Daniel Lüdecke

University Medical Center Hamburg - Eppendorf · Department of Medical Sociology

Objectives To identify factors that predict the quality of life (QoL) of patients with dementia in acute hospitals and to analyse if a special care concept can increase patients’ QoL. Design A non-randomised, case–control study including two internal medicine wards from hospitals in Hamburg, Germany. Setting and participants In all, 526 patients...

Background: This study examines if education, income, and loneliness are associated with physical functioning and optimism in an ageing population in Germany. Furthermore, time trends of physical functioning and optimism as well as of associations with social inequality and loneliness are analyzed. Methods: The German Ageing Survey (DEAS), a longit...

Objective Governments across the world have deployed a wide range of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Certain NPIs, like limiting social contacts or lockdowns, had negative consequences for mental health in the population. Especially elder people are prone to mental illnesses during the current pandemic. Th...

Turmoil has engulfed psychological science. Causes and consequences of the reproducibility crisis are in dispute. With the hope of addressing some of its aspects, Bayesian methods are gaining increasing attention in psychological science. Some of their advantages, as opposed to the frequentist framework, are the ability to describe parameters in pr...

Objective: The COVID-19 outbreak means far-reaching changes in the organization of daily lives. Disease-related literacy and factors such as age, gender, or education play a major role in shaping individual practices of protective behavior. This paper investigates different types and frequency of practicing protective behaviors, as well as socio-de...

Zusammenfassung: Hintergrund: Familien mit pflegebedürftigen Kindern sind großen Belastungen ausgesetzt. Hieraus resultieren Risiken, die häufig zu einer schlechten Lebens- und Versorgungssituation der Familien führen. Zu ihrer Unterstützung wird im Rahmen des Forschungsprojektes NEST eine innovative, regional verankerte Unterstützungsleistung durc...

Background Overall, research on social determinants of access and quality of outpatient care in Germany is scarce. Therefore, social disparities (according to sex, age, income, migration background, and health insurance) in perceived access and quality of consultation in outpatient care (primary care physicians and specialists) in Germany were expl...

Background Intersectional approaches are needed to disaggregate the complex interaction of social identities contributing to (mental) health disparities. Health anxiety represents an overlooked public mental health issue. Therefore, intersectional inequalities in health anxiety were examined using multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and...

This cross-sectional study aimed to determine 1) whether German citizens’ adherence to health professionals’ recommendations and mandates regarding protective masks during the COVID-19 pandemic varied according to their political party affiliations, and 2) how behavioral cues provided by members of shared social groups, such as family and friends,...

In den vergangenen Jahren hat die Wissenschaft ihre Aufmerksamkeit verstärkt auf das Thema der individuellen Gesundheitskompetenz gerichtet - und gezeigt, dass große Teile der deutschen Bevölkerung eine geringe Gesundheitskompetenz aufweisen. Informationen und Angebote rund um Gesundheit sind für viele schwer zu finden, zu verstehen oder anzuwenden...

Beyond the challenge of keeping up to date with current best practices regarding the diagnosis and treatment of outliers, an additional difficulty arises concerning the mathematical implementation of the recommended methods. Here, we provide an overview of current recommendations and best practices and demonstrate how they can easily and convenient...

Background Despite the epidemiological and economic relevance of the irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), there is a lack of research on what the general public knows and thinks about this condition (IBS literacy). Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore public knowledge and beliefs about IBS in Germany. Moreover, associations of knowledge and b...

Perceived treatment urgency of mental disorders are important as they determine utilization of health care. The aim was to analyze variations in perceived treatment urgency in cases of psychosis (adolescents), alcoholism (adults), and depression (older adults) with two levels of severity each by characteristics of the case and the respondents. A te...

Background Until now a comprehensive, consensus-based tool that can be used by a variety of health care organizations for assessing their organizational health literacy (OHL) is not available. Therefore, we aimed to develop and test a literature- and consensus-based self-assessment tool. Methods The study is based on a scoping review that was prev...

Beyond the challenge of keeping up-to-date with current best practices regarding the diagnosis and treatment of outliers, an additional difficulty arises concerning the mathematical implementation of the recommended methods. Here, we provide an overview of current recommendations and best practices and demonstrate how they can easily and convenient...

