JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
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To determine life-sustaining treatment preferences among nursing home residents, whether information regarding cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) affected these preferences, and with whom treatment preferences had been discussed, and to identify factors associated with CPR preferences. ⋯ More than half of nursing home residents capable of making decisions preferred the use of CPR. Few had discussed their preferences with health care providers. Individual preferences should be assessed when considering the use of life-sustaining treatments.
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To assess the vitamin D status in homebound, community-dwelling elderly persons; sunlight-deprived elderly nursing home residents; and healthy, ambulatory elderly persons. ⋯ Despite a relatively high degree of vitamin supplementation in the United States, homebound elderly persons are likely to suffer from vitamin D deficiency.
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To assess the short-term outcomes of incidental appendectomy through analysis of hospital administrative data and determine the consistency and plausibility of the observed results. ⋯ These findings suggest that incidental appendectomy is associated with a small but definite increase in adverse postoperative outcomes. However, plausible and consistent findings were only obtained after restricting the analysis to low-risk subgroups in which unmeasured differences in patients' baseline characteristics were less likely to confound adjusted outcome comparisons. This exercise highlights the potential pitfalls in nonrandomized outcomes comparisons using data sources with limited clinical detail, such as hospital discharge abstracts.