CU Anschutz In The News

Your drafty house may be bad for your health, according to a new University of Colorado study that suggests weatherizing homes is more than just a matter of saving money and the environment. The researchers from CU Boulder and the Colorado School of Public Health at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus measured ventilation, or air-exchange rates — the rate at which outdoor air replaces a room’s indoor air — in homes in low-income neighborhoods in Denver, Aurora and elsewhere in Colorado.

Researchers at CU Anschutz have zeroed in on a chromosome location that might help explain the high rates of asthma in people of African descent.

At the institutions where we work, the University of Colorado improved efficiency by decreasing unnecessary admissions by 20 percent, despite a 53 percent increase in ED volume. And, Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center implemented a number of techniques to speed patient flow through the system: bedside registration, electronic dashboard that displays bed status throughout the hospital, physical expansion of the ED, and a paging protocol to notify senior leadership of impending capacity issues, writes Richard Klasco, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

“That's the fear, but I don't know that we have a lot of evidence that that's true,” says Dr. Sean O’Leary, an associate professor in pediatrics and infectious diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “In the places that have had longstanding policies of not having any exemptions -- West Virginia and Mississippi, for example -- their kindergarten rates are 99 percent. They've maintained very high vaccination rates for many years.”

We don’t know the cause of Biliary atresia, which interferes with our ability to treat affected children,” said study co-author Ronald Sokol, MD, a pediatric gastroenterologist and hepatologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado and Director of the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CCTSI) at CU Anschutz.

Rob Valuck of the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences discusses safe injection sites.

The state ranks at the bottom because the law allows parents to claim exemptions for medical, religious or personal reasons, which is “essentially the easiest exemption policy in the country,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, an associate professor in pediatrics and infectious diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “We need to do something about it.”

"If we know that isolation and stress is overwhelming, then we need to rethink – what are the causes of that?" said Dr. Steven Berkowitz, professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.