Background: Governments across Europe deployed non-pharmaceutical interventions to mitigate the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which not only showed clear benefits but also had negative consequences on peoples' health. Health inequalities increased, disproportionally affecting people with higher age or lower education. This study a...

Objectives: We analyze whether the prevalence of depressive symptoms differs among various migrant and non-migrant populations in Germany and to what extent these differences can be attributed to socioeconomic position (SEP) and social relations. Methods: The German National Cohort health study (NAKO) is a prospective multicenter cohort study (N =...

Background The overarching project goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of a cross-sectoral and cross-service provider offering professional support for families with chronically ill and disabled children: so-called Family Health Partners (in German: ‘Familien-Gesundheits-Partner’ or FGP). This needs-oriented service, which is anchored in regional...

In both theoretical and applied research, it is often of interest to assess the strength of an observed association. Existing guidelines also frequently recommend going beyond null-hypothesis significance testing and reporting effect sizes and their confidence intervals. As such, measures of effect sizes are increasingly reported, valued, and under...

Background: Until now a comprehensive, consensus-based tool that can be used by a variety of health care organizations for assessing their organizational health literacy (OHL) is missing. Therefore, we aimed to develop and test a literature- and consensus-based self-assessment tool. Methods: The study is based on a literature review that was previo...

Background Quality of life (QoL) of people with dementia (PwD) is an important indicator of quality of care. Studying the impact of acute hospital settings on PwD’s QoL requires assessment instruments that consider environmental factors. Until now, dementia-specific QoL instruments have not yet demonstrated their feasibility in acute hospitals beca...

The recent growth of data science is partly fueled by the ever-growing amount of data and the joint important developments in statistical modeling, with new and powerful models and frameworks becoming accessible to users. Although there exist some generic functions to obtain model summaries and parameters, many package specific modeling functions d...

Correlations tests are arguably one of the most commonly used statistical procedures, and are used as a basis in many applications such as exploratory data analysis, structural modelling, data engineering etc. In this context, we present correlation, a toolbox for the R language and part of the easystats collection, focused on correlation analysis....

The {datawizard} package for the R programming language provides a lightweight toolbox to assist in key steps involved in any data analysis workflow: (1) wrangling the raw data to get it in the needed form, (2) applying preprocessing steps and statistical transformations, and (3) compute statistical summaries of data properties and distributions. T...

The {datawizard} package for the R programming language (R Core Team, 2021) provides a lightweight toolbox to assist in key steps involved in any data analysis workflow: (1) wrangling the raw data to get it in the needed form, (2) applying preprocessing steps and statistical transformations, and (3) compute statistical summaries of data properties...

A majority of the workforce in the humanitarian aid consists of volunteers who partly suffer from health problems related to their voluntary service. To date, only a fraction of the current research focuses on this population. The aim of this qualitative explorative study was to identify burdening and protective organisational factors for health an...

Background Quality of life (QoL) of people with dementia (PwD) is an important indicator of quality of care. Studying the impact of acute hospital settings on PwD’s QoL requires assessment instruments that consider environmental factors. Until now, dementia-specific QoL instruments have not demonstrated their feasibility in acute hospitals. Therefo...

Analyzing immunization coverage data is crucial to guide decision-making in national immunization programs and monitor global initiatives such as the Immunization Agenda 2030. We aimed to assess the quality of reported child immunization coverage data for 194 countries over 20 years. We analyzed child immunization coverage as reported to the World...

Introduction: European populations are becoming older and more diverse. Little is known about the health differences between the migrant and non-migrant elderly in Europe. The aim of this paper was to analyse changes in the health patterns of middle- and older-aged migrant and non-migrant populations in Europe from 2004 to 2017, with a specific fo...

The see package is embedded in the easystats ecosystem, a collection of R packages that operate in synergy to provide a consistent and intuitive syntax when working with statistical models in the R programming language (R Core Team, 2021). Most easystats packages return comprehensive numeric summaries of model parameters and performance. The see pa...

The see package is embedded in the easystats ecosystem, a collection of R packages that operate in synergy to provide a consistent and intuitive syntax when working with statistical models in the R programming language (R Core Team, 2021). Most easystats packages return comprehensive numeric summaries of model parameters and performance. The see pa...

