Annette Kjær Ersbøll

• University of Southern Denmark

Objectives Little is known about medical students’ speak-up barriers upon recognizing or becoming aware of risky or deficient actions of others. Improving our knowledge on these helps in preparing student to function in actual health care organizations. The aim was to examine medical students' perceived reasons for silence in respect to different s...

Background We aimed to explore (1) the influence of healthcare professionals' (HCPs’) specialty, profession, gender and length of employment on their perception of six dimensions of patient safety culture (PSC) and (2) the relation between these characteristics and the two dimensions of safety climate and perception of management. Methods In a cro...

Background The literature about the impact of congenital heart disease (CHD) on the length of hospital stay after delivery is limited, and nonexisting in a country with free and equal access to healthcare. We aimed to examine the hypothesis that Danish women with CHD have a longer hospital stay after delivery compared to women without CHD. Secondar...

Background The Danish Helicopter Emergency Medical Services (HEMS) is part of the Danish Emergency Medical Services System serving 5.7 million citizens with 1% living on islands not connected to the mainland by road. HEMS is dispatched based on pre-defined criteria including severity and urgency, and moreover to islands for less urgent cases, when...

Background The aim of this trial was to compare a video- and a simulation-based teaching method to the conventional lecture-based method, hypothesizing that the video- and simulation-based teaching methods would lead to improved recognition of breathing patterns during cardiac arrest. Methods In this Danish, investigator-initiated, stratified, ran...

IntroductionA small number of adverse events of seizure in patients using desloratadine (DL) have been reported. The European Medicines Agency requested a post-authorization safety study to investigate whether there is an association between DL exposure and seizure.Objective The aim was to study the association between DL exposure and incidence of...

Background Medical dispatchers have limited information to assess the appropriate emergency response when citizens call the emergency number. We explored whether live video from bystanders’ smartphones changed emergency response and was beneficial for the dispatcher and caller. Methods From June 2019 to February 2020, all medical dispatchers could...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on people's lives and may influence mental health in the general population. In a unique representative Danish longitudinal study, we examined mental well-being measured just before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Danish Health and Wellbeing Survey is the Danish contribution to the European Health I...

Background Disease mapping aims at identifying geographic patterns in disease. This may provide a better understanding of disease aetiology and risk factors as well as enable targeted prevention and allocation of resources. Joint mapping of multiple diseases may lead to improved insights since e.g. similarities and differences between geographic pa...

Background Citizen responder programs are implemented worldwide to dispatch volunteer citizens to participate in out‐of‐hospital cardiac arrest resuscitation. However, the risk of injuries in relation to activation is largely unknown. We aimed to assess the risk of physical injury for dispatched citizen responders. Methods and Results Since Septem...

Aim Quantifying the ratio describing the difference between “true route” and “straight-line” distances from out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCAs) to the closest accessible automated external defibrillator (AED) can help correct likely overestimations in AED coverage. Furthermore, we aimed to examine to what extent the closest AED based on true ro...

Aims This study aimed to describe the study design and respondent characteristics (including non-response analyses) of the Danish Health and Wellbeing Surveys in 2015 and 2019 and a follow-up survey that was carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Methods The Danish Health and Wellbeing Survey is the Danish part of the European Health In...

Pesticide pollution has raised public concern in Denmark due to potential negative health impacts and frequent findings of new substances after a recent expansion of the groundwater monitoring programme. Danish drinking water comes entirely from groundwater. Both the raw groundwater and the treated drinking water are regularly monitored, and the ch...

Introduction: The reference test to evaluate patients with suspected respiratory virus infection is a real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) from a nasopharyngeal swab (NPS). However, other specimen collection methods such as an oropharyngeal swab (OPS) or saliva specimen are also used for SARS-CoV-2 testing during the...

Background The prevalence and incidence rate of atrial fibrillation (AF) increase worldwide and AF is a risk factor for more adverse cardiovascular diseases including stroke. Approximately 44% of AF cases cannot be explained by common individual risk factors and risk might therefore also be related to the environment. By studying geographical varia...

