School of Medicine In the News

Jessica Hawks, clinical child and adolescent psychologist and clinical
director of the Pediatric Mental Health Institute at Children’s Hospital
Colorado [and assistant professor of psychiatry at CU School of
Medicine], said the data doesn’t fully represent youth mental health in
the state, though.

There are gender differences in bone fracture risk, osteoposoris, and type 1 diabetes that are still being explored, according to Viral Shah, MD, an endocrinologist and associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at the Barbara Davis Center for Diabetes, Adult Clinic School of Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz campus.

IInspired by how coffee shops foam milk, as well as gummy candy and sizzling Pop Rocks, researchers have designed three gas-trapping materials to deliver a low dose of carbon monoxide into the body to potentially treat gastrointestinal disorders.

New research at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus finds two FDA-approved drugs improve cognition in patients with Alzheimer's disease. 

University of Colorado at Boulder will restore its "Athletic Hall of Honor" and open a new "Legacy Wing," the CU Athletic Department announced Monday.

“The concept of normalizing menopause is not to make light of it,”
Nanette Santoro, professor and E. Stewart Taylor Chair of OB/GYN
at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told Healio. “It is a
life passage that is inconvenient and bothersome at best for most
women and can be actually very symptomatic for some. But that is
part of what the experience is — it is simply a life passage.”

While caring for his aging mother, Donald M. Bell, a 72-year-old gay man, began thinking about where he would spend his twilight years.

The FDA approved lisocabtagene maraleucel for treatment of adults with relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma after one prior therapy.

Dr. Eric France with the state department of health and Dr. Brandi Freeman with Children's Hospital Colorado discuss efforts to get more kids vaccinated.

A new study finds some unvaccinated Latino patients hospitalized for COVID-19 were motivated to encourage vaccination after their illness.

Medical experts have alerted to deadly complications in ‘long COVID’ survivors. They said the situation is dire because over 80 per cent of patients are not aware because they never knew they had COVID-19, they were not tested.

Dolores County Sheriff Don Wilson never expected to use Colorado's red flag law when it was passed in 2019. He thought the law made it too easy to take a person's guns away.

New findings suggest patients with better overall preoperative visual acuity, eyes with longer axial length, and eyes with intraoperative complications were at an increased risk of retinal tears following cataract surgery.

Life expectancy dropped in Colorado for the second straight year in 2021. It’s the kind of decline, driven by the pandemic, not seen in decades, data from the state health department show.

CEO Robin Wittenstein, who joined Denver Health in 2017, will retire at the end of August.

Country music star Toby Keith has been battling stomach cancer, also known as gastric cancer, for the past six months, he announced June 12 on social media.

In order to solidify a vaccine plan for the expected winter COVID-19 surge, a committee of scientists and other experts who advise the US Food and Drug Administration is scheduled to meet at the end of June to decide how the US should modify its COVID-19 vaccines.

For most of his life, Harris Marquesano struggled to live inside his own skin. He was a sweet boy — affectionate with his parents, protective of his little sister and devoted to his friends.

The Fitzsimons Innovation Community just north of the Anschutz Medical Campus is drawing scores of new companies that aim to transform the future of health care.

Traditionally, primary patellofemoral dislocations (first-time patellar dislocations) have been treated conservatively. It is still considered the standard of care. 

Armando Peniche Rosales has a crooked toe that for years has predicted the weather, growing sensitive when rain or cold is coming.

In today’s episode of Moving Medicine, AMA Chief Experience Officer Todd Unger discusses the mistreatment and harassment of physicians and its effect on physician well-being with Lotte Dyrbye, MD, senior associate dean of faculty and chief well-being officer at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver.

Pop star Justin Bieber announced he has Ramsay Hunt syndrome, a form of facial paralysis caused by a reactivation of the virus that causes chickenpox. 

Virtually all hearing aids cost $1,000 or more, which makes finding the best hearing aids under $100 prohibitively challenging.

Women in the Billings community will have access to some of the most advanced gynecologic oncology care. 

An ultrasound-based artificial intelligence classifier of thyroid nodules identified benign nodules with sensitivity similar to fine-needle aspiration, according to data presented at ENDO 2022.

