model may have an impact on acoustic and aerodynamic measures.

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Background: An emergency department (ED) visit provides a unique opportunity to identify elder abuse and initiate intervention, but emergency providers rarely do. To address this, we developed the Vulnerable Elder Protection Team (VEPT), an ED-based interdisciplinary consultation service. We describe our initial experience in the first two years after the program launch.

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Objective/hypothesis: We explored the following hypotheses in a cohort of patients undergoing injection laryngoplasty: (1) glottic insufficiency affects voluntary cough airflow dynamics and restoring glottic competence may improve parameters of cough strength, (2) cough strength can be inferred from cough acoustic signal, and (3) glottic competence changes cough sounds and correlates with spectrogram morphology.

Study Type/design: Prospective interventional study.

Methods: Subjects with glottic insufficiency secondary to unilateral vocal fold paresis, paralysis, or atrophy, and scheduled for injection laryngoplasty completed an instrumental assessment of voluntary cough airflow using a pneumotachometer and a protocolized voluntary cough sound recording.

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Deprescribing has emerged as an important aspect of patient-centred medication management but is vastly underutilized in clinical practice. The current narrative review will describe an innovative patient-centred approach to deprescribing-N-of-1 trials. N-of-1 trials involve multiple-period crossover design experiments conducted within individual patients.

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