In the News - News
There is much value in training hospital and nursing home staff in the basics of palliative care to make the last days of a dying patient's life as comfortable and dignified as possible. So says F. Amos Bailey of the Birmingham Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the US.
“In the final episode, she looks emaciated,” said Krista Casazza, Ph.D., R.D. and an expert on body tissue partitioning at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Up until the final episode when she was losing weight with the trainers, not at home, she looked a lot healthier and looked like she was preserving the bone and lean mass,” Casazza told the Huffington Post.
"There are many considerations about stroke that might be different for women: Reproductive factors and risk factors more common or stronger in women, like diabetes and atrial fibrillation, might get lost in a general guidelines document," explained Virginia Howard, Ph.D., UAB professor of epidemiology and co-author of the new scientific statement Guidelines for the Prevention of Stroke in Women.
Like other hospitals, UAB Hospital faces deep cuts in federal reimbursement for treating uninsured patients under the health-care law, he said, but won't see many new paying patients without the Medicaid expansion. On a recent evening, as a rare blizzard struck Birmingham, dozens of uninsured patients filed through the emergency room at UAB's main campus. Complaints ranged from headaches and swollen feet to broken bones. Such visits contribute to more than $100 million in uncompensated care costs at the hospital, according to 2012 Medicare data.
For some, this is the tournament that officially kicks off the golf season - the much-loved AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. This week, let's go with a couple of guys who have Alabama connections. I'll take defending champ Brandt Snedeker, who is due to have a big week, as well as former UAB star Graeme McDowell in his first outing on the PGA Tour this year.
"Men are physiologically different from women, so preventive tips cannot be one-size-fits-all," explained Virginia Howard, Ph.D., co-author of the new scientific statement Guidelines for the Prevention of Stroke in Women, published from the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association Council on Stroke in the AHA journal Stroke
Only one Alabamian has ever won a gold medal in a winter Olympic event. Do you remember her name? She won it a dozen years ago. Give up? She is Vonetta Flowers of Birmingham and UAB and she won gold in the women's bobsled in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.
It's rare to find a parent who hasn’t relied on the occasional bribe to extract certain behavior from her kid. Joshua Klapow, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist for the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public health, notes that not all bribery is bad. "'Bribe' has a very negative connotation, but bribing is basically offering a value proposition to do or not do a behavior," he explains.
During the height of last week's winter storm, some UAB doctors decided not to go home but instead chose to stay at the hospital and give others a second chance at life. Physicians and staff in UAB's transplant unit stayed three days and nights at the hospital to perform sixteen kidney operations. That included eight kidney donation procedures, and eight kidney recipient operations.
The newly opened Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at UAB opens its doors to the public for its first “Pop-Up Studio” event on Friday and Saturday, Feb. 14-15. Michael Tabie, of Two Arms Inc. in Brooklyn, N.Y., will present a free lecture and printmaking demonstration during his residency as he completes a commissioned silkscreen about Birmingham.
HCV — which affects more than 3 million people in the United States and is the leading cause of cirrhosis and liver cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — last saw guidelines released in 2011. Michael Saag, MD, professor of medicine in the UAB School of Medicine, served as co-chair of a panel of more than two dozen liver and infectious diseases doctors that created HCVguidelines.org, a new online resource.
An unexpected winter storm paralyzed nearly all of Birmingham and much of central Alabama last week, but it didn't stop doctors at UAB Hospital from continuing the Southeast's largest kidney transplant chain. The chain, which has been coined by the hospital as the "Pair Share Program," continued the week of Jan. 27 as doctors performed 16 operations, including eight donor nephrectomies and eight kidney transplants.
A study showed that older people who smoked less than 32 “pack years” — 3.2 packs (20 cigarettes per pack) a day for no more than 10 years or less than one pack a day for 30 years — and gave up smoking 15 or fewer years ago lowered their risks of developing heart failure or dying from heart failure, heart attacks and strokes to the same level as those who had never smoked. “It’s good news,” said Ali Ahmed, M.D., M.P.H., senior researcher and professor of cardiovascular disease at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Medicine. “Now there’s a chance for even less of a waiting period to get a cleaner bill of cardiovascular health.”
New opportunities exist through the National Dental Practice-Based Research Network for dentists to gather evidence that may have chairside significance. "This input has come enthusiastically at every step of the study development process—from idea generation, to study design, to design of the data collection forms, to study implementation, all to be done in busy clinical practices," said Dr. Gregg Gilbert, network director and chair of the department of clinical and community sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
'One glass of wine a day is better than six! Again, cook with butter - just use a little and most important, do not eat after 7 o'clock in the evening,' Does Raymond Blanc's advice match up to the research? The Michelin-starred chef says women should not eat bacon and eggs every morning, but a high-fat breakfast of bacon and eggs may be the healthiest start to the day, a study at the University of Alabama at Birmingham study. 'The first meal you have appears to program your metabolism for the rest of the day,'said study senior author Martin Young, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine in the UAB Division of Cardiovascular Disease.
A single bad year doesn't typically force a hospital to enter bankruptcy. A new study on the topic by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham found that most hospitals were done in by steadily declining admissions, revenues and relationships with their physicians, and were unable to reverse them.
For patients presenting to the emergency department with acute respiratory tract infections (ARTI), inappropriate utilization of antibiotics has decreased for children, but not for adults, according to a study published online Dec. 16 in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. John P. Donnelly, MSPH, from University of Alabama at Birmingham, and colleagues conducted a retrospective study involving patients presenting to emergency departments with ARTIs from 2001 to 2010 identified from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey.
Cancer patients who are actively being treated for cancer can safely receive flu shots, Mollie deShazo, MD, told The ASCO Post. “It is not going to be dangerous for them. The question is how effective it will be.” Dr. deShazo is Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology and Medical Director of Inpatient Oncology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Like a real-life Indiana Jones, Dr. Jim Pittman had a flair for adventure, despite his bow-tie wearing academic appearance as dean of the UAB School of Medicine. Pittman, dean of the UAB School of Medicine from 1973-92, died on Jan. 12. He was 86. Anyone who attended the Bessemer Air Show in the early 1980s had a chance to ride with Pittman in his 1935 Stearman biplane. Pittman would offer rides all day long.
The UAB campus, like the rest of the Birmingham area, was hit hard and fast by the sudden winter storm on Tuesday. "We had hundreds of folks stranded in buildings," Harlan Sands, UAB vice provost for administration, said on Thursday. "We did two things," Sands said. "We opened up the rec center for warmth and shelter. And we cranked up our dining commons to serve the people who were stuck."
Amy and Duane Donner recently contributed $125,000 to the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Collat School of Business for its Healthcare Leadership Academy. Founded in 2009, the academy is a joint collaboration between the Collat School of Business and School of Medicine, and it has helped the university retain promising health-focused faculty and staff. The academy’s mission is to identify and develop future leaders of the UAB academic medical center.