Aims: Existing quality of life questionnaires are either disease specific or generic in their assessment of themes which are perceived important to the quality of life in populations with disabilities. To be able to improve quality of life in a population with diverse disabilities there was a need for a cross-disability instrument. The Electronic...

Importance Emergency medical dispatchers fail to identify approximately 25% of cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), resulting in lost opportunities to save lives by initiating cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Objective To examine how a machine learning model trained to identify OHCA and alert dispatchers during emergency calls affected OH...

The data presented in this article are supplementary data related to the research article entitled “The Copenhagen Tool: A research tool for evaluation of BLS educational interventions” (Jensen et al., 2019). We present the following supplementary materials and data: 1) a standardized scenario used to introduce the test for gathering data on intern...

Objectives: Psychosocial healthcare is recommended, but little is known about how patients perceive the level of care and whether subgroups of patients experience less psychosocial healthcare than others. We examined the prevalence of patient-reported psychosocial healthcare and factors predicting patient-reported lack of psychosocial healthcare am...

Introduction Over the past decades, major changes have been made in basic life support (BLS) guidelines and manikin technology. The aim of this study was to develop a BLS evaluation tool based on international expert consensus and contemporary validation to enable more valid comparison of research on BLS educational interventions. Methods A modern...

Introduction Social and family conditions are likely of great importance to dental health; however, limited evidence of familial aggregation of caries among adolescent siblings exists. Moreover, social and family-level factors have never been evaluated as isolated caries predictors at the individual level. Objectives The objectives were to evaluat...

Background: Patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) are at high risk of recurrent cardiovascular (CV) event. The European guidelines recommend low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) levels < 1.8 mmol/L and early initiation of intensive lipid-lowering therapy (LLT) to reduce CV risk. In order to reduce the risk of further cardiac events, t...

Background Dispatching citizen responders through a smartphone application (app) holds the potential to increase bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and defibrillation in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). Objectives This study investigated arrival at the OHCA location of app-dispatched citizen responders before the Emergency Medical...

Purpose To determine the prospective relation between workplace violence and the risk of long-term sickness absence (LTSA), and study if work-unit social capital could buffer this effect. As an explorative analysis, the association between work-unit social capital and workplace violence is also tested. Methods The study is based on the Well-being...

The importance of social isolation and loneliness on our health is widely recognised in previous research. This study compares loneliness in deprived neighbourhood with that in the general population. It further examines whether social isolation and loneliness are associated with health-risk behaviours (including low intake of fruit or vegetables,...

Background Women with maternal congenital heart disease have a higher risk of preterm birth (PTB) and giving birth to a small for gestational age (SGA) infant. Advanced maternal age (≥35 years) likewise increases the risk of PTB and SGA, probably explained by poorer cardiovascular status. It is likely that advanced maternal age is particularly detr...

Background: Mental well-being is fundamental for a good life. Previous literature has examined the predictors of mental disorders and continuous measures of positive mental health. Very few studies have specifically focused on the predictors of different levels of mental well-being, but those that have suggest a different picture. This study aimed...

Purpose: Published epidemiological studies on the association between finasteride use and the risk of male breast cancer have been inconclusive due to methodological limitations including a few male breast cancer cases included. Determinants of male breast cancer have been studied, but it remains unexplored whether these are also related to finast...

Objectives This study determined the prospective relation between physical workload and long-term sickness absence (LTSA) and examined if work-unit social capital may buffer the effect of high physical workload on LTSA. Methods We included 28 925 participants from the Danish Well-being in HospitAL Employees (WHALE) cohort, and followed them for tw...

Background We hypothesized that women with congenital heart disease ( CHD ) are at increased risk of giving birth preterm, including very and moderately preterm and giving birth to infants small for gestational age ( SGA ). We aimed to investigate this in a nation‐wide study with focus on the potential modifying effect of socioeconomic status. Met...

