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.
With COVID-19 in the mix, a typical virus season now is higher-risk than one before the pandemic, said Beth Carlton, associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “There is hope that (COVID-19) declines to have an impact akin to flu, but that’s still a big impact,” she said.
It’s unclear why transmission of the virus has increased in the summer, said Beth Carlton, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “We don’t fully understand why that is,” she said. “We also don’t know if those summer waves are slowly going to go away.”
Unfortunately, those trends aren’t likely to reverse any time soon, said Beth Carlton, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “Deaths of despair,” including overdoses, liver disease and suicide, have been rising in working-age populations since the early 2010s, she said. “That’s not just pandemic-related,” she said.
“For some folks (for whom) a higher level of care is really needed, there are aspects of treatment that are extremely uncomfortable,” said Emily Hemendinger, a social worker who works with eating disorder patients at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus.
