CU Anschutz In The News

Four years ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, scientists expected the virus would be well on its way to settling into a seasonal pattern by now, said Talia Quandelacy, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health. Now, they’re less sure whether COVID-19 will eventually do that, or if it can keep churning out new variants fast enough to remain active year-round, she said. “That’s one of the big questions in the field,” she said.

Colorado is doing relatively well in addressing the kinds of deaths that people can prevent through healthy habits and routine screenings, and medical advances are allowing people to live longer with diseases like cancer, said Cathy Bradley, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health. Those same strategies don’t work as well in preventing deaths from drugs or alcohol, she said. “It’s very different,” she said.

Intuitively, then, slower biological aging might seem like a good thing, but that isn’t necessarily the case, said Dr. Wei Perng, an associate professor of epidemiology at Colorado School of Public Health and one of the researchers. The study didn’t look at whether the children were smaller than expected or met their developmental milestones later, so it can’t rule out immediate effects, and not much other information exists on aging in children, she said

The Fulginiti Gallery seems content to address its primary concern, using art to teach the finer points of health care to the future doctors and nurses who go to this outpost of the University of Colorado to study medicine. The theory goes that artists, with their unique and compelling way of saying things, can instruct in a way that scientists cannot, pushing students to think profoundly about the emotional experiences of the patients they will serve. It is part of the larger mission of CU’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities.

The trial, involving scientists in Colorado, the United Kingdom and Italy, infused stem cells taken from the brain of a fetus that had died in a miscarriage into 15 Italian patients who already had significant disabilities caused by multiple sclerosis. In the year after the infusions, the patients’ multiple sclerosis didn’t get worse, and they didn’t have severe side effects from the stem cells.

Matthew Woodward, a fellow at CU Anschutz’s Movement Disorders Center, said the results of their studies to date — looking at outcomes like balance improvement, movement and mood — show no negative results. The results need to be tested on a larger population to be statistically significant, Woodward said, but the research — this first study focuses solely on Parkinson’s disease — looks promising.

Hundreds of homeless metro Denver residents end up in hospitals for emergency treatment of hypothermia and frostbite, according to Dr. Joshua Barocas, an internal medicine and infectious disease physician at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus who sees homeless patients at the Denver Health Medical Center. At one metro Denver hospital where an informal study was done during a cold month last winter, 49 patients were treated for hypothermia and frostbite, Barocas said.

While home birth is “available for people who are low risk,” Dr. Jessica Anderson, director of midwifery and women’s health services at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, points to “people that shouldn’t or can’t birth out of the hospital,” such as those with medical conditions like high blood pressure or diabetes.