Cognitive function tends to worsen as kidney function declines, Jessica Kendrick, of the University of Colorado [Anschutz Medical Campus] and colleagues explained.
Renal & Urology News
CU Anschutz
Academic Office One
12631 East 17th Avenue
8601
Aurora, CO 80045
Cognitive function tends to worsen as kidney function declines, Jessica Kendrick, of the University of Colorado [Anschutz Medical Campus] and colleagues explained.
The pandemic is still disproportionately impacting vulnerable populations, and without addressing the inequities involved, it will continue to be a public health threat around the world, said Joshua Barocas, co-author on the paper and associate professor of infectious disease and internal medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz.
“It’s urgent that this happen,” said board member Barry Martin, a physician at University of Colorado Hospital [and associate professor of clinical practice of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. “For these families, it sounds like it really needs to happen immediately.”
A recently published study co-authored by Kristen Demoruelle, Kevin Deane, V. Michael Holers and Kristi Kuhn, medicine faculty in the University of Colorado School of Medicine's Division of Rheumatology, revealed an important clue to a potential culprit behind this disease: the bacteria in your gut.
ACC's newest Expert Consensus Decision Pathway offers a comprehensive and integrative framework for treating patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) and multimorbidity. The document, with a writing committee co-chaired by Larry Allen, MD, FACC and including Marc Bonaca, MD, FACC from the University of Colorado School of Medicine's Division of Cardiology, published Oct. 25 in JACC. It encourages making treatment decisions for patients based on life expectancy and "4-domains" of medical, mind and emotion, physical functioning, and social and physician environment.
In today’s AMA Update, Elizabeth Harry, senior medical director of well-being at UCHealth [and associate professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] in Aurora, Colorado, joins to discuss the connection between high childcare stress and burnout among health care workers during the pandemic.
Kevin D. Deane, associate professor of medicine and chair in rheumatology research at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, advises physicians to keep in mind other conditions linked with increased risk for severe COVID-19, including advanced age, heart, lung, or kidney problems, and autoimmune diseases.
Robert H. Eckel, emeritus professor of medicine in the divisions of cardiology and endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism, former professor of physiology and biophysics, Charles A. Boettcher II Chair in Atherosclerosis at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and past president of the American Heart Association, said the first day’s focus on cardiometabolic health in older adults brought a number of issues related to the elderly population to the forefront.
“There are several patients exactly like Tawny who are on their way to living when they are hit with this deal-breaker,” says Manali Kamdar, clinical director of lymphoma services for University of Colorado Medicine. The diagnosis creates “a huge break in what happens in living a normal life.”
Ross Camidge, MD, PhD, director, the Thoracic Oncology Clinical and Clinical Research Programs, the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, discusses toxicities observed with sunvozertinib (DZD9008) in EGFR Exon 20–Mutated non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
“Data shows that women with breast cancer who exercise have a better quality of life during and after their treatment,” said UCHealth’s Lavanya Kondapalli, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology and director of cardio-oncology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
One of my patients, Moksha Patel, who is a doctor himself, endured this from childhood until his early 30s. In September 2021, Patel underwent deep brain stimulation surgery, a rare neurosurgical procedure that can be used for severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, when it has been resistant to less invasive treatments.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus are spearheading clinical trials of cutting-edge cellular therapies to improve survival rates for aggressive cancers.
These are different viruses, but they belong to a class of about 70 flaviruses in the crosshairs of an eight-person research group led by University of Colorado School of Medicine infectious disease specialist and UCHealth physician Dr. David Beckham.
“One of the most rewarding things about our work is seeing the amazing resilience of the human spirit in our patients who are dealing with cancer,” said UCHealth’s Lavanya Kondapalli, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology and director of Cardio-Oncology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Heart Failure found that people who increasingly drank caffeinated coffee saw a lower risk for heart failure. While senior author Dr. David Kao, medical director at the University of Colorado School of Medicine's Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine, stressed the significance of this finding, he noted that more research is needed.
However, much of the data around care planning for patients with bladder cancer involves those who are younger than the typical patient with this disease, according to Elizabeth Kessler, member of University of Colorado Cancer Center and associate professor of medical oncology at CU School of Medicine.
“We really want people who have an age range of 22-65. They should have a BMI between 30 and 40,” says Shelby Sullivan, director of Gastroenterology Metabolic and Bariatric Program at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital [and associate professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. “That’s typically about 30-100 pounds overweight depending on if you are a man or woman.”
Joseph Simonetti, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado in Aurora, and colleagues reported that 60% of firearm deaths in 2020 were due to suicide, and that among the 45,979 suicide deaths that year, 51% were due to firearm injury.
It would be more accurate to say the societal response to the pandemic is largely over, said Michelle Barron, senior director of infection control at UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine].
For the sixth time in as many years, researchers at the University of Colorado lured more than $1 billion in sponsored funding and gifts….Of the four CU campuses, the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus was responsible for $777.8 million in research funding, with the Boulder campus a close second at $658 million. CU’s Denver and Colorado Springs campuses brought in less than $30 million combined.
An editorial written by Angela Sauaia, MD, PhD, Sarah Van Duzer-Moore, MD, and Ernest E. Moore, MD; Introduction by Richard L. Byyny, MD, FACP.
On hot days, go for a walk in the morning instead of the afternoon, when ozone levels are higher, said Anthony Gerber, a pulmonologist at National Jewish Health [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], a medical center in Denver specializing in respiratory diseases.
Michelle Barron, the senior medical director of infection prevention at UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], said two patients came in with Influenza A on Sunday and one had to be hospitalized. “The big message I have for everybody is get your flu shot early this year. I know there is always a debate of should I get it early or should I wait,” Barron said.
The results were published simultaneously online in the New England Journal of Medicine; along with an accompanying editorial by John Carroll, (University of Colorado School of Medicine, Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora), and Jeffrey Saver, (David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles), that provides a more-sobering assessment of the trial.
“It’s going to be different than the last two years in that, the last two years, we really haven’t seen a lot of flu. This year, I think we will see a regular flu season, which may be a little shock to people, because like I said, we’ve been covid, covid, covid for the last two years,” said Michelle Barron – UCHealth’s senior medical director for infection prevention and control.
It is the job of Michelle Barron, the Senior Director of Infection Prevention with UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] to pay attention to this kind of information. Should there be concern in Colorado because polio has resurfaced in another state?