Colorado has ordered small amounts of an FDA-approved monkeypox vaccine to protect health care workers and people directly exposed to the virus as cases of the disease continue to slowly increase across the state.

Patients who received a phone call two days after discharge from an emergency department were less likely to need a return trip to the hospital, researchers have found.

Children as young as 6 months old can now get vaccinated against covid-19. But you might be wondering what are the benefits of vaccinating your young children?

In today’s episode of Moving Medicine, AMA Chief Experience Officer Todd Unger discusses caring for LGBTQ seniors and addressing disparities during end-of-life care with Carey Candrian, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver.

The first randomized trial to examine whether older adults with multiple sclerosis (MS) can safely discontinue disease-modifying therapy (DMT) after years of being relapse-free failed to deliver a definitive conclusion.

The percentage of Colorado children in their first 15 months receiving preventive medical and behavioral health services rose by 23% from 2013 levels, and stayed constant during the COVID public-health emergency — according to new data released by the Center for Improving Value in Health Care.

Larimer County has reached the high-risk level for COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention metrics. 

Colorado hospitals’ response to COVID-19 ranked 17th among all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to The Commonwealth Fund’s national health care scorecard, an annual report that ranks state health care systems on various metrics based on how well states provide high-quality, accessible and equitable health care.

The US Food and Drug Administration approved fenfluramine for Lennox-Gastaut syndrome based on data that found that the frequency of certain seizure subtypes, notably generalized tonic-clonic seizures, dropped in a dose-dependent way compared with a group taking placebo.

Researchers have figured out a way to safely give children a donor kidney without the need for immune-suppressing drugs -- an advance they hope to expand to many more kidney transplant patients in coming years.

Long COVID is a set of symptoms that persist more than four weeks
after the resolution of a COVID-19 infection, according to Thomas
Campbell, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine
at the University of Colorado School of Medicine’s Division of
Infectious Diseases. Campbell also serves as chief clinical research
officer for UCHealth.

With the way COVID is making the rounds again in Colorado, we are taking a closer look at severity, reinfections and isolation guidance.

The annual U.S. News Best Children’s Hospitals rankings….Ten
hospitals earned a place on the U.S. News Best Children's Hospitals
Honor Roll by garnering points for being highly ranked in many
specialties.

Exercise is good for all parts of a person's body, but doctors don't know how cells in the body actually respond. Dr. Wendy Kohrt, a Distinguished Professor of Medicine at CU Anschutz, is hoping to help change that.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to identify thyroid nodules seen on thyroid ultrasound that are very unlikely to be cancerous, reducing a large number of unnecessary biopsies, according to a new study being presented Saturday at ENDO 2022, the Endocrine Society's annual meeting in Atlanta, Ga.

A year has passed since Children’s Hospital Colorado first declared a state of emergency for youth mental health last May. Not a single day has gone by that our organization has not grappled with the human impact of this staggering crisis across our health system.

Emmy Betz, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of
Colorado Medical School and the director of the Colorado University
Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative, and co-authors: “We cannot solve
complicated public health problems by refusing to talk about them.
The lives of our servicemembers depend upon Congress creating the
space for scientists to identify and test effective solutions. Until then,
our ability to prevent military suicide will be unjustifiably obstructed.”

CEO Robin Wittenstein, who joined Denver Health in 2017, will retire at the end of August.

Going to the doctor's office or hospital can be stressful, but a new study now quantifies how often physicians are mistreated by patients, and how it can lead to burnout.

As Britney Taylor toured the Mama Bird Maternity Wellness Spa during its grand opening this spring, she reflected on the birth of her first child: a confusing and lonely experience that resulted in an unplanned cesarean section and an extended period of postpartum depression.

“In this large, multicenter, real-world study including both academic
and community practices using standard-of-care reports, histologic
inflammation — despite endoscopic remission — independently
conveyed a two-fold increased risk for subsequent relapse within a
year,” Benjamin Click, assistant professor at the University of
Colorado Crohn’s and Colitis Center and School of Medicine, told
Healio.

