Publications by authors named "Priyanka Chilakamarri"

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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Background: In fiscal year 2021, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) provided care for sleep disorders to 599,966 Veterans, including 189,932 rural Veterans. To further improve rural access, the VA Office of Rural Health developed the TeleSleep Enterprise-Wide Initiative (EWI). TeleSleep's telemedicine strategies include tests for sleep apnea at the Veteran's home rather than in a sleep lab; Clinical Video Telehealth applications; and other forms of virtual care.

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Background: Travel is a major barrier to healthcare access for Veteran Affairs (VA) patients, and disproportionately affects rural Veterans (approximately one quarter of Veterans). The CHOICE/MISSION acts' intent is to increase timeliness of care and decrease travel, although not clearly demonstrated. The impact on outcomes remains unclear.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aims to compare the demographic characteristics and health conditions of rural and urban Veterans with sleep disorders from 2010 to 2021, and to assess if living in rural areas affects access to sleep care.* -
  • Findings indicate that while the rates of diagnosed sleep disorders were similar in both groups, rural Veterans were more likely to have chronic conditions like lung disease, heart failure, and diabetes, but received sleep treatment less frequently than urban Veterans.* -
  • The results suggest that sleep disorders may be underdiagnosed in rural Veterans, highlighting rurality as a barrier to accessing necessary sleep care, which the Veterans Affairs (VA) is trying to address through various programs, including telehealth.*
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Article Synopsis
  • Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a serious health issue, especially among U.S. military Veterans, and there's a need to improve diagnosis and treatment due to high demand for these services.
  • This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of removing the initial provider meeting for OSA diagnosis, analyze home sleep apnea testing (HSAT) accuracy, and create guidelines for HSAT use in at-risk groups.
  • Conducted over four years at three VA sleep medicine sites, the research will track referral times, treatment adherence, patient satisfaction, and ultimately aim to improve OSA clinical practices.
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Purpose Of Review: Diabetic neuropathy from type I diabetes (DMI), type II diabetes (DMII), or gestational diabetes commonly occurs concurrently with restless legs syndrome (RLS) with an estimated prevalence in DMII specifically of 17.7 to 45%. The diagnosis of RLS can be obscured by symptoms of peripheral neuropathy, which may be similar to those of RLS, but also by other RLS mimics, including nocturnal leg cramps or akathisia.

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Background/objective: Inter-hospital patient transfers for neurocritical care are increasingly common due to increased regionalization for acute care, including stroke and intracerebral hemorrhage. This process of transfer is uniquely vulnerable to errors and risk given numerous handoffs involving multiple providers, from several disciplines, located at different institutions. We present failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) as a systems engineering methodology that can be applied to neurocritical care transitions to reduce failures in communication and improve patient safety.

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Purpose: This work compares the relative cost utility of ranibizumab and aflibercept with and without verteporfin photodynamic therapy (vPDT) for the treatment of polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy.

Methods: A retrospective cost and outcomes analysis of the PLANET (Efficacy and Safety of Intravitreal Aflibercept for Polypoidal Choroidal Vasculopathy) and EVEREST II (Efficacy and Safety of Ranibizumab With or Without Verteporfin Photodynamic Therapy for Polypoidal Choroidal Vasculopathy) studies was performed. Clinical utilization and outcomes were based on data from these clinical trials, and costs were obtained from Medicare fee schedules.

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Purpose Of Review: Hemicrania Continua (HC) is a daily and persistent form of headache that is characterized by side-locked pain which is continuous, varies in severity and can be associated with conjunctival injection, lacrimation, nasal congestion, rhinorrhea, eyelid edema, forehead or facial sweating and miosis and/or ptosis.

Recent Findings: Functional imaging studies have shown activation of subcortical structures such as the posterior hypothalamus and dorsal rostral pons, which are known to disinhibit the trigeminal autonomic reflex, a reflex responsible for autonomic outflow through trigeminal efferents. A similar pathway activation is seen in other Trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias (TAC) which solidifies HC as a TAC.

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Purpose Of Review: Chiari malformations (CM) are a group of neuroanatomical pathologies resulting from overcrowding of the hindbrain. The purpose of this review is to characterize Chiari headache (CH) and describe diagnosis and treatment of the condition.

Recent Findings: Recent research has helped solidify the criteria for diagnosis of CH.

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Objective: To determine whether spindle activity differs in young children with and without autism.

Methods: We investigated differences in spindle density, duration, and oscillatory features in 135 young children with autism, developmental delay without autism (DD), or typical development (TD) and secondarily assessed the dimensional relationship between spindle density and both cognitive ability and social functioning.

Results: Compared to TD, both spindle density (Cohen 0.

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The current report used structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to objectively measure olfactory bulb volume and olfactory sulcal depth in patients diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia and healthy controls. Additional measures were obtained to assess olfactory function. The olfactory bulb and sulcus were manually traced on structural 3T MRIs for 25 right-handed male patients diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia and 25 matched male healthy controls.

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