Health & Medicine

Jan

2023

What Is Smallpox?

Verywell Health, January 26, 2023.

Smallpox is a deadly infectious disease caused by a virus. It hasn’t caused an infection in the wild since the 1970s. No one has had smallpox in the United States since 1949. The last death from smallpox was in the United Kingdom in 1978.

Though you’re not likely to encounter smallpox in the wild, it still exists in two labs. These two labs are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States and the Vector Institute in Russia. These samples are kept to test drugs and conduct other experiments. Read More >

Jan

2023

Weighing the Pros and Cons of Antineoplastic Drugs

Verywell Health, January 26, 2023.

Antineoplastic drugs are medicines used to treat cancer and other diseases. It’s a general name for drugs that stop tumor cells from growing and dividing. Antineoplastic drugs are also called anticancer drugs, chemotherapy, cytotoxic drugs, oncology drugs, and cancer drugs.

The goal of antineoplastic drugs in cancer treatment is to stop or block the growth of cells in a tumor.

These drugs may also treat arthritis, multiple sclerosis, benign (noncancerous) tumors, and other noncancer medical conditions. Read More>

Jan

2023

What Is Toxoplasmosis?

Verywell Health, January 24, 2023.

Toxoplasmosis is a disease caused by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. This parasite is a tiny single-celled organism called a protozoan. People can acquire it from undercooked meat and exposure to cat feces.

In healthy individuals, this infection doesn’t usually do lasting damage and often shows no symptoms. But, pregnant people, their fetuses, and people with a weakened immune system are at risk of more dangerous infections. Read More >

Jan

2023

Melatonin Searches Spike Every Winter

SleepFoundation.org, January 4, 2023

Melatonin web searches on Google increased 36% from December 2021 to January 2022, as they have the past few winters.
Google searches for “sleep aid” also hit a five-year peak in January 2022.
West Virginia, Kentucky, and Mississippi are the states with the highest relative search volume for melatonin.

Melatonin’s popularity has grown tremendously in recent years. Google searches for the term “melatonin” have jumped each of the past five winters, peaking each January. According to Google Trends, melatonin searches grew 36% from late December 2021 to early January 2022, spiking again at the end of January. Read More >

Dec

2022

What Is Thymoma?

Verywell Health, December 31 2022.

Thymoma is a tumor (growth) of the thymus gland. It may be benign or malignant (cancer). The thymus gland is part of the lymphatic system—the tissues that help produce, store, and transport white blood cells. The thymus helps white blood cells called T lymphocytes grow and multiply. It’s found in the chest behind the breastbone.

Thymomas are rare. There are only about 400 cases of thymomas per year in the United States. Thymic carcinoma accounts for 20% of all tumors in the thymus. Read More >

Dec

2022

Dr. Shawn Torres

UCSF Health, December 5 2022.

Dr. Shawn Torres is a primary care doctor with expertise in preventing, diagnosing and treating chronic disorders. She has a special interest in relieving chronic conditions through lifestyle changes. Her approach is to see her patients as whole people, taking their physical, mental and social health into account while working to understand and address any illness. Read More >

Nov

2022

Triple Positive Breast Cancer Prognosis

Verywell Health, November 29 2022.

Triple-positive breast cancer has three features that influence its prognosis and set it apart from other subtypes of breast cancer. It grows in response to two hormones and makes a lot of a protein called human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2).

While these features mean cancer grows fast, it also means that it has many treatment options. It responds to both hormone treatments and targeted treatments against HER2. However, new research suggests that it may not respond as well to these drugs as other breast cancers with HER2. Read More >

Oct

2022

Obstetrician LeRoy Heinrichs, evangelist for virtual medical training, dies at 90

Stanford Medicine, October 24 2022.

William LeRoy Heinrichs, MD, PhD, a professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynecology at the Stanford School of Medicine, died Sept. 21. He was 90.

Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology from 1976 until 1984, Heinrichs pursued minimally invasive surgical techniques, took an early interest in fertility and hormone treatments as well as surgical treatment of endometriosis, and was a champion of virtual medical training technologies. Read More >

Jun

2022

Stanford researchers testing ways to improve clinical trial diversity

Stanford Medicine, June 22, 2022.

Two Stanford Medicine professors are working with the Morehouse School of Medicine to test ways to enroll more diverse patients in clinical trials for heart disease treatments. The research is part of a $20 million project launched by the American Heart Association to improve diversity in clinical trials.

“Many common chronic diseases disproportionately affect communities of color,” said Hannah Valantine, MD, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at Stanford Medicine. For example, Black Americans are 30% more likely to die of heart disease than white Americans, according to 2018 data from the U.S. Health and Human Services. “To translate research discoveries into medicines that can make an impact on those communities, we must have diversity in the clinical trials testing them,” she noted. Read More >

May

2022

Digging into diversity to understand diabetes

Stanford Medicine SCOPE, May 16 2022.

Studying the human genome — the code that determines how the body is put together and operates — has helped scientists decipher the root of many diseases. Even so, there are still holes (some might say gaping ones) in our knowledge of genetic disease.

That’s particularly true when it comes to the causes and risk factors that lead to genetically complex diseases, such as Type 2 diabetes. Researchers call these complex polygenic diseases because they arise from hundreds of small changes to the genome combined with a person’s environment and lifestyle. Read More >