“The persistence of high numbers of virus-specific T cells in individuals
with long COVID suggests that there may be hidden viral reservoirs
that are maintaining and leading to long-term symptoms,” said Brent
Palmer, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of
allergy and clinical immunology at the University of Colorado School of
Medicine.

Rachel Hudson and her husband had their first serious discussion about leaving the country in the days following the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion foreshadowing the reversal of Roe vs. Wade.

One of the most memorable lectures during my first year of medical school at the University of Michigan was delivered by Dr. Julian "Buz" Hoff. He was the chair of neurosurgery and a master at teaching the natural history of brain diseases. We learned about brain tumors, vascular diseases and trauma.

Adolescents with type 1 diabetes (T1D) who don't get enough sleep are at higher risk for more severe cardiometabolic risk factors, said Stacey Simon, PhD, sleep psychologist and associate professor, University of Colorado Denver, Children's Hospital Colorado, at SLEEP 2022.

Adults and children with type 1 diabetes who used an insulin-only bionic pancreas had reduced HbA1c without increasing hypoglycemia and other improved metrics compared with standard of care, researchers reported.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to present considerable public health challenges in the United States and around the globe. One of the most puzzling is why many people who get over an initial and often relatively mild COVID illness later develop new and potentially debilitating symptoms. 

The percentage of Colorado children in their first 15 months receiving preventive medical and behavioral health services rose by 23% from 2013 levels, and stayed constant during the COVID public-health emergency - according to new data released by the Center for Improving Value in Health Care.

A study to explore whether high-dose exercise can reduce the symptoms and secondary effects of concussion has been backed by a $US3.3 million grant.

Diagnosing what’s become known as long COVID is mostly a process
of ruling out everything else that could be causing a patient’s
symptoms, said Thomas Campbell, a professor of medicine at the
University of Colorado School of Medicine and chief clinical research
officer at UCHealth.

A team of world-renowned experts in diabetes presented updates about automated insulin delivery (AID), focusing on the role of diet and exercise for closed-loop systems.

 If you're taller than average, your genes may affect your risk for a variety of diseases, a new study suggests.

People with food allergies showed lower risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection, whereas those with obesity had a higher risk, according to a study published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Two weeks ago, federal health officials authorized COVID-19 boosters for children between ages 5 and 11.

Celebrating voices of the LGBTQ+ community is our year long commitment. During the month of June we pay special attention as a reminder that Pride started as an act of resistance to affirm, honor and celebrate all identities in our state.

Gender-affirming care is not child abuse. So say experts from the nation’s leading organizations in the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect, including the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children and our nation’s oldest academic center in the field, the Kempe Center.

Over a four-year period of time (from January 2016 through December 2019), a total of fifteen teenagers sustained injuries from e-cigs that exploded, according to the surgeons who treated some of these patients at nine hospitals across the United States.  Ten of these teens were ultimately hospitalized with three needing treatment in an intensive care unit (ICU)

How tall, or short, you are could affect your risk of certain medical conditions, a new study suggests.

COVID-19 hospitalizations in Colorado are rising sharply this week. 

Flu season in Colorado usually peaks between December and February, but this year it peaked in the spring.

The hallmark of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic has been treating a large number of people who need immediate attention without having the data to support those interventions. And, unfortunately, that seems to be happening with post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC): The immediate need to treat people must be weighed with providing the best care possible, often without the data to support the interventions.

One of the most common genetic conditions in the country is cystic fibrosis, affecting about 30,000 people. While treatment has improved for those living with the disease, there is no cure.

With the COVID-19 positivity rate on the rise in Colorado, hospitals like Swedish Medical Center in Englewood are once again requiring masks in all areas, not just in the clinical spaces.

"Doctors, in general, have behaved as if they are 'superior beings,'" Pius Kamau said, "and they are treating the Black patient as if, first of all, you are doing them a favor to see them, and secondly, it's like … ‘Why are you here? You’re not worth it!’"

Ahead of Memorial Day, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs launched the Mission Daybreak challenge: a $20 million competition and accelerator program aimed at fostering innovation to decrease suicide deaths among veterans.

