CU Anschutz In The News

There is still no clear cause for a mysterious paralytic condition that has been striking U.S. children over the past five years, government health officials report. The CDC researchers found more microbes when they looked at mucus and stool samples, but there was no clear single cause. "I think it's fair to say it's still the leading suspect in the biennial surges we're seeing," said Dr. Samuel Dominguez of Children's Hospital Colorado and the University of Colorado School of Medicine, in Aurora. Dominguez wrote an editorial published with the study.

Due to an ongoing, nationwide shortage of Shingrix, a shingles vaccine, long waits for the vaccine are possible at Colorado pharmacies. “There could be long waiting lists. When I checked with a particular pharmacy they said they had a wait list of about 200 people, and then they decided to just disband the wait list, and just do first come first served,” said Sunny Linnebur with the University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy. Linnebur recommends calling around to different pharmacies to check availability. The UCHealth pharmacy at University of Colorado Hospital, for instance, did have Shingrix in stock.

Producing doctors for the vast swaths of rural America needs to be more of a priority at every step in the education pipeline, experts said. Many academic centers sell students on the party line that they’ll be overworked, underappreciated and underpaid, according to Dr. Mark Deutchman, director of the University of Colorado School of Medicine's rural program. “They take people who are interested in primary care or rural and beat it out of them throughout their training,” he said.

Emmy Betz, an emergency physician at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who focuses on firearm injury prevention, said a central tenet of responsible firearm ownership is preventing access to that weapon to kids and other unauthorized people. “We know that kids are curious, kids are often impulsive, their brains are not fully formed,” Betz said. “As adults, one of the things we need to be doing is making sure that they don’t have access to dangerous things. “It can be with a trigger lock, a cable lock. There are lots of different ways to do that. But the main thing is it shouldn't just be hidden somewhere,” she said.

Research from the University of Colorado School of Nursing highlighted during National Midwifery Week. National Midwifery Week runs through October 5th and the goal is to raise awareness about midwives and the options for women during childbirth. 

Among people with diabetes who develop high blood pressure, those who delay getting it under control may be more likely to have heart attacks and strokes than their counterparts who manage it promptly, a recent study suggests. “Hypertension (high blood pressure) is a risk factor for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which includes coronary artery disease, myocardial infarction (heart attack), and stroke. Diabetes is also a risk factor for the same clinical endpoints,” said lead researcher Dr. Sridharan Raghavan at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center.

New research is helping a 4-year-old boy by providing innovative options to treat a rare form of childhood cancer. University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus researchers can now take a patient's tumor cells, load 140 FDA-approved drugs into a machine and run hundreds of different drug combinations to see which will kill the patient's tumor cells.

As the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus positions itself as a world-class research facility, the “Mayo Clinic of the West,” the world is about to find that out. Researchers on the 230-acre campus in Aurora are the focus of the first national marketing campaign aimed at major TV, radio and digital outlets, as well as documentary-style videos on websites dedicated to showing off the innovative work.