Publications by authors named "Starks M"

Article Synopsis
  • A study was conducted to find out where Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) are located in Forsyth County, NC, focusing on large businesses and some small organizations.
  • Researchers carried out phone surveys with a 79.1% response rate, discovering that 411 businesses had AEDs and identifying a total of 963 AEDs across 573 locations.
  • Most AEDs (65.1%) were not listed in the state registry, and only a small fraction (11.8%) were included in the county’s emergency medical dispatch center registry.
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Background: Defibrillation in the critical first minutes of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) can significantly improve survival. However, timely access to automated external defibrillators (AEDs) remains a barrier.

Objectives: The authors estimated the impact of a statewide program for drone-delivered AEDs in North Carolina integrated into emergency medical service and first responder (FR) response for OHCA.

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Article Synopsis
  • This study investigates the impact of bystander CPR on survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, analyzing data from over 623,000 cases between 2013 and 2022 in the US.
  • It finds that bystander CPR significantly improves survival chances across different racial and ethnic groups, but the effect is strongest in White and Native American individuals, and weakest in Black individuals.
  • Additionally, the positive association of bystander CPR with survival rates is higher in men compared to women, indicating a potential disparity in outcomes based on sex and race/ethnicity.
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Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) occurs in nearly 350,000 people each year in the United States (US). Despite advances in pre and in-hospital care, OHCA survival remains low and is highly variable across systems and regions. The critical barrier to improving cardiac arrest outcomes is not a lack of knowledge about effective interventions, but rather the widespread lack of systems of care to deliver interventions known to be successful.

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Article Synopsis
  • Drone-delivered automated external defibrillators (AEDs) show potential for improving out-of-hospital cardiac arrest response times and CPR quality, with research conducted through timed simulations involving CPR and AED delivery.
  • The study involved 51 participants and found that the median time from a 9-1-1 call to starting CPR was 1 minute and 19 seconds, while retrieving and using the drone-delivered AED took just under 2 minutes.
  • Results indicated that younger participants and those with previous AED experience performed AED tasks faster, but recent CPR training did not significantly influence the quality of CPR or the AED delivery time.
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Background: Bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (B-CPR) and defibrillation for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) vary by sex, with women being less likely to receive these interventions in public. It is unknown whether sex differences persist when considering neighborhood racial and ethnic composition. We examined the odds of receiving B-CPR stratified by location and neighborhood.

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In adults, spatial location plays a special role in visual object processing. People are more likely to judge two sequentially presented objects as being identical when they appear in the same location compared to in different locations (a phenomenon referred to as Spatial Congruency Bias [SCB]). However, no comparable Identity Congruency Bias (ICB) is found, suggesting an asymmetric location-identity relationship in object binding.

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Aim Of The Study: Survival to hospital discharge from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) after receiving treatment from emergency medical services (EMS) is less than 10% in the United States. Community-focused interventions improve survival rates, but there is limited information on how to gain support for new interventions or program activities within these populations. Using data from the RAndomized Cluster Evaluation of Cardiac ARrest Systems (RACE-CARS) trial, we aimed to identify the factors influencing emergency response agencies' support in implementing an OHCA intervention.

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Pediatric anesthesia is a diverse subspecialty practiced at thousands of hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers across the country. Most unusual and high-risk cases are performed in dedicated children's hospitals. However, the majority of cases and practitioners are based in the community.

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Rationale & Objective: Black patients and those with diabetes or reduced kidney function experience a disproportionate burden of acute kidney injury (AKI) and cardiovascular events. However, whether these factors modify the association between AKI and cardiovascular events after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is unknown and was the focus of this study.

Study Design: Observational cohort.

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Article Synopsis
  • Racial health disparities in the U.S. starkly affect Black Americans compared to White Americans, largely stemming from historical and systemic anti-Black racism.
  • The article proposes a model suggesting that racism impacts brain activity and bodily processes, particularly affecting neural networks responsible for emotion and decision-making, which can lead to increased inflammation in the body.
  • These responses may result in chronic health issues and reduced well-being, highlighting the need for further research to understand the connections between racism and health outcomes.
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Background: Viral respiratory infections trigger pulmonary exacerbations (PEs) in children with cystic fibrosis (CF), but their clinical impact is not well understood.

Methods: A retrospective review of pediatric patients with CF who underwent nasopharyngeal respiratory viral panel testing during hospitalization for a PE between 2011 and 2018 was conducted. Patients were dichotomized into viral-positive and viral-negative groups.

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Space weather phenomena can threaten space technologies. A hazard among these is the population of relativistic electrons in the Van Allen radiation belts. To reduce the threat, artificial processes can be introduced by transmitting very-low-frequency (VLF) waves into the belts.