There is a new option for patients with congenital heart disease, and Children’s Hospital Colorado was the first hospital in the world to implant the recently approved G-Armor stent.

Most of us have experienced some form of medical imaging, whether it was at an eye appointment or after a broken bone.

It’s been a tough few years for healthcare workers.

In far-eastern Colorado, eight miles from the Nebraska border, there is a dairy farm called “Camelot.” Instead of using cow’s milk, the farmers there harvest the milk from camels.

Long suspected as a cause of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), enterovirus D68 was found in the anterior horn cells of a 5-year-old boy who died of an illness very much like it in 2008, according to a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine.

A gunman opened fire in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday, killing 19 children and two adults. The horrific event happened just two weeks after another gunman killed 10 people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

The world might be looking at an unfortunate new normal for how viruses spread.

Colorado has detected its first presumptive case of monkeypox, state health officials said Thursday, but they reassured the public the risk of getting infected with the latest disease making headlines across the world remains low.

A new report suggests the gut microbiota of patients with type 1 diabetes (T1D) are significantly different from those of healthy controls, a finding that could play an important role in understanding the pathogenesis of the disease.

People with food allergies and lactose intolerance are always looking for other options to cow’s milk. There is an ancient alternative that’s being produced in Colorado.

Shootings in schools can create instant trauma for all of us – parents and kids alike. While it might be difficult to talk about these feelings with your kids, child psychologists say having open and honest conversations with them is helpful and important.

A handful of new monkeypox cases in the United States are under investigation, according to a media briefing this week by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The country confirmed its first case of monkeypox this year, in a man from Massachusetts who'd recently traveled to Canada. 

Pfizer's release of data showing its three-shot COVID-19 vaccine is 80% effective among children under the age of 5 is welcome news for parents anxious to get their young children vaccinated more than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic.

It's not COVID. Great, but your coworkers still don't want whatever else you have. UCHealth's Dr. Michelle Barron discusses navigating respiratory illness season.

Run by the Colorado Melanoma Foundation (CMF), the Sun Bus has provided more than 3500 free skin-cancer screenings throughout the Central and Southwestern United States to date. Along the way, providers are learning perhaps as much about melanoma misconceptions as the project teaches patients about skin cancer.

 A study shows that over a 4-year period, 15 teenagers were injured from exploding e-cigarettes, according to surgeons who have treated young people at nine hospitals in the United States.

Nearly 30 percent of physicians reported experiencing discrimination and mistreatment from patients or patients’ family members or visitors, a study published May 19 in JAMA Network Open found.

Mile High Behavioral Healthcare likes to keep its center colorful and bright — words maybe most people wouldn’t associate with addiction treatment, but to Jessica Courtney, the center's chief clinical officer, it’s been how she’s able to reach people to save their lives.

Some of the most advanced research in diabetes is being done right here in Colorado. The Barbara Davis Center is world renowned for the care and research of Type 1 diabetes. On the first floor at the center, doctors provide care to patients. In the labs on the upper floors, researchers are studying the disease on a microscopic level.

Colorado reports 13 cases of rare but serious mystery hepatitis in children

ABX-002, an experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS) being developed by Autobahn Therapeutics, promoted the restoration of the myelin sheath in preclinical models of the disease, new data show.

Physicians who experience mistreatment and discrimination by patients, their families, and visitors are more likely to have symptoms of burnout, according to a study published today in JAMA.

Nearly one-third of doctors in the United States have experienced mistreatment from patients or their families, including racist or sexist remarks, a study published Thursday found.

Drinking two to three cups of coffee a day significantly reduces the risk of acute kidney injury, a prospective cohort study suggests.

Christopher Schneck, the medical director of the Helen and Arthur E.
Johnson Depression Center at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz
Medical Campus, estimates that 15% to 30% of people suffering with
depression encounter treatment resistance. At the same time, 17% of
the U.S. population deals with depression during their life, he said.
“We have no way of really knowing which drug is going to work for
which person, other than trying medications,” Schneck said.

Lebrikizumab reduced exacerbations in adolescents with uncontrolled asthma and had a favorable safety profile, according to results of the ACOUSTICS study.