CU Anschutz In The News

Dr. Jonathan Samet, an epidemiologist and the dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, said that he hopes people will continue to be vaccinated in large numbers, which will help reduce the spread of the pandemic, and urged people to continue other precautions, like masking and distancing, until coronavirus numbers recede. "I don't think anyone would have thought we'd be looking forward to summer where we're mostly vaccinated," Samet said. "A year ago, that was not a prediction I would have made. I think we can look forward to a summer that would be far better than I thought it would be."

"This discovery of the safety and [effectiveness] of GM-CSF in Alzheimer's disease has the potential to be a breakthrough, which will be proved when a larger, longer trial is done to show that the benefits we saw are stronger and long lasting," said study lead author Huntington Potter. He's the director of the University of Colorado Alzheimer's and Cognition Center in Aurora.

The Circulation study employed observational data, but its initial aim was not to assess the relationship between coffee and heart failure. This is how the lead author David Kao, a cardiologist at University of Colorado School of Medicine, characterized it to me: “The overall question was, What are the factors in daily life that impact heart health that we don’t know about that could potentially be changed to lower risk.” Because one in five Americans will develop heart failure, even small changes in their behaviors could have a big cumulative impact.

It’s difficult to tell if the second day of increases is meaningless “noise” in the data, or a sign that the virus is spreading more widely, Dr. Jon Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, said during the news conference. The situation should become clearer over the next week, but in the meantime, it’s “tough” to know if the public should stay the course with their current behavior or take additional precautions, he said.

That doesn’t mean all travel has to be forbidden, said Dr. Sean O’Leary, vice chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Infectious Diseases and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and Children’s Hospital Colorado. “It’s really a personal decision, and depends on lots of different factors. Does the child have underlying health issues that may put them at higher risk?” he said, referring to conditions such as diabetes, obesity, cystic fibrosis and asthma.

Search and rescue team members can be the overlooked patients in a traumatic mission, said Laura McGladrey.  She’s with CU Anschutz Medical School’s Stress Trauma Adversity Research and Treatment Center, working with cops, emergency service providers, search-and-rescue teams as well as guide services and ski patrols. Stress accumulation from exposure to traumatic missions can build up like a snowpack, McGladrey said. It starts gradually and following a big event, people can break in an avalanche of anguish.

“With the increasing utilization of marijuana in society as a whole, we are seeing more mothers who use marijuana during pregnancy,” said Erica Wymore, MD, MPH, primary investigator, neonatologist at Children’s Colorado and assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine on the Anschutz Medical Campus. “However, given the lack of scientific data regarding how long THC persists in breast milk, it was challenging to provide mothers with a definitive answer regarding the safety of using marijuana while breastfeeding and simply ‘pumping and dumping’ until THC was no longer detectable in their milk. With this study, we aimed to better understand this question by determining the amount and duration of THC excretion in breast milk among women with known prenatal marijuana use.”

Ross Kedl, an immunologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine, says there is some prior evidence that mixing vaccines can be a boon. “We have used this method in animal studies for decades, and it is well known that this promotes a much better immune response than when immunizing with the same vaccine twice,” says Kedl.