“By and large, I think the study is well done and it certainly continues to add to the foundation of knowledge that tells us exercise is good stuff,” said Andrew Freeman, director of cardiovascular prevention and wellness at National Jewish Health [and associate professor of clinical practice of medicine at CU School of Medicine].
“A lot of the measures used during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as masking and limiting gatherings that helped limit the spread of flu, are no longer in place,” said Michelle Barron, [professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine and] UCHealth’s senior medical director for infection prevention and control in a news release.
A recent clinical trial led by Yoni Ashar, PhD [assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine] and published in the JAMA: Psychiatry indicates the power of therapies that target how we feel about hurting.
The flu typically starts circulating widely around Thanksgiving in the United States and peaks in December or January, said Michelle Barron, senior medical director for infection prevention and control at UCHealth. If the country follows the pattern set in Australia, that could mean the flu season kicks off in late October or early November, she said.
It’s safe to get the new booster and flu shots at the same time, Michelle Barron, UCHealth’s senior medical director for infection prevention and control, said in a statement. “Think of it as training your immune system in a similar manner to basic training in the military. You may learn to use a weapon and also learn physical combat. They are related but separate types of training meant for your protection,” she explained.
Claudia Hammond hears about the health consequences of a ban on abortion in some US states for young women who develop a breast cancer diagnosis during pregnancy. Professor Virginia Borges and Assistant Professor Nicole Christian from the University of Colorado explain the difficult decisions women are having to make.
Colorado’s school and child care immunization data show that 94.86 percent of the state’s school-aged children in 2021 were vaccinated against polio. “Which is good news,” Michelle Barron, senior medical director of infection prevention and control for UCHealth, recently stated on UCHealth’s website.
“We’re going to see probably the worst year we’ve seen in a couple years in terms of respiratory viruses,” said Michelle Barron, UCHealth’s senior medical director for infection prevention and control.
“This year has the potential to be a bad flu year,” said Michelle Barron, senior medical director for infection prevention and control at UCHealth. “A lot of the measures used during the COVID-19 pandemic such as masking and limiting gatherings that helped limit the spread of flu are no longer in place.”
“This year has the potential to be a bad flu year. A lot of the measures used during the COVID-19 pandemic such as masking and limiting gatherings that helped limit the spread of flu are no longer in place," said Michelle Barron, UCHealth’s senior medical director for infection prevention and control. "We also have less immunity to flu since we haven’t had the same exposures we normally have from year to year.”
9NEWS spoke with National Jewish Health pulmonologist Anthony Gerber [professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] to discuss why we may see the epidemic come back for the first time in three years. “So typically when we talk about ‘September epidemic,’ we’re talking about the return to school viral infections. This has been really different since COVID.”
There is no one reason for this gap, according to Jamie Studts, a professor of medical oncology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus School of Medicine. Part of the low rate may be that determining lung cancer screening eligibility can be difficult for overworked primary care providers, unlike other cancer screenings that have simple age-based criteria. The gap may also be related to the stigma and fatalism around lung cancer, as patients often think they will be blamed for having the disease and will not survive anyway.
“This is certainly the greatest invention of our time to be able to produce a vaccine that’s safe and effective this quickly,” said Larissa Pisney, an infectious diseases physician at UCHealth [and assistant professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine].
As a child, Dr. Abbey Lara helped her family pick cotton. She then became the first in her family to go to college. Family — and Lara's patients — motivate this caring provider every day.
One of Sarah Stella’s patients had been homeless for about four years when he was struck by a car, the impact fracturing his pelvis and breaking his femur. The 45-year-old man had surgery at Denver Health, spent a few days recovering in the hospital, and then left — to sleep in his tent. Stella, an internal medicine doctor at the safety net hospital [and associate professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], recalled how the man described in a post-surgery appointment how much his body and his bones still hurt.
“We’ve gone a couple of years now without having a normal flu season,” said Michelle Barron, UCHealth’s senior medical director of infection prevention and control [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. “We don’t have immunity like we normally do.”
Michelle Barron, professor of medicine, CU School of Medicine: “This is what we do with flu every year. For people who say this is weird science we’ve never done this. We do this every year. Every year we look to see lots of different strains of flu circulating. Not just one. When they develop the flu shots, which ones do they think based on predictions and modeling is going to be the one we should include because you are going to get exposed to this.”
Shared experience led them both to National Jewish Health’s cystic fibrosis center, led by Jennifer Taylor-Cousar [professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. “So up until 2012, all of the drugs that we used to treat CF were for the signs and symptoms,” Taylor-Cousar said.
Co-authored by Virginia F. Borges – We are oncologists; we do not perform abortions. And yet the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will harm some of our patients — indeed, the harmful effects will become a reality for all clinicians who care for women of childbearing age.
“Our aims were to get a clearer picture of what patients were understanding and not understanding, and to learn more about what educational tools patients would find most helpful. We’re seeing this need not just in breast oncology and surgery, but across all areas of healthcare,” said lead author Alexandra Verosky, a third-year medical student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, in a statement.
“It’ll start by looking like a blister, so it’ll have some fluid in it,” says Michelle Barron, the senior medical director of infection prevention and control for UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. “Over time, that will change. It’ll darken and have almost like a divot in it. And that’s fairly characteristic, but again, everybody’s a little different.”
Author Matthew K. Wynia, MD, MPH asks, What should medical professionals do when a law requires them to harm a patient? This question has become a pressing one as physicians grapple with the implications of state laws banning abortion. When these laws directly and immediately threaten the health of patients, should physicians collectively disobey them — that is, should they engage in professional civil disobedience?
Despite major U.S. civil rights advancements over the last decade, most LGBTQ+ patients have lived a lifetime under legal discrimination and often still struggle to access medical care, according to Carey Candrian, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver.
In the interviews, “[m]any described clinical encounters in which acceptance, understanding and support of SGM people was not clearly expressed by clinicians or healthcare organizations,” reported Carey Candrian, of the University of Colorado School of Medicine and colleagues. “The important connecting factor was a need to be assured that they would be treated safely and respectfully,” the authors wrote.
Dr. Mehdi Fini from Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Research Program (CVP) and Pulmonary Medicine, was interviewed by Medscpae News regarding the new paper published in Arthritis and Rheumatology regarding the clinical importance of Low Urate level.