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This cohort study examines the association of COVID-19 infection with survival outcomes of US adults after in-hospital cardiac arrest.

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Background: Recent reports on challenges in resuscitation care at hospitals severely affected by the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic raise questions about how the pandemic affected outcomes for in-hospital cardiac arrest throughout the United States.

Methods: Within Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation, we conducted a retrospective cohort study to compare in-hospital cardiac arrest survival during the presurge (January 1-February 29), surge (March 1-May 15) and immediate postsurge (May 16-June 30) periods in 2020 compared to 2015 to 2019. Monthly COVID-19 mortality rates for each hospital's county were categorized, per 1 000 000 residents, as low (0-10), moderate (11-50), high (51-100), or very high (>100).

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Background: Studies have reported lower survival for in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA) during the initial COVID-19 surge. Whether the pandemic reduced IHCA survival during subsequent surges and in areas with lower COVID-19 rates is unknown.

Methods: Within Get-With-The-Guidelines®-Resuscitation, we identified 22,899 and 79,736 IHCAs during March to December in 2020 and 2015-2019, respectively.

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Background: Patients with sudden cardiac arrest occurring in the acute phase of myocardial infarction (MI-SCA) are believed to be at similar risk of death after revascularization compared with MI patients without SCA (MI-no SCA). Among patients with anterior MI, we examined whether those with MI-SCA were at greater risk of all-cause mortality or sudden cardiac death (SCD) than MI-no SCA patients.

Methods: The Home Automated External Defibrillator Trial enrolled patients with anterior MI who had not received or were candidates for an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD).

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Background Following the implementation of the HeartRescue project, with interventions in the community, emergency medical services, and hospitals to improve care and outcomes for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) in North Carolina, improved bystander and first responder treatments as well as survival were observed. This study aimed to determine whether these improvements were consistent across Black versus White individuals. Methods and Results Using the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES), we identified OHCA from 16 counties in North Carolina (population 3 million) from 2010 to 2014.

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Background: For patients with cystic fibrosis (CF), sustaining lung function through the adolescent years is crucial to slow the progressive decline that leads to significant morbidity and early mortality. This holds true for patients with high per cent predicted forced expiratory volume in 1 s (ppFEV), as they may receive less vigilant monitoring and treatment. Early identification of lung function decline followed by aggressive treatment can lead to preservation of lung function.

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Opioid overdose is the leading cause of death for Americans 25 to 64 years of age, and opioid use disorder affects >2 million Americans. The epidemiology of opioid-associated out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the United States is changing rapidly, with exponential increases in death resulting from synthetic opioids and linear increases in heroin deaths more than offsetting modest reductions in deaths from prescription opioids. The pathophysiology of polysubstance toxidromes involving opioids, asphyxial death, and prolonged hypoxemia leading to global ischemia (cardiac arrest) differs from that of sudden cardiac arrest.

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Background: Undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is a risk factor for AKI development, but few studies have quantified racial differences in AKI incidence after this procedure.

Methods: We examined the association of self-reported race (Black, White, or other) and baseline eGFR with AKI incidence among patients who underwent PCI at Duke University Medical Center between January 1, 2003, and December 31, 2013. We defined AKI as a 0.

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The "spatial congruency bias" is a behavioral phenomenon where 2 objects presented sequentially are more likely to be judged as being the same object if they are presented in the same location (Golomb, Kupitz, & Thiemann, 2014), suggesting that irrelevant spatial location information may be bound to object representations. Here, we examine whether the spatial congruency bias extends to higher-level object judgments of facial identity and expression. On each trial, 2 real-world faces were sequentially presented in variable screen locations, and subjects were asked to make same-different judgments on the facial expression (Experiments 1-2) or facial identity (Experiment 3) of the stimuli.

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Background: Cardiac arrest is the leading cause of death among patients receiving hemodialysis. Despite guidelines recommending CPR training and AED presence in dialysis clinics, rates of CPR and AED use by dialysis staff are suboptimal. Given that racial disparities exist in bystander CPR administration in non-healthcare settings, we examined the relationship between patient race/ethnicity and staff-initiated CPR and AED application within dialysis clinics.

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Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) refer to experiments with randomization carried out at the cluster or the group level. While numerous statistical methods have been developed for the design and analysis of CRTs, most of the existing methods focused on testing the overall treatment effect across the population characteristics, with few discussions on the differential treatment effect among subpopulations. In addition, the sample size and power requirements for detecting differential treatment effect in CRTs remain unclear, but are helpful for studies planned with such an objective.

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