Background: Non-technical skills (NTS) are essential for healthcare professionals. Earlier the students are made aware of this, the more time they have to acquire these skills. Escape rooms have been introduced in the medical literature but a detailed published manual on setting up and running such a learning modality is lacking. The purpose of thi...

Objectives To examine longitudinal (seven years) relationships among cardiorespiratory fitness (VO2peak), body fatness, and motor competence. Method Data were collected as part of the Copenhagen School Child Intervention Study (CoSCIS). Body fatness was assessed by the sum of four skinfolds. VO2peak was measured directly in a continuous running pr...

Background: Etoricoxib is a second-generation cyclooxygenase-2-inhibitor approved in 2012 for short-term treatment of pain associated with dental surgery. Objectives: To evaluate etoricoxib utilization in dental patients in the Nordic countries, including its off-label use. Methods: The entire populations of Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway with...

Aims: This study described the interplay between geographical and social inequalities in survival after incident acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and examined whether geographical variation in survival exists when accounting for sociodemographic characteristics of the patients and their neighbourhood. Methods: Ringmap visualization and generali...

Background: Emergency medical dispatchers fail to identify approximately 25% of cases of out of hospital cardiac arrest, thus lose the opportunity to provide the caller instructions in cardiopulmonary resuscitation. We examined whether a machine learning framework could recognize out-of-hospital cardiac arrest from audio files of calls to the emer...

Background: In case reports, concerns have been raised as to whether finasteride use increases the risk of male breast cancer. Previous epidemiologic evidence on the potential link is conflicting. This study aimed to assess whether an association between finasteride use and male breast cancer exists after accounting for potential confounders. Met...

Objective This study examined whether geographical patterns in incident acute myocardial infarction (AMI) were explained by neighbourhood-level and individual-level sociodemographic characteristics. Design An open cohort study design of AMI-free adults (age ≥30 years) with a residential location in Denmark in 2005–2014 was used based on nationwide...

Background Simulation-based mastery training may improve clinical performance. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of simulation-based mastery training on clinical performance in abdominal diagnostic ultrasound for radiology residents. Method This study was a multicenter randomized controlled trial registered at clinicaltrials.gov (i...

Background Psychiatric comorbidity might modify the disease course adversely in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Treatment options include antidepressants, which, apart from improving mood, have anti-inflammatory properties that might modify the disease course. This nationwide study aimed to examine the influence of antidepressants o...

Introduction: Survival from Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest is highly associated with bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The quality of bystander CPR is influenced by citizens attending Basic Life Support (BLS) courses and the quality of these courses. The purpose of the study was to investigate content, quality and compliance with the Europe...

Background: Lack of formal education is an important social determinant of health inequality and represents a public health problem. School dropout is particularly common in vocational education; however few prevention programs targeting dropout in the vocational school setting have been evaluated. The purpose of the present study was to test the...

Background: Assessing the actual implementation of multi-component interventions can provide important knowledge for future interventions. Intervention components may be implemented differently, knowledge about this can provide an understanding of which components are essential and therefore must be included. The aim of this study was to examine t...

Introduction: High arsenic concentration in drinking water is associated with a higher incidence rate of stroke, but only few studies have investigated an association with arsenic in drinking water at low concentration (<50 μg/L). Objective: To examine if arsenic in drinking water at low concentration was associated with higher incidence rate of...

Introduction More women with congenital heart disease are reaching childbearing age compared to earlier, due to advances in diagnosis and treatment. Women with congenital heart disease are at increased risk of obstetric and cardiac complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Likewise, studies indicate an increased risk of adverse neonatal outcom...

Introduction Socially vulnerable and homeless peoples’ life situation is characterized by combined social, physical and mental problems resulting in complex health care needs. Yet, they are hard to reach and often do not seek or want help. Consequently, their life expectancy is found to be remarkably lower than for the general populations. In Denma...