The best source of information to guide treatment is medical research. But how do you know when that information is reliable and evidence-based? And how can you tell the difference between shoddy research findings and those that have merit? Lisa Bero, PhD, research professor of Public Health and Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus has answers.
Co-authored by Jacinda Nicklas, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine – Early treatment to prevent severe coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) is an important component of the comprehensive response to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic.
On the Monday after CU Anschutz’s shutdown on March 13, 2020, medical students fired up their laptops and met their SPs online for “telehealth visits.” The switch took some quick thinking from tech team members and program coordinators, such as CU Anschutz’s Center for Advancing Professional Excellence director Shimaa Basha and Simulation Education Project coordinator Tanya Russell. “Converting (sessions) to a virtual conversation took a lot of creative energy … to put it together and not jeopardize the session outcomes or what the students can get out of it,” Basha said.
Thomas Campbell, an internal medicine doctor at the University of Colorado Hospital [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], said he thinks the biggest reason behind not getting sick doesn’t have much to do with science and will probably frustrate anyone who has been sick. “I think a lot of that is due to luck,” said Campbell.
Have you ever been hiking or running, and your fingers started to swell? You are not alone. In fact, this happens to many people, especially during the summertime. William Cornwell [associate professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] at UCHealth said there are several factors that can cause your hands and feet to swell while you hike and exercise.
How does the virus spread? Sarah Rowan, infectious disease specialist, Denver Health [and associate professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]: Close physical contact. That could be respiratory secretions, close skin-to-skin contact, or from touching a surface that was in contact with a monkeypox sore. All of those things could happen from a variety of activities, including (but not limited to) sex.
Thomas Flaig of the University of Colorado Cancer Center discusses the rapidly changing treatment landscape for patients with bladder cancer….
Michelle Barron from UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] talks about the importance of young students getting vaccinated before returning to classes this fall.
“I think it is critical that everyone understand what's going on with this virus,” said Sarah Rowan, [associate professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine and] an infectious disease specialist at Denver Health who has been leading the system’s response to the outbreak. “There are communities with higher transmission. But anyone can be exposed.”
In November 2021, the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus—which includes UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital and Children’s Hospital Colorado (CHC)—was designated a Rare Disease Center of Excellence by the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD), the nation’s leading advocacy organization on rare diseases.
“We’ve been doing rare disease work and research for decades, although it’s been happening in a way that’s not very structured across the campus,” says Matthew Taylor, director of adult clinical genetics at the CU School of Medicine. “Now that we have this center designation, we’ll be able to organize all of our rare disease services and be in a better position for patients to connect with us more easily.”
Jennifer Taylor-Cousar, a pulmonologist at National Jewish Health [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], knows how difficult it is for doctors to witness patients struggling to find medications. “These drugs can be very, very expensive, and we see a lot of patients fall through the cracks,” Taylor-Cousar says. “It’s incredibly hard to watch.”
“So you’re not going to catch it on a bus. You’re not going to catch it in the grocery store,” said Michelle Barron, UCHealth’s senior medical director of infection prevention and control [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine].
Strong, punchy interferon responses are essential to early viral control, acting as a “first line of defense” that comes online within minutes or hours, says Mario Santiago, PhD, an immunologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
Even so, “I think there’s every reason to think that interferons are still going to be effective” in some form, once scientists nail the timing, recipe, and dose, says Eric Poeschla, MD, Santiago’s collaborator at CU Anschutz. The molecules are, after all, nature’s DIY antivirals.
Lilia Cervantes cared for a patient who she then befriended until the woman died in 2014 after being unable to obtain regularly scheduled dialysis. The internal medicine hospitalist set about seeking a change in her state of Colorado. It took a few years, but the state moved in 2019 to include scheduled dialysis for undocumented immigrants under Emergency Medicaid. Now, Cervantes [associate professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] informally advises medical colleagues in five states seeking to do the same, including Georgia.
After the cancer had metastasized, McNeilly’s care team expanded to include CU Cancer Center member Breelyn Wilky, who knew she had to act fast. “He had developed disease all over his body, very symptomatic, miserable, and all of a sudden his quality of life was horrible and we were worried he was going to die,” says Wilky, associate professor of medical oncology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is one of the locations partnering with NIH for the study. 9NEWS spoke with Kristine Erlandson, who is overseeing the study there.
“Medical schools are currently training students about combatting racism, and there should also be training in combatting discrimination against people with disability, also known as ‘ableism,’” emphasizes Eric G. Campbell, a survey scientist at the University of Colorado and senior author of the study. “Every practicing physician can expect to see increasing numbers of people with disability, and they need to know how to accommodate them.”
Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus hope they have begun to crack the code, though, after a study focusing on T cells, the special ops forces of the immune system. “I’ve been excited about it,” said Brent Palmer, an associate professor of allergy and clinical immunology in the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the senior author of the paper. “I think it’s a pretty important study.”
But Thomas Campbell, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said CDC data show that while two-thirds of the U.S. population has received the full course of primary doses (two shots in the case of Moderna and Pfizer’s vaccines, or one of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine), just under half of that group has gotten one booster shot.
"SARS-CoV-2 just recently crossed the species barrier into humans and continues to adapt to its new host," said Eric Poeschla, Professor of medicine, at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
The No. 1 hospital in the state of Colorado, according to the U.S. News and World Report 2022–23 Best Hospitals Ranking released Tuesday, was last year’s top-ranked UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora. This marks the 11th year in a row U.S. News has ranked the hospital in the No. 1 spot. Three additional UCHealth hospitals ranked second, fourth and fifth on the list.
Cari Levy, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and a co-author of the study, specializes in palliative and tele-nursing home care for the VA. Levy, who has worked for the VA for about 20 years, says how medical foster homes provided care during the pandemic carries lessons for civilian clinics.
Paul MacLean, a professor of medicine and pathology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, has carefully studied weight regain. He identifies three reasons why dieters regain weight: biology, behavior and, environment.
“This review builds on decades of previous work conclusively showing that a diet high in fruits and vegetables- many of which contain carotenoids, responsible for some of the vivid colors of fruits and vegetables- is associated with healthy aging and longevity, and a lower risk of chronic disease,” said Amy Keller, Assistant Professor in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Diabetes at the University of Colorado, not involved in the review.
“It's not overwhelming us in any way compared to what we’ve seen at previous points in the pandemic,” said Anuj Mehta, a pulmonologist with Denver Health [and assistant professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. “So from a hospital perspective, I think directly related to acute COVID infections, things are going actually, OK.”
