CU Anschutz In The News

An 11-month-old child who died after being exposed to marijuana is believed to be the first person whose death has been attributed to marijuana exposure, according to two Colorado doctors who published a report on the death in August. The report by Thomas M. Nappe, DO, who works at the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center in Denver, and Christopher O. Hoyte, MD, with the Department of Emergency Medicine at the CU Anschutz Medical Center, was published in the August edition of the journal “Clinical Practice and Cases in Emergency Medicine.”

Dr. David Kuwayama, a vascular surgeon and professor at the University of Colorado Denver in Aurora who was not involved with the study, said it “clearly illustrates the inherent biases that all of us in academic medicine . . . share when it comes to devaluing research from outside of the U.S. and Europe.” “If a journal publishes a groundbreaking paper from a low-income country, but we in the Western world are unwilling to value it, then we are depriving both ourselves and our patients of valuable, maybe even life-saving, medical knowledge,” he said in an email.

Most of the new laws approved in the past decade — including in Colorado — require youth-sports coaches to remove athletes from play if they show signs of a concussion and to prevent the athletes from returning to play until they are cleared by a doctor. Dawn Comstock, a researcher at the CU School of Public Health and a co-author on the paper, said the study suggests that athletes who sit out until they fully recover from a concussion are less likely to suffer a new concussion when they return to competition.

Some of the best doctors and surgeons in the state teach classes and serve as faculty members at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora — and they have the salaries to prove it. The highest-paid faculty member is James Jaggers, a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon and the co-medical director at the Children's Hospital Colorado's Heart Institute.

Researchers from the University of Colorado medical school analyzed data from the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the eating patterns and cardiovascular health of more than 15,000 people since the 1940s. They were looking for previously unidentified risk factors for heart failure and stroke. They used a method known as machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that looks for patterns in big data sets, similar to the way e-commerce websites might predict products a customer mighty like based on their previous shopping history.

Dr. Christopher Hoyte, associate medical director for the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center and faculty member for the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said he can't say it's "impossible," but instead calls it "very improbable." "I never say never, but it is highly, highly, highly, unlikely someone could become that systemically ill just from having fentanyl touch their skin," Hoyte told CBS News. "It's not absorbed just touching it."

Richard Kogan, an award-winning psychiatrist and pianist, sees Beethoven as more than just the mad genius he’s often portrayed as. The composer also has “an extraordinary story of recovery from trauma,” says Korgan, who will lecture Thursday night on the subject at the CU Anschutz Campus.

“Getting shocks at the end of life is not really helping patients live longer or better,” said Dr. Larry Allen, a heart failure specialist at the University of Colorado and an author of the study.