Author Interviews, Brigham & Women's - Harvard, Diabetes, Ophthalmology / 16.06.2023

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Ali Hafezi-Moghadam, Ph.D., M.D Director, Molecular Biomarkers Nano-Imaging Laboratory (MBNI) Associate Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School Brigham and Women’s Hospital MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: “It is very easy to answer many fundamental biological questions” said Richard Feynman in his 1959 address, where he also offered his simple and ingenious solution: “you just look at the thing!”[1]. As a biologist, I am familiar with the challenges surrounding looking at things in the context of life. There is no single device or technology that lets me simply see the answers to my questions. How does diabetes harm the tissues in the body? When exactly does the pathology start and which molecules and cells are involved? Trying to answer these questions, I have spent the past two decades innovating new ways of quantifying expression of molecules in the living organism [2]. At the same time to study diabetes, we needed a realistic rodent model that mirrors the human disease. In collaboration with KC Hayes[3], we first introduced the Nile grass rat (NGR, Arvicanthis niloticus), a gerbil that recapitulates the main features of the human type 2 diabetes [4]. For visualization of early changes, the eye offers a unique site. Much of my lab’s work focused on the first effects of diabetes in the retina, the site of the neurons that perceive light in the back of the eye [5], [6], [7]. In recent studies, we focused on how diabetes affects the lens in the eye of our animals [8], [9]. Diabetes is a major risk factor for cataract formation, a condition during which the lens loses its original transparency to visible light. How diabetic cataracts are formed is not well understood. A popular and prevailing theory, termed “sugar cataracts”, has been around for over half a century. According to the sugar hypothesis of cataracts, the excess levels of the sugar molecule, glucose, in the lens are transformed through the polyol pathway into the sugar-alcohol sorbitol. The resulting osmotic dysbalance leads to swelling of the fiber cells and opacity of the lens. Even though the sugar hypothesis has never been proven, it was generally accepted and remained unchallenged for a very long time. That is where our latest experimental results became relevant. (more…)
Author Interviews / 10.03.2023

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Norman Kleiman, PhD, MS Department of Environmental Health Sciences Mailman School of Public Health Columbia University, New York, NY MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster caused the evacuation of 300,000 persons from the cities and villages surrounding the nuclear power plant complex. Pets and belongings were left behind, and the Soviet authorities ordered all animals within the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone killed. Some dogs evaded destruction, and some 300+ descendants of these animals live primarily at two locations today, immediately surrounding the Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) complex and about 10 km away in Chornobyl city. What is relatively unknown to the general public is that Chornobyl is not a desolate, abandoned wasteland. Some thousands of individuals work there every day in continuing cleanup activities and at two new fuel reprocessing facilities built near the damaged reactor. These areas have been substantially remediated, and the average radiation levels are relatively modest. The dogs, which, while feral, are accustomed to human interaction, live near the workers and are not currently exposed to high radiation levels. In contrast to lower radiation levels, there is a toxic mixture of heavy metals, organics, pesticides, and unknown chemicals left over from years’ long cleanup efforts and the decay of a large former military-industrial complex at the NPP. Since 2016, the NPP authorities have brought in teams of veterinarians and volunteers to spay, neuter, and vaccinate the dogs to protect the workers and deal with a growing population. At the same time, some scientists joined the teams to obtain various kinds of biospecimens (hair, urine, feces, blood, saliva, parasites) to examine the animals’ health and learn how this toxic environment may have affected them or their offspring. Since dogs are human companion animals and live closely with us, any information we learn about health risks to the dogs may be relevant to protecting human workers and inform us about the kinds of health risks posed by ecological and environmental disasters in the future. (more…)
Author Interviews, Pediatrics / 22.01.2023

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Maria Grandahl, Associate Professor, PhD, Senior lecturer Director of Education in Nursing and Midwifery programs Uppsala University Department of Women’s and Children’s Health on behalf of authors: Dr Jenny Stern, Dr Eva-Lotta Funkquist and Dr Maria Grandahl MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Conflicting advice and non-evidence-based recommendations have a negative effect on breastfeeding. Since 2011, the National Food Agency in Sweden has informed parents that they can introduce tiny tastings (1 mL of solid food, i.e. other sources of nutrition than breastmilk/formula) to infants from four months of age. It is unknown how national recommendations, which differ from the Word Health Organization’s recommendation, affect breastfeeding. (more…)
Author Interviews, BMC, Breast Cancer, Cancer Research, Weight Research / 27.02.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Carolyn Ee PhD NICM Health Research Institute Western Sydney University Australia MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Worldwide and in Australia, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. Weight gain is common after diagnosis of breast cancer and may increase tumour recurrence risk, mortality rate, and worsen quality of life. As there was no national data on the prevalence of weight gain after breast cancer in Australia, we undertook a national survey which was open to any woman living in Australia who had breast cancer. (more…)
Author Interviews, BMC, Cost of Health Care, Diabetes, Yale / 28.09.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Phoebe Tran Doctoral Student Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology Yale School of MedicinePhoebe Tran Doctoral Student Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology Yale School of Medicine  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: As the prevalence of diabetes risk factors such as obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and physical inactivity are considerably higher in US individuals residing in rural areas compared to their urban counterparts, rural residents face increased risk of developing diabetes. Diabetes screening is a useful tool that can be used to identify people with newly developed type 2 diabetes and offer them early treatment. In this study, we examined whether there are differences in diabetes screening levels between rural and urban areas across the US using nationally representative survey data from 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017.   (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Health Care Systems / 14.03.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Nicholas A. Rattray, Ph.D. Research Scientist/Investigator VA HSR&D Center for Health Information and Communication Implementation Core, Precision Monitoring to Transform Care (PRISM) QUERI Richard L. Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center Indiana University Center for Health Services & Outcomes Research Regenstrief Institute, Inc. Indianapolis, Indiana on behalf of study co-authors re: Rattray NA, Flanagan ME, Militello LG, Barach P, Franks Z, Ebright P, Rehman SU, Gordon HS, Frankel RM MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: End-of-shift handoffs pose a substantial patient safety risk. The transition of care from one doctor to another has been associated with delays in diagnosis and treatment, duplication of tests or treatment and patient discomfort, inappropriate care, medication errors and longer hospital stays with more laboratory testing. Handoff education varies widely in medical schools and residency training programs. Although there have been efforts to improve transfers of care, they have not shown meaningful improvement. Led for the last decade by Richard Frankel, Ph.D., a senior health scientist at Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University and professor at Indiana University School of Medicine, our team has studied how health practitioners communicate during end-of-shift handoffs. In this current study, funded by VA Health Services and Research Development, we conducted interviews with 35 internal medicine and surgery residents at three VA medical centers about a recent handoff and analyzed the responses. Our team also video-recorded and analyzed more than 150 handoffs. Published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, this study explains how the person receiving the handoff can affect the interaction. Medical residents said they changed their delivery based on the doctor or resident who was taking over (i.e., training level, preference for fewer details, day or night shift). We found that handoff communication involves a complex combination of socio-technical information where residents balance relational factors against content and risk. It is not a mechanistic process of merely transferring clinical data but rather is based on learned habits of communication that are context-sensitive and variable, what we refer to as “recipient design”. In another paper led by Laura Militello, we focus on how residents cognitively prepare for handoffs. In the paper published in The Joint Commission Journal of Quality and Patient Safety®, researchers detailed the tasks involved in cognitively preparing for handoffs. A third paper, published in BMC Medical Education, reports on the limited training that physicians receive during their residency. Residents said they were only partially prepared for enacting handoffs as interns, and clinical experience and enacting handoffs actually taught them the most.   (more…)