“So many institutions have made strides to address equity and representation while decreasing burnout, and this data suggests that attending to childcare stress will be an important part of those initiatives,” Elizabeth Harry, associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and lead researcher on the study, told Medscape Medical News.
“While increased risk for heat stroke is an obvious manifestation of global warming, climate change is actually causing health problems today, in both direct and indirect ways,” says Richard J. Johnson, a medical professor and researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, and one of the world’s foremost experts on the intersection of heat stress and kidney disease.
“We learned that they really do want to be involved in discussions of their care and to have clear expectations for their treatment,” said Elizabeth Kessler, a University of Colorado Cancer Center member and associate professor of medical oncology in the CU School of Medicine, one of the study’s authors, in a news release. “They want to be engaged early in the process and not feel like they’re waiting or wishing for information.”
The majority of studies on mistreatment have focused on the culture of medicine, not on poor treatment of physicians from patients, according to AMA member Lotte Dyrbye, senior associate dean of faculty and chief well-being officer at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Dyrbye and her colleagues hypothesized that there was a link between suboptimal treatment and higher risk for burnout.
“The current epidemiology suggests that ongoing spread is probably more than we know,” said Michelle Barron, director of infection prevention and control for UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], told KUNC. “There is some unique properties of the current outbreak, and it's people that are having prolonged contact with people that have the lesions or are in the early stages where they don’t realize that the rash is actually developing.”
Researchers need to write better discussion sections in their papers, tweeted Vineet Chopra, chair of the department of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, who also serves as deputy editor for the Annals of Internal Medicine. “I often read discussions that are long winded, meandering and fail to make an impact,” he wrote.
“These findings provide a more complete understanding of the true spectrum of thrombotic risk facing patients with PAD undergoing revascularization and may help to identify patients at higher risk for VTE after LER,” wrote study author Connie N. Hess, Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Thomas Campbell, an internal medicine physician [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] who ran clinical trials for COVID vaccines, told UCHealth, that it’s “important to plan for another wave in the fall and winter because there’s a good probability that it will happen,” as COVID will likely continue to spread due to a variety of factors.
“For most people, it’s not going to be something they will be worried about,” said Michelle Barron, an infectious disease expert at UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine].
Over a decade ago, Curt Freed and his team came to focus on a class of existing drugs called HDAC inhibitors after research identified a gene mutation that in rare cases triggers Parkinson’s….“I think phenylbutyrate has a good chance of stopping the progression of Parkinson’s disease in humans,” said Freed, who heads the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at CU Health Sciences Center at Anschutz in Aurora.
"It's critical to understand further the triggers that contribute to the development of Parkinson's disease and how inflammation may interact with proteins found in the disease. With this information, we could potentially provide new approaches for treatments by altering or interfering with these inflammatory pathways that may act as a trigger for the disease," says David Beckham, MD, associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Producing adequate amounts of the foam for humans and ensuring it meets the Food and Drug Administration’s safety standards will take some more work, said Joseph Onyiah, an assistant professor of gastroenterology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who was not involved with the study.
Tyra Faintstad, MD, associate professor of Internal Medicine and Adrienne Mann, MD, assistant professor of Hospital Medicine at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus wanted to address the experiences that negatively affect medical training and begin healing the culture. So they created an online life coaching program: Better Together Physician Coaching, or simply Better Together, as they call it.
Combating bias will take more than an executive order, said Carey Candrian, an associate professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and LGBTQ elderly care expert. “There has to be some connection between these larger overarching policies and protections and then the actual training of staff and of leadership, so the protections go all the way down.”
“Breyanzi represents a remarkable advance over a nearly 30-year standard of care, providing significantly improved efficacy with a well-established safety profile,” Manali Kamdar, lead investigator of the TRANSFORM study and clinical director of lymphoma services in the division of hematology, hematologic malignancies and stem cell transplantation at University of Colorado Cancer Center, said in a Bristol Myers Squibb-issued press release.
Lilia Cervantes, one of the researchers, said before they got sick many felt COVID didn’t exist or they didn’t trust information about the virus. “And after being hospitalized, felt like, ‘Wow, yes, I had COVID. I was really sick. I saw other people that had COVID and were also really sick.’ This thing is real,” said Cervantes, an associate professor in the department of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
“The persistence of high numbers of virus-specific T cells in individuals with long COVID suggests that there may be hidden viral reservoirs that are maintaining and leading to long-term symptoms…,” said the paper’s senior author Brent Palmer, associate professor of allergy and clinical immunology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
COVID-19 was the leading cause of death among Hispanics, as well as non-Hispanic Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islanders and American Indian/Native Alaskans, the data show. Lilia Cervantes, an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said she wasn’t surprised by the new numbers. “The Latino community makes up the majority of the essential workforce,” said Cervantes, who is a member of the Colorado Vaccine Equity Taskforce.
Sunnie Kim, a University of Colorado Cancer Center member and assistant professor of medical oncology in the CU School of Medicine, researches stomach and gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) cancers. She is leading an upcoming clinical trial studying a chemotherapy-free drug treatment regimen for patients with stage IV stomach and GEJ cancers.
In today’s episode of Moving Medicine, AMA Chief Experience Officer Todd Unger discusses the mistreatment and harassment of physicians and its effect on physician well-being with Lotte Dyrbye, senior associate dean of faculty and chief well-being officer at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
“We don’t have 130 patients coming through the ED needing emergency dialysis anymore,” said Dr. Lilia Cervantes, director of immigrant health at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the key advocate for the dialysis change, which has saved the state about $10 million a year, according to data from the state’s health care policy and financing department. But she’d like to see more people get the care they need to avoid developing a chronic condition like kidney disease in the first place.
“Artificial analysis of thyroid ultrasound images can identify nodules that are very unlikely to be malignant,” Nikita Pozdeyev, assistant professor at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, told Healio. “These are mostly spongiform nodules that have a less than 3% probability of malignancy.”
Michelle Barron, medical director of infection control and prevention for UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], previously told Denver7 the first thing people should do if they think they’ve come into contact with someone who has monkeypox is to thoroughly check and examine the skin “quite well.”
Long COVID is a set of symptoms that persist more than four weeks after the resolution of a COVID-19 infection, according to Dr. Thomas Campbell, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases. Campbell also serves as chief clinical research officer for UCHealth.
