Author Interview with Dr Matthew Grainge Achieved his BSc in Statistics at Reading University and his MSc in Medical Statistics at...
MedicalResearch.com Interview with Dr. Ciaran McMullan MD
from Channing Division of Network Medicine in Boston, a research division within the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Mass
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. McMullan: In this observational study performed in non-diabetic women we found that lower nocturnal melatonin secretion predicted future risk of developing type 2 diabetes. When we categorized the individuals by category of nocturnal melatonin secretion we found that those in the lowest category had twice the risk as those in the highest category of nocturnal melatonin secretion. This association remained even after adjusting for other well established risk factors for development of diabetes including body mass index, physical activity, dietary factors, family history of diabetes, smoking and hypertension. This increased risk translates into the lower melatonin secretion group having an additional 5 cases of incident diabetes per 1000 person years than the high melatonin secretion group.
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Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network
Ontario Cancer Institute (OCI)
Assistant Professor
Department of Medical Biophysics
University of Toronto
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Lupien: Approximately 50% of breast cancer patients fail to respond to the standard of care based on endocrine (hormonal) therapy. Our research identifies a mechanism that accounts for this resistance. Drugs against this mechanism are already tested for other diseases. Hence, our discovery should rapidly help reposition these drugs against endocrine therapy resistant breast cancer.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with Karl K. Szpunar PhD
Department of Psychology,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Szpunar: The results of our experiments demonstrate that students can have difficulty paying attention to online lectures, and that including brief quizzes during lectures can help to alleviate this problem. Specifically, we found that students who were tested throughout a 21-minute long Statistics lecture were half as likely to mind wander during the lecture, three times as likely to take additional notes, and much better able to retain the contents of the lecture at a later time.
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Department of Physics of Complex Systems and Department of Biological Regulation, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Prof. Domany: The findings are two-fold: methodological and clinical. A novel method was introduced for personalized analysis of cancer, and was applied on large colon cancer and glioblastoma datasets.
The method uses high throughput (gene expression) data to infer a pathway deregulation score (PDS) for individual tumors, for hundreds of pathways and biological processes. The method is knowledge-based in that it uses well known information about the assignment of genes to biologically relevant pathways. No detailed knowledge of the underlying networks of interactions and activations is necessary. Each tumor is represented by a few hundred of these PDSs, and further analysis uses this representation.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview Dr. Alexander Turchin M.D.,M.S.
Director of Informatics Research
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School
Endocrinology, Diabetes and Hypertension
Brigham and Women's Hospital Boston, MA
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Turchi: A large number of patients – 17% of individuals included in our study – report side effects to statins in routine care settings. Nearly 60% of these patients stopped the statin at least temporarily. However, overwhelming majority of patients who stopped taking a statin after experiencing a possible side effect, could tolerate a statin long-term if they tried taking one again. In other words, it appears that many statin-related events are tolerable, specific to individual statins or have other causes. These findings are consistent with the current guidelines that urge a conservative approach to statin discontinuation. They are particularly important because statins have been convincingly shown to save lives – they decrease all-cause mortality, and also cardiovascular mortality and incidence of cardiovascular events in patients with ischemic heart disease and / or elevated cholesterol levels.
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Dr. Steven A. Branstetter, PhD
The Pennsylvania State University, 315 E. HHD, University Park, PA 16810.
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Branstetter: This study demonstrated that the time to the first cigarette of the day after waking is associated with increased levels of a NNAL, a metabolite of a powerful tobacco-specific carcinogen, NNK -- even after controlling for the total number of cigarettes smoked per day.
For years, the time to the first cigarette of the day after waking was one of several questions assessing nicotine dependence on the Fagerstrom Test for Nicotine Dependence (FTND), the gold standard questionnaire int he field. Over time, it was found that much of the predictive validity of the FTND was due to the time to first cigarette item. Researchers have found that single time to first cigarette item was highly correlated with other measures of nicotine dependence, and was predictive of more difficulty quitting smoking and increased intake of nicotine. Our current study demonstrates that this behavioral measure, is predictive of exposure to the cancer-causing components of cigarettes, regardless of the total number of cigarettes smoked per day. The results suggest that researchers, clinicians and smokers can assess the level of nicotine dependence and potential cancer risk by looking at the time to the first cigarette of the day after waking.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with Janet S. de Moor, PhD, MPH
Program Director, Office of Cancer Survivorship
Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences
National Cancer Institute/National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD 20891-8336
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. de Moor: The number of people who have been diagnosed with cancer during their lifetime has been steadily increasing. As of January 1, 2012, approximately 13.7 million cancer survivors were living in the United States with projected prevalence to approach 18 million by 2022. Women with breast cancer and men with prostate cancer represent the two largest groups of cancer survivors, accounting for 22% and 20% of the population respectively. Sixty-four percent of cancer survivors have survived 5 years or more; 40% have survived 10 years or more; and 15% have survived 20 years or more after diagnosis. Over the next decade, the number of people who have lived 5 years or more after their cancer diagnosis is projected to increase approximately 37% to 11.9 million.