Background Organizational health literacy (OHL) aims to respond to the health literacy needs of patients by improving health information and services and making them easier to understand, access, and apply. This scoping review primarily maps criteria characterizing health literate health care organizations. Secondary outcomes are the concepts and t...

A crucial part of statistical analysis is evaluating a model's quality and fit, or performance. During analysis, especially with regression models, investigating the fit of models to data also often involves selecting the best fitting model amongst many competing models. Upon investigation, fit indices should also be reported both visually and nume...

A crucial part of statistical analysis is evaluating a model's quality and fit, or performance. During analysis, especially with regression models, investigating the fit of models to data also often involves selecting the best fitting model amongst many competing models. Upon investigation, fit indices should also be reported both visually and nume...

In both theoretical and applied research, it is often of interest to assess the strength of an observed association. This is typically done to allow the judgment of the magnitude of an effect (especially when units of measurement are not meaningful, e.g., in the use of estimated latent variables; Bollen, 1989), to facilitate comparing between predi...

Introduction: Adults Born Very Preterm (ABP) are an underperceived but steadily increasing patient population. It has been shown that they face multiple physical, mental and emotional health problems as they age. Very little is known about their specific health care needs beyond childhood and adolescence. This article focuses on their personal pers...

The recent growth of data science is partly fueled by the ever-growing amount of data and the joint important developments in statistical modeling, with new and powerful models and frameworks becoming accessible to users. Although there exist some generic functions to obtain model summaries and parameters, many package-specific modeling functions d...

Correlations tests are arguably one of the most commonly used statistical procedures, and are used as a basis in many applications such as exploratory data analysis, structural modelling, data engineering etc. In this context, we present correlation, a toolbox for the R language (R Core Team, 2019) and part of the easystats collection, focused on c...

Objective To examine differences in the anamnesis in heart failure patients by patient and physician gender. Methods A factorial experimental design with video vignettes was applied. While the dialog of an initial encounter because of heart failure symptoms was identical in all videos, patients, played by professional actors, differed in terms of...

Background The majority of acute care hospitals are not prepared for people with dementia with acute diseases in need of treatment. This results in an increased likelihood of the personnel being overtaxed. Dementia is the most frequent reason that hospital personnel administer sedating medication and use restraining measures.Objective The aim of th...

Objectives: Two research questions will be addressed: (1) What does the German public think about possible causes of somatic symptom disorder (SSD) and are there differences in causal attributions according to symptom and course of SSD? (2) Are causal attributions associated with beliefs about treatment and stigmatizing attitudes? Methods: Two v...

This paper investigates the associations between social relationships, age and the use of preventive health services among German adults. Data stem from the German Ageing Survey (10,324 respondents). The use of preventive health services was assessed by asking for regular use of flu vaccination and cancer screening in the past years. Predictors of...

Turmoil has engulfed psychological science. Causes and consequences of the reproducibility crisis are in dispute. With the hope of addressing some of its aspects, Bayesian methods are gaining increasing attention in psychological science. Some of their advantages, as opposed to the frequentist framework, are the ability to describe parameters in pr...

Objectives Differences in public beliefs about causes of obesity between the USA and Germany are analyzed. We additionally examine the relevance of social characteristics of individuals with obesity for causal attributions in the two countries. Methods National telephone surveys were conducted in both countries (total sample = 2802). Vignettes des...

The Bayesian framework for statistics is quickly gaining in popularity among scientists, for reasons such as reliability and accuracy (particularly in noisy data and small samples), the possibility of incorporating prior knowledge into the analysis, and the intuitive interpretation of results (Andrews & Baguley, 2013; Etz & Vandekerckhove, 2016; Kr...

Background: While there is evidence for educational health inequalities in Europe, studies on time trends and on the explanatory contribution of social relations are less consistent. It has been shown that the use of welfare state typologies can be helpful to examine health inequalities in a comparative perspective. Against this background, analys...

Smoking is associated with automatic approach tendencies towards smoking-related stimuli. Therefore, it has been investigated whether training smoking individuals to consistently avoid smoking-related stimuli exerts positive effects on smoking behavior (Approach-Bias Modification [AppBM]). A web-based pilot study provided preliminary evidence for t...

There is evidence that training addicted participants to implicitly avoid disorder-related stimuli by using a training version of the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT) results in reduced substance consumption (i.e., Approach Bias Modification [AppBM]). The aim of the present web-based study was to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of AppBM...