In today’s episode of Moving Medicine, AMA Chief Experience Officer Todd Unger discusses caring for LGBTQ seniors and addressing disparities during end-of-life care with Carey Candrian, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver.
"We demonstrated that using artificial intelligence (AI) analysis of ultrasound images to rule out thyroid cancer and avoid biopsy is definitely possible," Dr. Nikita Pozdeyev [assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Biomedical Informatics and Personalized Medicine] of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, in Aurora, said in a news release.
Coronavirus-related hospitalizations have been steadily climbing for a few weeks, said Michelle Barron, UCHealth’s senior medical director of infection prevention and control [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. But thankfully, Barron said, this wave is not nearly as bad as the last wave the county experienced in December and January.
Anuj Mehta, a pulmonary care physician at Denver Health [and assistant professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], told CPR in March while Colorado’s COVID-19 numbers are better in recent weeks than earlier in the pandemic, “most hospitals remain incredibly busy with non-COVID patients who are much sicker and tend to stay in the hospital for longer periods of time than before the pandemic.”
Michelle Barron, an infectious disease specialist with UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], wrote: “It is generally thought that you are unlikely to develop infection within 90 days after infection, but there are reports of individuals that had infection with omicron, that within two to 4 weeks, subsequently developed infection with BA.2 or some of the new variants.”
Connie Price with Denver Health, another infectious disease specialist [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], said that in general, they are finding reinfection to be less severe. “Immunity does keep the virus a little more in control, likely not spreading as much virus,” said Price.
“Historically, those with asthma and allergic disease are susceptible for poor outcomes due to viral infections,” says Max Seibold, a pediatrician and genomics researcher at the National Jewish Health hospital [and associate professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] who led the research. “There was a real fear there about whether this was a risk group.”
Thyroid nodules are very common. Fine needle aspiration biopsy is used to diagnose thyroid cancer. However, most biopsies produce benign (noncancerous) results and are potentially avoidable, according to study lead researcher Nikita Pozdeyev, of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
A new study conducted by Lotte Dyrbye in collaboration with the American Medical Association focused on physician mistreatment surveyed 6,500 physicians from different backgrounds and found that 30 percent experienced discrimination or mistreatment from a patient or their family members….“The doctors who had had these experiences of being mistreated, they were much more likely to be burnt out,” Lotte Dyrbye, senior associate dean of faculty and chief well-being officer at the CU School of Medicine, said. She authored the study.
“In this large, multicenter, real-world study including both academic and community practices using standard-of-care reports, histologic inflammation — despite endoscopic remission — independently conveyed a two-fold increased risk for subsequent relapse within a year,” Benjamin Click, assistant professor at the University of Colorado Crohn’s and Colitis Center and School of Medicine, told Healio.
“The persistence of high numbers of virus-specific T cells in individuals with long COVID suggests that there may be hidden viral reservoirs that are maintaining and leading to long-term symptoms,” said Brent Palmer, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of allergy and clinical immunology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Diagnosing what’s become known as long COVID is mostly a process of ruling out everything else that could be causing a patient’s symptoms, said Dr. Thomas Campbell, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and chief clinical research officer at UCHealth.
But just because you’re tall doesn’t mean that you’re destined to develop one of these conditions, said lead researcher Sridharan Raghavan. He is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “Personally, I don’t think a person should worry about their height as a predeterminant of their risk for medical conditions,” Raghavan said.
“We know that development of childhood asthma is associated with severe early-life respiratory viral infection and that most asthma exacerbations, both childhood and adult, are related to respiratory virus infection,” Max A. Seibold, director of computational biology and the Wohlberg and Lambert Endowed Chair of Pharmacogenomics at National Jewish Health [and associate professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], told Healio.
“Using genetic methods applied to the VA Million Veteran Program, we found evidence that adult height may impact over 100 clinical traits, including several conditions associated with poor outcomes and quality of life—peripheral neuropathy, lower extremity ulcers, and chronic venous insufficiency,” Sridharan Raghavan, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado and the lead researcher on the study, said in a press release.
Carey Candrian, associate professor of medicine, discusses her photography exhibit Eye to Eye: Portraits of Pride, Strength, Beauty: “I think the voices that these pictures give them is that we have a life worth living. . .I really wanted to bring the person back in so that people in the community could see how research and statistics affect people and affect their lives so that was really what Eye to Eye grew out of.”
“We actually saw a huge rise in cases in May, and it was influenza A,” said Michelle Barron, senior medical director of infection prevention at UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. “There’s A and B. Usually, we see B in the spring, not A, and it was behaving a lot like what we normally see in December and January.”
David Beckham, an associate professor of medicine, immunology and microbiology, and neurology at the University of Colorado Health Infectious Disease Clinic, Anschutz Medical Campus, in Aurora, told Infectious Disease Special Edition that hospitalization from SARS-CoV-2, so far, is the most prominent predictor of which patients will be affected by long COVID.
Those numbers are “much higher than we’ve seen in a while, but nowhere near the same magnitude,” of earlier waves, said Michelle Barron, an infectious disease expert at UCHealth, which has treated a large number of COVID-19 patients during the pandemic.
“If you are going on a cruise ship, probably a good idea, just because you can’t really escape people. If you are going to be in places where you know you are going to be in high dense populations or crowds because you are all going to the same attraction, probably a good idea,” the Senior Medical Director of Infection Prevention at UCHealth Michelle Barron explained.
The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus provides several programs to support its Black students, such as the Mile High Medical Society (MHMS). This organization consists of Black health professionals who act as "preceptors," or mentors, to young Black students and help to eliminate health disparities in the medical field.
Lotte Dyrbye is the Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Chief Well-Being Officer at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She was also part of the research team that published a study this month reviewing reasons for physician burnout, including experiences of mistreatment and discrimination.
“People are most infectious when they have the rash itself,” said Michelle Barron, medical director of infection control and prevention at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. “If you come into contact with that rash, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to get infected, but your risk is highest when the vesicles are there until they scab and completely fall off.”
It’s not COVID. Great, but your coworkers still don’t want whatever else you have. UCHealth’s Michelle Barron [professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] discusses navigating respiratory illness season.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s position on aspirin use for prevention has seesawed over the decades, noted Dr. Allan Brett, an internist at the University of Colorado, in a JAMA editorial accompanying the new guidelines.