Introduction Sibling designs in assessing familial aggregation and risk prediction of dental caries have been largely unutilized. This large-scale investigation evaluated the robustness of parental socioeconomic position (SEP) as a cardinal determinant of caries experience by appraising it at the family level. Moreover, sibling-specific aggregation...

Concentrations and spatial variations of the four cations Na, K, Mg and Ca are known to some extent for groundwater and to a lesser extent for drinking water. Using Denmark as case, the purpose of this study was to analyze the spatial and temporal variations in the major cations in drinking water. The results will contribute to a better exposure es...

Objective There is a lack of studies investigating social capital at the workplace level in small and relatively homogeneous work-units. The aim of the study was to investigate whether work-unit social capital predicts a lower risk of individual long-term sickness absence among Danish hospital employees followed prospectively for 1 year. Methods T...

Background: The aetiology of multiple sclerosis (MS) is largely unknown, but commonly assumed to be a complex interaction between genes and environmental exposures, presumably during early life. To evaluate the possible importance and timing of environmental exposures we investigated the spatial variation in the risk of MS in Denmark according to...

Objectives: To examine longitudinal (seven years) relationships among cardiorespiratory fitness (VO2peak), body fatness, and motor competence. Method: Data were collected as part of the Copenhagen School Child Intervention Study (CoSCIS). Body fatness was assessed by the sum of four skinfolds. VO2peak was measured directly in a continuous runnin...

Background Previous studies have found that residents of deprived neighbourhoods have an increased risk of perceived stress compared to residents with similar sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics in non-deprived neighbourhoods. While stress may provide an explanatory pathway linking neighbourhood deprivation to health-risk behaviour,...

Background: Telephone triage is used to assess acute illness or injury. Clinical decision making is often assisted by triage tools that lack callers' perspectives. This study analysed callers' perception of urgency, defined as degree of worry in acute care telephone calls. Aim: To explore the caller's ability to quantify their degree of worry, t...

In Reply Two comments by Sachdev and by Uzoigwe et al have addressed influences of latitude and other potential confounding factors in our study on the association between lithium in drinking water and the incidence of dementia.

Background: There is limited research on the importance of implementation when evaluating the effect of hand hygiene interventions in school settings in developed countries. The aim of this study was to examine the association between an implementation index and the effect of the intervention. The Hi Five Intervention was evaluated in a 3-armed cl...

Figure S1. Percentage of PY among finasteride users out of PY in the total male population in each of the four Nordic countries.

Objective Measuring the quality of care as experienced by patients is increasingly recognised as a way of improving healthcare services. However, disease-specific measures that take the patient journey into account are needed. This paper presents the development of such a measure for patients with heart disease and details the psychometric evaluati...

Importance: Results from animal and human studies suggest that lithium in therapeutic doses may improve learning and memory and modify the risk of developing dementia. Additional preliminary studies suggest that subtherapeutic levels, including microlevels of lithium, may influence human cognition. Objective: To investigate whether the incidence...

Objective: Animal data suggest that subtherapeutic doses, including micro doses, of lithium may influence mood, and lithium levels in drinking water have been found to correlate with the rate of suicide. It has never been investigated whether consumption of lithium may prevent the development of bipolar disorder (primary prophylaxis). In a nation-...

Background: Despite recent advances, the average survival after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) remains <10%. Early defibrillation by an automated external defibrillator is the most important intervention for patients with OHCA, showing survival proportions >50%. Accordingly, placement of automated external defibrillators in the community as...

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate plasma levels of serotonin, calcitonin and calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) in the course of acute pancreatitis (AP) taking organ failure, etiology and severity into consideration. Material and methods: Sixty consecutive patients with alcohol- or gallstone-induced AP were included over a 15-...

Background: Previous school-based hand hygiene interventions have reported to successfully reduce infectious illness among schoolchildren. But few studies have tested the effect in large populations with adequate statistical power and analyses. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether a school-based multi-component intervention to improve han...

