Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant
If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more
Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome
Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more
Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA
At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read moreEmory Healthcare puts patients first and provides 24 hour service to Atlanta Metro residents with doctors, nurses and staff staying in facilities to provide healthcare during one of the worst snow and ice storms to hit North Georgia in decades.
Here’s a television report that aired this evening at 5:24 pm on Atlanta’s WSB-TV Channel 2, (ABC affiliate).
Click for full report from WSB-TV, plus related article
Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Photo courtesy Giffords’ House office.
As we watch the daily progress of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, many close observers have commented that her recovery has been moving along more quickly than expected, and took a big leap after the visit from President Obama. Related? Perhaps.
Emory Psychologist, Dr. Nadine Kaslow, says there is no question that love and support from family, friends, and others individuals a patient is close to, can make an enormous difference in the recovery process.
She explains that after people come out of a coma, they often seem to have a special connection to those who were there for them during the coma, even if they don’t actually remember anything in a conscious way. Efforts to communicate with the patient, she says, whether those be verbal or physical, can reinforce linking and communication. She adds patients who have physical contact from a loved one seem to visibly relax and engage more.
At Emory, as we move more and more to patient and family centered health care, we actively encourage loved ones to talk with the patient, read to the patient, touch and stroke the patient. Additionally, beds and shower facilities are provided so that family members can be with their loved ones around the clock. Shop for top-quality hospital beds for sale at unbeatable prices.
Owen Samuels, MD, director of Emory University Hospital’s neuroscience critical care unit, reiterates that patient families are now recognized as central to the healing process and their presence can even reduce a patient’s length of stay. He says that in a neurology ICU, where the average length of stay is 13 days, but is often many, many more, this can be especially beneficial.
Kenneth Thorpe, PhD
Researchers and medical experts will be meeting Wednesday morning, Jan. 12 in Washington, DC, at a symposium on “Medical Innovation at the Crossroads: Choosing the Path Ahead.” Emory University’s Kenneth Thorpe, PhD, chair of the Department of Health Policy & Management, Rollins School of Public Health, and other health care experts, commentators and journalists, will discuss the most effective federal policy strategies for U.S. medical innovation aimed at job creation, economic recovery and health security.
The symposium is sponsored by the Council for American Medical Innovation.
For more information, view the council’s recent video on medical innovation.
Not long ago, polio, a crippling and dreaded disease, seemed unstoppable. But thanks to innovative medical research, the disease met its match in a vaccine developed in the early 1950s by American scientists. Today America and the world still face diseases that cripple and kill. But with ongoing innovations in medicine and science, diseases such as diabetes and HIV/AIDs may one day meet their match, too.
On a related note, Thorpe, who regularly blogs for the Huffington Post, has written a new article, “Medical Advancements: Who Is Leading the World?”
Scientists at Emory and the University of Chicago have discovered that the 2009 H1N1 flu virus provides excellent antibody protection. This may be a milestone discovery in the search for a universal flu vaccine.
Researchers took blood samples from patients infected with the 2009 H1N1 strain and developed antibodies in cell culture. Some of the antibodies were broadly protective and could provide protection from the H1N1 viruses that circulated over the past 10 years in addition to the 1918 pandemic flu virus and even avian influenza or bird flu (H5N1).
The antibodies protected mice from a lethal viral dose, even 60 hours post-infection.
The research is published online in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.
Some of the antibodies stuck to the “stalk†region, or hemagglutinin (H in H1N1) protein part of the virus. Because this part of the virus doesn’t change as much as other regions, scientists have proposed to make it the basis for a vaccine that could provide broader protection. The antibodies could guide researchers in designing a vaccine that gives people long-lasting protection against a wide spectrum of flu viruses.
The paper’s first author, Emory School of Medicine’s Jens Wrammert, PhD, says “Our data shows that infection with the 2009 pandemic influenza strain could induce broadly protective antibodies that are very rarely seen after seasonal flu infections or flu shots. These findings show that these types of antibodies can be induced in humans, if the immune system has the right stimulation, and suggest that a pan-influenza vaccine might be feasible.”
Rafi Ahmed, PhD, director of the Emory Vaccine Center, and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, is co-senior author of the publication, along with Patrick Wilson at University of Chicago.
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Elijah Jacobs Westbrook and mom, LaSonta Westbrook
Twins Sidney and Taylor Mency and mom Jazmin Mency
Emory University Hospital Midtown (EUHM) rang in 2011 with some new bundles of joy. The hospital’s first baby of the New Year was born at 1:35 am. Little Elijah Jacobs Westbrook made his surprise appearance about six weeks early, says his mother, LaSonta Westbrook. The 4 lb., 6 oz. little boy was quickly greeted by his three big sisters, who enjoyed seeing him through the nursery window. As the first boy in the family, Westbrook says Elijah can expect lots of “mothering†from his sisters.