“This is a staggering number,” said Lotte Dyrbye, one of the study’s authors and a senior associate dean of faculty and chief well-being officer at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “Simply having patients or family members say, ‘No, you can’t provide care because of the way you look’—not because of competency—is really heartbreaking.”
“If you’re using drugs right now, you don’t know what you’re getting. We have a completely unregulated supply. And so that’s what makes this so dangerous on top of the fact that it’s more potent,” said Josh Barocas, an infectious disease physician and addiction researcher at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
“Burnout is the result of chronic, high levels of unmitigated stress stemming from the work environment,” Liselotte N. Dyrbye, who conducted the research while at the Mayo Clinic but is now at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told Medscape Medical News. “Solutions lie in improving the practice environment and addressing system-level factors causing high stress.”
“Physicians commonly experience mistreatment and discrimination by patients, families and visitors,” study co-author Lotte Dyrbye told UPI. “Everyone has a role in addressing prejudice, harassment and mistreatment, including the government, the press, medical institutions, healthcare workers and the public,” said Dyrbye, senior associate dean of faculty at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora.
Carey Candrian, an associate professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, wants to humanize these statistics and bring faces to the issue. Her exhibition, “Eye to Eye: Portraits of Pride, Strength, Beauty” at the Anschutz Medical Campus, aims to destigmatize the LGBTQ community through photographs. “The goal of this project is to actually see these women, see their faces and realize they're not that scary and in hopes of really helping people; just connect human to human, person to person,” Candrian told Rocky Mountain PBS.
“Vaccination still is very effective and helps keep you from getting severely ill or ending up in the hospital,” said Michelle Barron, an infectious disease expert at UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine].
“The prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea is probably around 5% of the general population, or up to 25% depending on what numbers you look at,” said Sheila Tsai, a sleep medicine physician at National Jewish Health [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. Tsai said the condition can cause lower oxygen saturation and interrupt sleep throughout the night.
Laura L. Peters, D.N.P., from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, and colleagues used data from all adult recipients of OHT at a single U.S. heart transplant program to assess the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination in OHT recipients.
“The Gates Institute will make it possible for our faculty to achieve the vast potential of cell and gene therapies,” John J. Reilly Jr., the dean of the University of Colorado School of Medicine and vice chancellor for health affairs at CU Anschutz, said in a statement. The new institute will build upon work from two other Gates efforts, a center for regenerative medicine and a biomanufacturing facility, according to the university. Reilly said CU Anschutz "will build on that foundation so our scientists can develop a new generation of therapies that allow our clinicians to offer hope to those facing serious disease.”
Dr. David Kao, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, stated, "Sometimes the coffee consumption is just a marker of other things" (via WebMD). Dr. Kao suggests that researchers analyze lifestyle factors such as sleep habits and diet.
There is “unintended and collateral damage that happens from being incarcerated,” says Joshua Barocas, an infectious disease doctor and associate professor at University of Colorado School of Medicine. It can cause opioid addicts to experience increased housing instability, decreased food and difficulty accessing work, all of which may lead them back to their addiction.
Dr. Kristine Erlandson, an associate professor of medicine and infectious disease specialist at the University of Colorado, has been doing her part by recruiting participants for a study of the long-term impact of Covid-19. The initiative is a part of the National Institutes of Health's RECOVER trial.
Tyra Fainstad, visiting associate professor at the University of Colorado (CU) School of Medicine, and co-author Adrienne Mann, assistant professor at the CU School of Medicine, said they both had experienced burnout, with feelings of “overwork, anxiety and creeping despair.” After finding life coaching to be helpful for their own experiences, they each pursued professional certification to help other physicians. They created the Better Together Physician Coaching program to target self-destructive attitudes and created a voluntary program that drew 101 participating female resident physicians in graduate medical education at the University of Colorado.
Paul MacLean, Professor of Medicine & Pathology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, has carefully studied weight regain. He notes three reasons why dieters regain weight: biology, behaviour, and environment.
“I don’t think that the findings in this paper are necessarily enough to change any advice about coffee,” said David Kao, an associate professor medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, in commenting on the findings.
In a related editorial, Monica Parks, a cardiology fellow at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, and colleagues wrote that despite decades of research describing Asian Americans as an aggregate and the persistent stereotype of Asian Americans as a “model minority,” studies demonstrate substantial heterogeneity in CVD prevalence and outcomes across Asian American subgroups, with a notably increased disease burden among Filipinos and Asian Indians.
“We find sometimes that our patients are coming from small towns where their docs may not have seen long COVID yet,’ UCHealth’s clinic medical director Sarah Jolley [assistant professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] said in a statement.
“In light of more infectious COVID-19 variants and ongoing high rates of transmission, COVID-19 vaccination for all OHT recipients is of paramount importance,” wrote study author Laura L. Peters, School of Medicine, University of Colorado.
It’s been reported “that dogs can sniff out people who have lung cancer,” says Paul Bunn. He’s a cancer researcher at the University of Colorado in Aurora who was not involved in the work. “This study,” he says, “is another step in the same direction.”
The report was authored by Sarah Rowan, a doctor with Denver Health and the University of Colorado [School of Medicine], and multiple epidemiologists and other public health experts working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In fall of 2020, “looking back at results from summer, we were able to see a consistent pattern that the encampments had lower rates of current and past COVID cases than indoor shelters,” said Rowan.
Michelle Barron [professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] with UCHealth said she has seen projections that expect a significant increase in hospitalizations in the next few weeks.
After leaving Sinai in 1989, he worked for two defibrillator makers: Cardiac Pacemakers, a subsidiary of Eli Lilly, as a vice president, and Guidant, as a consultant. He later taught medicine at Johns Hopkins and most recently, the University of Colorado school of medicine in Aurora.
A coaching program aimed at decreasing burnout among female resident physicians significantly reduced emotional exhaustion and imposter syndrome while increasing self-compassion over a six month period, according to Tyra Fainstad, MD and Adrienne Mann, MD at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
"We're in sort of a crisis mode of being able to get people on to preventive medicine," Joshua Barocas, MD, infectious disease specialist and director of the Social Determinants of Health and Disparities Modeling Unit at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told Medscape Medical News.
Continuous monitoring of body temperature can detect weak signals or trends in ways that traditional temperature-taking, even in hospitals, can find challenging, according to Clay Smith, director of the Blood Disorders and Cell Therapies Center and medical director of UCHealth and CU Innovation Centers [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine].