Suicide is a major public health concern. High-dose lithium is used to stabilize mood and prevent suicide in patients with affective disorders. Lithium occurs naturally in drinking water worldwide in much lower doses, but with large geographical variation. Several studies conducted at an aggregate level have suggested an association between lithium...

The aim of this study was to explore spatio-temporal mortality patterns in Danish swine herds from December 2013 to October 2015, and to discuss the use of mortality data for syndromic surveillance in Denmark. Although it has previously been assessed within the context of syndromic surveillance, the value of mortality data generated on a regular an...

Table S1. All Variables Included in Univariable Analysis of the Association Between Completed CPR Training and Factors Associated With Completed CPR Training Table S2. Construction of Latent Variables of Teachers' Attitudes Toward CPR Training, Perceived Pressure, and Perceived Behavioral Control to Ensure Student CPR Training Table S3. Definitio...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in pig populations is a public health concern. There is a lack of information of spatial distributions of AMR genes in pig populations at large scales. The objective of the study was to describe the spatial pattern of AMR genes in faecal samples from pig farms and to test if the AMR genes were spatially randomly distr...

Reporting of observational studies in veterinary research presents challenges that often are not addressed in published reporting guidelines. Our objective was to develop an extension of the STROBE (Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology) statement that addresses unique reporting requirements for observational studies...

The reporting of observational studies in veterinary research presents many challenges that often are not adequately addressed in published reporting guidelines. A consensus meeting of experts was organized to develop an extension of the STROBE statement to address observational studies in veterinary medicine with respect to animal health, animal p...

Background: The reporting of observational studies in veterinary research presents many challenges that often are not adequately addressed in published reporting guidelines. Objective: To develop an extension of the STROBE (Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology) statement that addresses unique reporting requirement...

The STROBE (Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology) statement was first published in 2007 and again in 2014. The purpose of the original STROBE was to provide guidance for authors, reviewers, and editors to improve the comprehensiveness of reporting; however, STROBE has a unique focus on observational studies. Although...

Background: Reporting of observational studies in veterinary research presents challenges that often are not addressed in published reporting guidelines. Objective: To develop an extension of the STROBE (Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology) statement that addresses unique reporting requirements for observational...

The STROBE (Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology) statement was first published in 2007 and again in 2014. The purpose of the original STROBE was to provide guidance for authors, reviewers and editors to improve the comprehensiveness of reporting; however, STROBE has a unique focus on observational studies. Although...

Background: Reporting of observational studies in veterinary research presents challenges that often are not addressed in published reporting guidelines. Objective: To develop an extension of the STROBE (Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology) statement that addresses unique reporting requirements for observational stu...

Osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) is a hereditary, clinically heterogeneous, connective tissue disorder. The population prevalence of OI in Denmark is 10.6 in 100,000. A hallmark of the disease is frequent fractures that are often precipitated by minimal trauma. The aim of the current study was to compare the fracture rates across the lifespan of patien...

The aims of this study were to investigate if (A) injuries and (B) increased physical education (PE) influenced the development of physical fitness in schoolchildren. Simultaneously, to investigate if a possible PE effect was modified by sport participation outside school hours. This was a longitudinal controlled school-based study. Six schools wit...

The naturally occurring geogenic elements iodine (I), lithium (Li), and strontium (Sr) have a beneficial effect on human health. Iodine has an essential role in human metabolism while Li and Sr are used, respectively, as a treatment for various mental disorders and for post-menopausal osteoporosis. The aim here is to evaluate the potential for futu...

The range of influence refers to the average distance between locations at which the observed outcomeis no longer correlated. In many studies, missing data occur and a popular tool for handling missingdata is multiple imputation. The objective of this study was to investigate how the estimated range ofinfluence is affected when 1) the outcome is on...

Background Acute myocardial infarction has severe individual and public health consequences. Spatial analysis of public health data is often performed using data aggregated in administrative areas. Reliable individual-level data on the population and disease enable examination of spatial variation of AMI in Denmark using a high geographical resolut...