AP - “A healthier heart, for example, is going to translate to a healthier brain...you can have a group of people who at age 80 are still going to work every day, doing all the stuff they need to do. We’re not very good at understanding who’s going to be able to tolerate the stress in emergency situations,” like the 3 a.m. crises presidents so often must navigate, said EPI's Anne Newman as three Democrats in their 70s are vying to challenge the...
FOX NEWS - Texas is the largest state by population that allows parents to not vaccinate their children for personal or religious reasons. And the number of exemptions has increased in recent years, growing from 2,300 in 2013 to 64,000 in 2016. Research led by PHDL postdoc David Sinclair found just a 5 percent decrease in the vaccination rate could increase the size of a potential measles outbreak by 4,000 percent in some communities in Texas. ...
“This year’s ranking positions the University of Pittsburgh as a top-20 public school,” says Chancellor Patrick Gallagher. “It’s a powerful testament to our students, faculty and staff and a clear signal that our trajectory as a world leader in learning, teaching, and research is still—undeniably—on the rise."
Hirunwut Praekunatham (EOH, '18) was recently promoted to chief of the Epidemiology and Public Health Emergency Response unit under the new Division of Occupational and Environmental Diseases in Thailand. Praekunatham's responsibilities include surveillance of environmental/occupational diseases at the national level and field work in response to emergencies or events related to chemical and radioactive substances.
Review the latest findings in the 2018 Community Violence Prevention Initiative Homicide Review Findings Report.
UNDARK - Research by HPM's Marian Jarlenski has shown women’s perception of cannabis as risky is dropping. A study published in June in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that between 2002 to 2003 and 2016 to 2017, self-reported use of cannabis in pregnancy doubled overall in the U.S., from 3.4 percent to 7 percent.
BUSINESS INSIDER - Alvaro San-Juan Rodriguez (HPM '20) and Inmaculada Hernandez (HPM '16) published a new study in JAMA Neurology that found that drug prices for individuals with multiple sclerosis quadrupled over a 10-year period. The average price of the the treatments climbed from $18,660 in 2006 to $75,847 in 2016.
THE NEW YORK TIMES - Mona Hanna-Attisha, author of What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City, explains how persistence, activism, teamwork, and science prevailed when the powers-that-be tried to silence her research when she found lead in the blood of Flint's children. Since then, Flint has been on a slow but sure path toward recovery.
HEALIO - A child’s chance of survival in an emergency may depend on the hospital where they receive care. Researchers assessed the pediatric readiness of EDs in five states and found that hospitals with the highest scores had lower mortality rates. “For some time, we’ve known that hospitals vary widely with respect to their readiness to care for pediatric emergencies,” said HPM's Jeremy Kahn. “What’s new about our study is that for the first tim...
Just looking at the average difference in sleep over a week may be “misleading,” said EPI's Stephen Smagula. “That comes down to about 25 minutes a day. But some caregivers may be really losing a lot of sleep while some aren’t losing much,” he added.
In case you missed it - head into the new academic year by catching up with the highlights from BCHS faculty, students, and staff with the 2019 newsletter.
ASPPH FRIDAY LETTER - There is a dearth of scientifically investigated, evidence-based interventions to address substance use, mental health conditions and violence victimization in sexual and gender minority youth, according to a research review led by BCHS's Robert Coulter (BCHS '17) published in the journal Pediatrics. After poring over thousands of research publications spanning nearly two decades, the scientists identified only nine studies...
NEWSWEEK - David Sinclair, a postdoctoral researcher in Pitt's Public Health Dynamics Laboratory and lead author of the study said, "I was surprised at how large measles outbreaks could be in Texas at current vaccination rates, according to our forecasts. The clustering of unvaccinated children in certain schools appears to help measles spread widely."
Alex Nowalk (BCHS '16), program director at Pitt's Program Evaluation and Research Unit, recently co-authored a chapter in an upcoming book, A Public Health Guide to Ending the Opioid Epidemic. Nowalk's chapter presents screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment as a public health and prevention strategy to address substance use and addiction. The book will be published through Oxford University Press and co-published with the Amer...
THE NATION'S HEALTH - The law is good news for maternal health, but it is critical that such committees include and work with women most at risk, said EPI's Dara Mendez, a member of Pennsylvania’s newly established Maternal Mortality Review Committee, which had its first meeting in July. In a Health Affairs article published in February on implementation of the new federal law, Mendez and co-authors said the “extent to which these voices are cur...
ASPPH FRIDAY LETTER - Hormone replacement therapy is a common treatment for menopause-related symptoms, and new research from EPI's Samar El Khoudary reinforces the importance of tailoring hormone therapy to each patient, based on her individual risk factors for cardiovascular disease. In a study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, researchers showed for the first time that hormone replacement therapy affects the accumula...
FOX 46 ORLANDO - "They are considered fat-loving or lipophilic. So they naturally migrate into the fat in the food,” EPI's Jennifer Adibi said.
STAT NEWS - “This study shows that there continues to be a chance to really intervene on the prevention side,” said HPM's Marian Jarlenski. The decision to write an initial prescription is a low-hanging-fruit point of intervention, she said.
BIOST Chair Shyamal Peddada presented "Identification of rhythmic signals in oscilatory systems with applications to chronobiology at the July 2019 International Workshop on Data Science at Jilin University, Changchun, Jilin, China.
People in the Mon Valley ages 65 and older are experiencing fewer depression symptoms than previously reported. A new study authored in part by EPI postdoc Kevin Sullivan, looked at how over 3,000 older people in communities across Southwestern Pennsylvanians are aging physically and mentally. The study finds people born more recently report fewer symptoms than cohorts from earlier birth decades. “Our job when looking at these effects is to real...