After moving to Denver around 2010, he taught at the University of Colorado medical school in Aurora. The school was one of several institutions that exhibited artwork collected by Morton Mower and his wife, Toby, a nurse who helped launch residential recovery homes in Baltimore for people battling drug and alcohol addiction.
The study was led by Timothy Amass, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and published last week in JAMA Internal Medicine. Amass and his team analyzed data from 330 family members of COVID-19 patients who spent time in the ICU between February 1 and July 31, 2020.
An exhibit on display at CU Anschutz in Aurora is highlighting the disparities in care for elderly people in the LGBTQ community. Carey Candrian, a researcher and associate professor at the medical school, received multiple grants to work on the project titled Eye to Eye on display at the Fulginiti Pavilion for Bioethics and Humanities on the CU Anschutz campus.
A study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine found nearly 64% of people who had a family member in the intensive care unit for COVID-19 experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder three months after admission. It's a stark increase from what was seen in similar studies conducted before the pandemic, said lead author, Tim Amass, assistant professor of medicine at the department of pulmonary sciences and critical care at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Laura L. Peters, from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, and colleagues used data from all adult recipients of OHT at a single U.S. heart transplant program to assess the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination in OHT recipients.
In many ways, it’s a lot like the experiences of families of patients in the intensive care unit with Covid-19, said Timothy Amass, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. These family members, too, often see an abrupt change in circumstance, have to make difficult decisions quickly and feel a loss of control, he said. And often, they come away from the experience with symptoms of anxiety, depression and PTSD, according to a new study published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
Jean Kutner, Chief Medical Officer at the University of Colorado Hospital [professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] and DSST school board member, said that hospital faculty are “so excited” to partner with the school.
“It is still important to get vaccinated and get a booster. There are now reports that show that you can be re-infected with the BA.2 variant even if you had omicron,” said Michelle Barron, an infectious disease expert at UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. “Vaccination still is very effective and helps keep you from getting severely ill or ending up in the hospital.”
Proning is a strategy for improving oxygen levels in ventilated patients that’s been practiced for decades in the United States, and previous clinical trial results have supported its use, said Peter Sottile, an assistant professor of pulmonology and critical care medicine at the University of Colorado, in Aurora.
Three Denver physicians, all of whom work with people who use illicit substances, testified that no evidence exists indicating that incarceration and mandatory treatment work to slow drug use and overdoses. They argued that the public health measures in the bill, including more money for Naloxone and fentanyl test strips, don't outweigh the damage they said tougher penalties, if adopted, would do.
Christopher Lieu, associate director for clinical research and codirector of gastrointestinal medical oncology at the University of Colorado Cancer Center, and an associate professor of medicine-medical oncology at the University of Colorado Medicine in Aurora, discussed new developments in CRC during the 7th Annual School of Gastrointestinal Oncology.
Dan Pollyea, associate professor, clinical director of leukemia services, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, discusses the current role of maintenance therapy in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) who are unfit for intensive chemotherapy.
James Burton is a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He says half of the liver transplants they performed last year were because of alcohol, and most of those were on younger people.
Dr. James Burton is a professor of medicine [in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology] at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He says half of the liver transplants they performed last year were because of alcohol, and most of those were on younger people.
Dr. Joseph Frank, who leads a team at the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center for veterans with chronic pain [and associate professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], has been prescribing the drug buprenorphine for patients who have used traditional opioid painkillers for relief but want an alternative that’s safer and has fewer side-effects. Dr. Frank said in many cases, his patients report the drug works better than the drugs they had been taking.
Josh Barocas, an Infectious Disease Physician at CU Medical School agreed. “Strong scientific evidence supports that criminalization simply doesn’t work,” he said. Barocas says the bill will have the opposite effect of saving lives. He says people who don’t receive treatment in prison will come out and overdose.
Peter Forsberg, an assistant professor of hematology [in the Department of Medicine] at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and a physician who works specifically with immunocompromised patients, said vaccine trials were not conducted on the immunocompromised population, so scientists are still studying how effective the vaccines are for them.
Dr. Josh Barocas, a physician [and visiting associate professor of medicine, Division of Internal Medicine] with the University of Colorado School of Medicine who testified during Tuesday's hearing, said he looks forward to working for the defeat of any lawmaker who voted for that amendment.
Still, Michelle Barron, senior medical director of infection prevention with UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], says a potential increase in cases remains important. “At the end of the day, the goal still should be to try and protect yourself from getting any of these strains and not just be completely dismissive or fatalistic that, ‘I’m going to get it anyway, so might as well get it over with,’” said Barron.
Today, in a new paper published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus faculty Judy Regensteiner, Ph.D., [distinguished professor of medicine in the Division of Internal Medicine] and Jane Reusch, MD, [professor of medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Diabetes] discuss the need for sex-specific health information for the treatment of obesity, hypertension and diabetes.
Developing a new CD19-directed CAR-T for patients with B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma is necessary despite an already crowded market of commercially available therapies because approximately 60% of patients who receive the therapy lack a durable response and will experience disease relapse, according to Manali Kamdar, associate professor of medicine/hematology at University of Colorado School of Medicine and clinical director of lymphoma services at CU Cancer Center.
These data suggest that a lack of understanding about metabolic and bariatric surgery along with social stigma and access challenges associated with financial difficulties contribute to limited or decreased access to metabolic and bariatric surgery, report Eric G. Campbell, a professor of medicine at University of Colorado School of Medicine, and colleagues.
“Your body works to break down and metabolize alcohol in the bloodstream. The more drinks you have, and the higher the percentage of alcohol, the longer it takes to rid your body of that toxin, which deposits in the organs and causes them to be temporarily dysfunctional,” explains William Cornwell, a cardiologist and the director of the sports cardiology program at the University of Colorado Hospital [and assistant professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine].
“Where we used to see older patients, it has shifted to people in their late 20s and early 30s who have severe alcohol-use disorders and have developed liver disease severe enough to warrant transplant,” said James Burton, professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and medical director of liver transplantation at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital. “Fifty percent of the transplants we did last year were on account of alcohol.”
Here is part of our conversation with infectious disease expert Michelle Barron with UCHealth [and CU School of Medicine] and Jonathan Samet, the dean of the Colorado School of Public Health which models COVID behavior.