Hamburg hat mit einem Anteil von 18,9 % an über 64-Jährigen einen relativ günstigen Altersquotienten von 30 gegenüber 35 in ganz Deutschland (Destatis 2017). Doch auch hier bekommt das Risiko der Pflegebedürftigkeit eine erhebliche gesellschaftsrelevante Dimension. Die Organisation der Langzeitpflege ist zu einer komplexen Gestaltungsaufgabe geword...

Healthcare providers seek to improve patient-centred care. The fragmentation of services requires establishing integrated care partnerships to reach this goal. The challenge is both to control costs while enhancing the quality of care and to co-ordinate this process in a setting with many organizations involved. The problem is establishing control...

Results of regression models, like estimates, are typically presented as tables that are easy to understand. Sometimes pure estimates are not helpful and difficult to interpret. This is especially true for interaction terms in logistic regression or even more complex models, or transformed terms (quadratic or cubic terms, polynomials, splines), whe...

Data preparation is a common task in research, which usually takes the most amount of time in the analytical process. There are typically two types of data transformation: arranging and reshaping data sets (like filtering observations or selecting variables, combining data sets etc.) and recoding and converting variables. Statistical software packa...

Für Menschen mit einer schweren, stationär behandlungsbedürftigen Akuterkrankung und der (Neben-)Diagnose „Demenz“ ist der Großteil der Akutkrankenhäuser nicht optimal vorbereitet. Insbesondere die personelle Ausstattung und Qualifikation als auch die baulichen und räumlichen Bedingungen entsprechen den besonderen Bedarfen und Bedürfnissen demenzer...

Depressionen sind eine weltweit verbreitete und häufige Erkrankung. Trotz der Bedeutung des Themas finden sich nur wenige vergleichende Untersuchungen zu sozialen Ungleichheiten bei Depression. Insgesamt ist der Forschungsstand zu internationalen Vergleichen von sozialen Ungleichheiten bei Depression defizitär. Dies gilt insbesondere für Untersuchu...

Objectives Demographic change has led to an increase of older people in need of long-term care in nearly all European countries. Informal carers primarily provide the care and support needed by dependent people. The supply and willingness of individuals to act as carers are critical to sustain informal care resources as part of the home health care...

Distribution of adjusted inverse probability weights. (PDF)

EUROFAMCARE dataset used for the analyses, as RData file (to use with R statistics). (ZIP)

Objectives This paper investigates (1) how social relationships (SRs) relate to the frequency of general practitioner (GP) visits among middle-aged and older adults in Europe, (2) if SRs moderate the association between self-rated health and GP visits, and (3) how the associations vary regarding employment status. Methods Data stem from the Survey...

Der Großteil der Akutkrankenhäuser ist für Menschen mit Demenz nicht optimal vorbereitet. Demenzerkrankungen sind häufig Grund für den Einsatz freiheitsentziehender Maßnahmen oder ruhig stellender Medikamente. Das kann zur Verschlechterung des Gesundheitszustandes (z.B. als Folge von Stürzen und Delir) der Patienten führen. Daher wird in einem Hamb...

Patientenorientierung hat stetig an Bedeutung gewonnen und wird als wesentlicher Bestandteil der Versorgungsqualität angesehen. Regulations- und Steuerungsmechanismen (z.B. Modelle der integrierten Versorgung), müssen sicherstellen, dass aufgrund knapper finanzieller Ressourcen die Versorgung nicht zu Gunsten des Profitstrebens vernachlässigt wird....

Purpose: To examine income-related disparities in health-related quality of life (HRQOL) over a one-year period after surgery (radical prostatectomy) and its contributory factors in a longitudinal perspective. Evidence of associations between income and HRQOL among patients with prostate cancer (PCa) is sparse and their explanations still remain u...

Patientenorientierung hat in den letzten Jahren in der Krankenbehandlung bzw. vernetzten Versorgung immer mehr an Bedeutung gewonnen und wird als ein wesentlicher Bestandteil angesehen, um die Versorgungsqualität zu verbessern (Charmel und Frampton 2008; Weijden u. a. 2010). Das Konzept der Patientenorientierung schließt zahlreiche Akteure ein.