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Matt T. Bianchi MD PhD MMSc
Assistant Professor
Department of Neurology
Director, Sleep Division
Massachusetts General Hospital
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Bianchi: We showed that patients reporting symptoms of insomnia tend to under-estimate the amount of time they slept during overnight sleep testing in our clinical sleep laboratory.
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Dr. Sylvia Santosa, PhD
Department of Exercise Science
Concordia University
Department of Exercise Science
Montreal, Quebec, Canada H4B 1R6
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Santosa: Our results show that postmenopausal women burn less fat making more available to be stored. Our results also suggest that greater fat storage in postmenopausal women are likely to be attributed to changes in the pathways our fat cells use to store fat. We found that some of the proteins that help our fat cells store fat were more active and this greater activity corresponded with the amount of fat stored from our circulation.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Laura B. Zahodne, PhD
Postdoctoral fellow in the cognitive neuroscience division in the Department of Neurology and the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain
Columbia University Medical Center.
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Zahodne: Having more depressive symptoms early on in Alzheimer’s disease was associated with more rapid declines in the ability to handle tasks of everyday living, and this relationship was independent of cognitive decline.
MedicalResearch.com: Were any of the findings unexpected?
Dr. Zahodne: Previous studies have shown that depressive symptoms are associated with more difficulties with thinking and daily activities. This study additionally shows that depressive symptoms herald not only more rapid declines in thinking, but also daily functioning, over time.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with Stig E. Bojesen
Staff specialist, MD, PhD, DMSci
Dept. of Clinical Biochemistry, Copenhagen University Hospital
Herlev Hospital DK-2730 Herlev Denmark
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Medical Research.com Interview with
Dr. Anna Nordström MD
Department of Community Medicine and Rehabilitation, Rehabilitation Medicine, Umeå University, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden
Medical Research.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Nordström: We have found that low cognitive function and factors related to low socioeconomic status and intoxications are strong independent risk factors for mild traumatic brain injury in men.
Medical Research.com: Were any of the findings unexpected?
Dr. Nordström: Our knowledge of risk factors that predispose people to sustaining such injury is limited. Previous research has inferred that mild traumatic brain injuries have important long-term consequences on cognitive function. However, we found similar deficits in cognitive function in subjects that sustained a mild traumatic brain injury before and after cognitive testing. Thus our data suggest that the injury itself may not reduce cognitive function.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with Gabriel Brooks MD
Fellow, Medical Oncology
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Brooks: First, we found that there is substantial regional variation in Medicare spending for patients with advanced cancer. For patients with a new diagnosis of advanced stage cancer, spending in the six months following diagnosis varied by 32% between regions in the highest and lowest quintiles of spending. And for patients who died from cancer, spending in the last six months of life varied by 41% between the highest and lowest spending regions.
Second, we tested the association between area-level spending and survival from the time of advanced cancer diagnosis. We found that there was no consistent association between increasing spending and survival for any of the five cancer sites included in our study (non-small cell lung cancer, colorectal cancer, pancreas cancer, breast cancer and prostate cancer).
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Dr. Donald K. Milton, MD, Dr.P.H
Professor and Director
Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health
University of Maryland
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Milton: We found that total viral copies detected by molecular methods were 8.8 times more numerous in fine (≤5 µm) than in coarse (>5 µm) aerosol particles and that the fine particles from cases with the highest total number of viral RNA copies contained infectious virus.
Surgical masks reduced the overall number of RNA copies by 3.4 fold.
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Medical Research.com
Author Interview: Dr. Martin C. Tammemägi
Professor (Epidemiology) Brock University
Department of Community Health Sciences
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada L2S 3A1
Medical Research.com What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Tammemägi: Our study accomplished three things:
1. We presented an updated Lung Cancer Risk Prediction Model, which compared to our previously JNCI-published model, incorporates more predictors but is simpler to use because we changed the way we modeled nonlinear effects.
2. We demonstrated that using the Lung Cancer Risk Prediction Model to select individuals for lung cancer screening was much more effective than using the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) enrolment criteria. 41.3% fewer lung cancers were missed. Sensitivity and positive predictive value of identifying individuals who develop lung cancer were significantly improved. Shortly after our NEJM paper was published, Ma et al published in CANCER their findings that 8.6 million Americans are NLST-criteria positive and if they were CT screened under ideal conditions 12,000 lung cancer deaths would be averted. Our NEJM article findings indicate that an additional 2,764 lives would be saved if the selection criteria had enrolled 8.6 million individuals for screening based on highest risk by our Lung Cancer Risk Prediction Model.
3. Importantly, using NLST data we demonstrated that the beneficial effect of CT screening did not vary by model predicted lung cancer risk.
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MedicalResearch.com Author Interview: Sam Schulman M.D., FRCPC(C)
Professor, Division of Hematology and Thromboembolism, Department of Medicine
Associate Professor, Medicine, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden
Director, Clinical Thromboembolism Program Hamilton Health Sciences, Hamilton General Hospital, Hamilton, Ontario
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Response: Similar effect of dabigatran as warfarin, 92% risk reduction compared to placebo. The risk of bleeding is reduced by almost 50% compared to warfarin but in comparison with placebo there is an increased risk of minor bleeding. No routine coagulation monitoring or dose adjustments are required, making the treatment convenient for patients and physicians.
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