Patients often have comorbidities that make it important to consider them holistically and not bucket them into one disease state, and the findings on rivaroxaban show broad benefits and a favorable risk-benefit profile, said Marc Bonaca, executive director of CPC Clinical Research and CPC Community Health and director of vascular research, associate professor of medicine, and the William R. Hiatt Endowed Chair in Cardiovascular Research at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Dr. Tim Jenkins, an infectious disease physician at Denver Health, was part of an expert Center for Disease Control and Prevention panel investigating the overuse of antibiotics like fluoroquinolones. The study found 47% of fluroquinolones given to patients in the hospital should have never been prescribed.
The School of Medicine at University of Colorado ranks No. 27.
The School of Medicine at University of Colorado ranks No. 6.
In the second segment of an interview with HCPLive during ACC 2022, Larry Allen, medical director of heart failure at University of Colorado School of Medicine, discussed his interest in some of the meeting’s key contributions to heart failure research.
This professional dynamic is unusual, said Eric Campbell, a bioethics professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who was not aware of any other hospital systems where doctors also work as police. Campbell said the dual allegiance poses a clear conflict of interest in areas of patient privacy and consent.
Stacy Fischer, an inpatient palliative care physician and researcher at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital [and associate professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], says the fear of death is one of the most challenging things her patients face. “Worse, we don’t have therapies to help with demoralization,” Fischer says. “Antidepressants don’t work in this population.”
In Colorado, Michelle Barron said the consistently low COVID-19 hospitalizations prompted smiles among staff, even as she double-checks the numbers to make sure they’re actually correct. “I had one of these moments like, oh this is amazing,” said Barron, medical director of infection prevention and control at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. “It feels unreal.”
“Using the EHR to inform those pathways will increase access to more standardized post-COVID care, particularly in rural and underserved areas where patients may not have access to a specialized long COVID clinic,” said co-author Sarah Jolley, assistant professor of Pulmonary Sciences & Critical Care Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and medical director of the Post-COVID Clinic at UCHealth’s University of Colorado Hospital.
Those numbers jibe with a study from Eric Campbell, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and a biomedical ethics researcher. The research, which included 300 physician surveys, found that many doctors are still wary of prescribing the medication.
Nearly half (46%) of the patients did not receive either cancer treatment or hospice after discharge to an SNF, reported Sarguni Singh, [assistant professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] of the University of Colorado Hospital. What’s more, only 9% received both cancer treatment and hospice care
“The drop in COVID-19 hospitalizations is very encouraging and something that most healthcare workers are celebrating,” said Anuj Mehta, a pulmonary care physician at Denver Health [and assistant professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine].
Michelle Barron, senior medical director of infection prevention at UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], said people who are over age 65 or immunocompromised should get an extra booster. “Everybody else, I think there’s still some level of debate. I think the FDA approved it to be able to allow broad access,” Barron said.
This lack of communication is “an enormous data challenge” that becomes more complicated outside the realm of COVID-19 data, said Matthew Wynia, director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities and a leading expert on crisis standards.
In an article published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, Margaret E. Wierman, and Katja Kiseljak-Vassiliades, both professors of medicine in the division of endocrinology, metabolism and diabetes at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, said few data have been published on DHEA [dehydroepiandrosterone] administration since 2014 and most available data show no association between DHEA and improvements in sexual health, menopausal symptoms and overall well-being
David Kao, however, said via email that he doesn't “think there is sufficient information in that abstract to support that assertion.” Kao wasn’t involved in the research and is an associate professor in the divisions of cardiology and bioinformatics & personalized medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz.
Unlike with other vaccines, senior medical director of infection prevention and control for UCHealth Michelle Barron [professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] said officials are still learning what the threshold of an antibody response is needed for lasting protection from COVID-19. “We don’t know what that is for COVID,” Barron said. “The other bigger piece is that your immune system is not just antibodies.”
“I think everybody’s breathing a sigh of relief, but everybody’s really tired,” said Michelle Barron, an infectious disease doctor with UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine], when asked about how hospital staff are holding up.
“Right now, certainly I feel okay,” said Michelle Barron, Senior Medical Director of Infection Prevention and Control for UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine]. She says the newest variant doesn’t seem to be very severe.
Michelle Barron of UCHealth [and CU School of Medicine] said there’s no guarantee future COVID variants will continue to step-down in severity but this particular one shouldn’t cause panic.
Josh Solomon, a pulmonologist at National Jewish Health [and associate professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] who treats patients with diseases that scar their lungs, including Pierre-Louis, said people with those conditions are about 60% more likely to die of COVID-19 than healthy people if it gets into their lungs.
James Burton, [professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine] who works with patients before and after their liver transplants at UCHealth, said only about a quarter of patients who have had an organ transplant develop COVID-19 antibodies after two vaccine doses, though some have after receiving a third or fourth shot.
Daniel Bessesen, chief of endocrinology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, says people believe some of these stories because the substances in question come from natural sources. However, he emphasizes: “Black tea does not cure diabetes.”
Matthew Wynia, of the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, discusses his article in the Annals of Internal Medicine on the ethics of treating hunger-striking detainees and gives advice to physicians who may be pressured to make difficult ethical decisions.
Dr. William Cornwell, a cardiologist at UCHealth specializing in exercise and sports medicine, agrees most people are OK exercising in extreme cold—so long as they are young and healthy.
Led by Joshua Barocas, MD, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Denver, researchers investigated the efficacy of outpatient treatment for infective endocarditis.
Dr. Josh Barocas, with the CU School of Medicine, is a public health researcher. He says there's an erroneous belief that most people on the street are harmful.
NBC News
May 08, 2024
Colorectal cancer rates have been rising for decades among people too young for routine screening, new research finds.
Healio
May 08, 2024
Following military deployment, veterans who served in Southwest Asia and Afghanistan had poorer lung function if they experienced more intense inhalation exposures, according to results published in Respiratory Medicine.
CPR
May 08, 2024
Kayden Riley, a fifth grader at Blessed Sacrament Catholic School in Park Hill, loves basketball and, therefore, the Denver Nuggets of course — baseball cap and all.
News Medical
May 07, 2024
As part of the University of Colorado Department of Medicine's annual Research Day, held on April 23, faculty member Christine Swanson, MD, MCR, described her National Institutes of Health-funded clinical research on whether adequate sleep can help prevent osteoporosis.