CU Anschutz In The News

As Catholic health systems that restrict care on religious grounds have expanded, Maryam Guiahi had what she thought was a simple question. Guiahi, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, wanted to know what happens to patients who are denied reproductive health care by Catholic institutions. So she and fellow researchers trawled through thousands of papers dating back to at least the 1960s in scientific databases, looking for data on patient outcomes. They found one study. It happened to be one Guiahi had written.

[Editorial co-authored by Dr. Emmy Betz, University of Colorado School of Medicine]. At the end of the day, we all want our children, families, and communities to be safe. There are tens of thousands of us who know that we are on the cusp of transforming this epidemic. As physicians and allied health care professionals, we have a responsibility to continue to insist that this is our highway. We’ll keep driving forward, together. From the Department of Emergency Medicine, Alpert Medical School, Brown University, Providence, RI (M.L.R.); the Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora (M.E.B.); and the Department of Emergency Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston (C.D.).

Texas: Two-thirds of low-income moms unable to access contraception. That's according to a study by Kate Coleman-Minahan, PhD, RN, of the University of Colorado College of Nursing in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, which also found that only 11 percent of women who wanted long-acting contraception (such as the contraceptive implant) were able to get it at their six-week postpartum checkup. Nearly 60 percent of women left their initial postpartum checkup with no contraception at all, POLITICO's Renuka Rayasam reports.

“They're fighting a losing battle,” said Robert Valuck, a professor of pharmacy at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and director of the Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention, which works with lawmakers to address the opioid crisis. “Whether they keep trying to defend or sell Subsys, there's going to be some amount of perception that this is the product that got them sued.”

“It is commonly thought that the medical profession is more enlightened around parental support than other professions, but it really isn’t,” said the study’s lead author Emily Gottenborg, MD, assistant professor in the division of Hospital Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “We found a lack of paid leave policies in academic settings, difficulty in support for breastfeeding, and loss of career opportunities when new parents return to work.” Gottenborg said hospital medicine is unique in that 47 percent of practitioners are women and 80 percent are under age 40, indicative of a large proportion of women entering the profession during a time in life when many want to start a family.

“That ‘freaking out’ should be taken seriously,” said child psychiatrist Steven Berkowitz, visiting professor at the CU School of Medicine. “While that man might not be the perp, someone who looked like him might be.”

But choosing a boy or girl seems a far cry from the genetic editing that could affect generations. "It could have unintended consequences and we could be causing harm," said Dr. Curtis Coughlin with the Center for Bioethics and Humanities on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus. Coughlin, and other scientists, are concerned that this kind of genetic editing could cause genetic defects that last generations or harm other genes.

"Often, Medicare patients with terminal cancer and their families are given a terrible choice: You can continue treatments or have hospice care, but not both. But the VA has this unique structure where we can provide cancer therapies that are designed to be disease-modifying while also referring patients for hospice care in the community. Now Medicare is exploring the possibility of concurrent treatment and hospice, and we said, wait we've been doing this in the VA for a long time! Maybe our experience can inform Medicare's experiment," says Cari Levy, MD, Ph.D., investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center, professor in the CU School of Medicine Department of Health Care Policy and Research.