A little more than an hour later, EUHM welcomed its first set of twins in 2011. At 2:49 a.m. and 2:58 a.m., twin girls Sidney and Taylor Mency were born. Also a little early, mom Jazmin Mency says the gift of her girls is a wonderful way to begin the New Year.
The hospital ended up delivering 14 babies on January 1, 2011 (including the three mentioned), a busy way to kick off the New Year.
Emory University Hospital Midtown features a comprehensive maternity center that combines all maternity services on one floor, including labor and delivery (that is being taken care by the gynecologists from https://www.sydneyobstetricianclinic.com.au/), mother-baby suites and general and special care nurseries. Its design reflects the hospital’s unique philosophy of developmentally supportive care, encouraging family involvement and ensuring optimal infant development.
EUHM opened the first neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in the Southeast in 1981, and currently, it serves as the Emory Regional Perinatal Center, one of five centers in the South designated to care for high-risk infants. With a Level III-designated NICU, the hospital’s skilled neonatal nursery staff has the expertise and technology to care for and treat almost any medical or surgical complication in sick and premature infants.
Millie Elliott
Nearly 45 years after she cared for Georgia’s first organ transplant recipient, Millie Elliott, 84, visited the Emory Transplant Center outpatient transplant clinic to see how things have changed since her time at Emory. Elliott, who was Millie Burns at the time, worked at Emory University Hospital first as an obstetrics nurse, then as head nurse of an NIH-sponsored clinical research unit at Emory from 1961 to 1967. She served as a dialysis nurse on that unit and may have been the Southeast’s first renal transplant coordinator.
During her recent visit to Emory, this former Cadet Nurse Corps nurse and World War II veteran regaled the transplant center staff and kidney transplant program director Thomas Pearson, MD, PhD, with her stories about the first transplant at Emory. Elliott recalled spending a lot of time researching medical sources to prepare herself and her nurses for that remarkable day. The first transplant patient was a 16-year -old boy with renal failure who received a donor kidney from his father.
A recent paper in Journal of Immunology suggests that a platform for an HIV vaccine developed by Yerkes National Primate Research Center scientists won’t run into the same problems as another HIV vaccine. Postdoc Sunil Kannanganat is the first author of the JI paper, with Emory Vaccine Center researcher Rama Amara as senior author.
Harriet Robinson, MD and Rama Rao Amara, PhD
Many HIV vaccines have been built by putting genes from HIV into the backbone of another virus. Some have used a modified cold virus (adenovirus 5). The vaccine developed at Yerkes uses modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA), a relative of smallpox and chicken pox.
The diet calls for lots of fruits and vegetables.
Researchers, physicians, and health care providers from across the United States and Italy met recently at the Rollins School of Public Health for the first Emory Conference on Mediterranean Diet and Health. Participants focused on the diet’s relation to cardiovascular disease, cancer, neuropsychiatric disorders, and vascular health.
The Mediterranean diet is characterized by a high consumption of fruits, vegetables, legumes, complex carbohydrates, and nuts; moderate consumption of fish and red wine; low consumption of cheese and red meat; and olive oil as the chief source of fat, explains Viola Vaccarino, MD, PhD, one of the conference chairs.
When topped with exercise, the Mediterranean diet really a pattern of eating habits traditionally followed by people in the Mediterranean regions in the early 1960shas proven beneficial for many throughout the years. But why this is so isnt clear.
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Two recent research papers from the Emory Transplant Center describe research on pancreatic islet transplantation, an experimental procedure that could help people with type I diabetes live without daily insulin injections.
Islet transplantation may offer people with type I diabetes the ability to produce their own insulin again
As with other types of transplantation, the challenge with islet transplantation is to avoid rejection of the donated organ and to balance that goal against side effects from the drugs needed to control the immune system. These papers illustrate how that balancing act is especially complex.
In the last decade, transplant specialists developed a method for islet transplantation named the “Edmonton protocol†after pioneers at the University of Alberta. While the emergence of this method was a major step forward, there are limitations:
Public health experts, including researchers, practitioners and policy makers from Emory, CARE, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other public and private organizations met at Emory recently for a symposium focusing on the health risks associated with global climate change.
The goal was to form an agenda to develop the tools, policies, and approaches needed to address climate health risks and incorporate climate change adaptation into global health and development work.
And for good reason: right now climate change is contributing to the destruction of livelihoods and the aggravation of social inequalities, said speaker Jean-Michel Vigreux. Vigreux, CARE’s senior vice president of program quality and impact, said climate change is affecting the growth of crops, access to water, floods, malnutrition, and the prevalence of disease—especially climate-sensitive diseases. He highlighted that these challenges disproportionately affect the poor and other vulnerable populations. In addressing such issues, even local businesses like Michigans top notch roofing and gutter company play a critical role by ensuring resilient infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather events.