Publications by authors named "M A Whooley"
Improving colonoscopy quality in the national VA healthcare system.
Contemp Clin Trials
December 2024
Background: Colorectal cancer (CRC) prevention is a Veterans Affairs (VA) priority. Colonoscopy quality, especially adenoma detection rate (ADR), is critical for effective screening. Our research indicates considerable variation in ADR among VA providers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: It is unclear if certain post-stroke somatic symptoms load onto items of the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), a self-report depression questionnaire. We investigated these concerns in a stroke sample using factor analysis, benchmarked against a non-stroke comparison group.
Methods: The secondary dataset constituted 787 stroke and 12,016 non-stroke participants.
Article Synopsis
- The study investigates how using small datasets to select an optimal cutoff score for the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) can lead to inaccurate results.
- Researchers evaluated whether data-driven methods for cutoff selection resulted in scores that were significantly different from the true population optimal score and if these methods produced biased accuracy estimates.
- Findings showed that many small studies frequently failed to identify the correct optimal cutoff score, particularly in smaller samples, leading to an overestimation of test sensitivity.
Article Synopsis
- Sarcoidosis is a complex disease with various outcomes, and this study aims to explore the trends in mortality among U.S. Veterans diagnosed with the condition from 2004 to 2022, focusing on demographics and geographic differences.
- The research used electronic health records to analyze data from 23,745 Veterans, finding that all-cause mortality increased by 4.7% annually and was significantly higher in Black Veterans compared to White Veterans.
- Factors such as older age, male sex, Black race, and living in the Northeast increased mortality risk, while socioeconomic status did not significantly change mortality trends in the subgroup analysis.
Veteran access to sleep medicine is of paramount importance to the Veterans Health Administration (VA). To increase access, VA has created community referral policies and programs, as well as telehealth programs. In 2017, the Office of Rural Health (ORH) funded a TeleSleep initiative focused on reaching rural Veterans with unmet sleep needs.
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