IN THE NEWS: Enrique Galvan, a young man from Paraguay, was born with neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes skin lesions. Last week, a team of UCI Health surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses and other staff volunteered their skills in…
Contributed by Joan Steffan, PhD In a recent paper published in Proceedings of the National Academic of Sciences, colleagues and I show that a critical regulator of the immune system – called kinase IKKbeta – helps slow the onset of Huntington’s disease (HD) in mice, and this may be due to activation of a process called autophagy. Autophagy helps cells clean out and recycle their ‘trash’. Accumulation of trash can occur as we age and when disease is present, so regular cleaning enabled by autophagy is critical to maintain cellular function. In HD, brain cell autophagy fails, leading to an accumulation of harmful proteins that…
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IN THE NEWS: In January, Abby Crain was transported to the Level I trauma center at UCI Medical Center after suffering multiple broken bones in a near-head on traffic collision. While surgeons set her bones and put her on the road to recovery, UCI Heal…
UCI Health has received a 10th consecutive “A” grade in The Leapfrog Group’s biannual Hospital Safety Grade, which rates how well hospitals protect patients from errors, injuries and infections. The spring 2019 Hospital Safety Gr…
Contributed by Joan Steffan, PhD & Leslie Thompson, PhD Results from a recent study published by Tabrizi and colleagues and Ionis/Roche Pharmaceuticals in The New England Journal of Medicine are very exciting for the Huntington’s disease (HD) patient, family, and scientific communities. The researchers showed for the first time that treatment with a huntingtin lowering drug called an antisense oligonucleotide, or ASO, is safe in HD patients. Huntingtin is the protein linked to the genetic mutation that causes HD. With these results, researchers are planning a large clinical trial to test whether ASO can reduce symptoms in HD patients. The HD community is…
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UCI Health is now offering a non-surgical treatment for men with prostate enlargement. Prostate artery embolization (PAE) is a minimally-invasive outpatient procedure to treat men with benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH. Since becoming available…
UCI Health has recognized 14 nurses for excellence as part of National Nurses Week.
The medical center annually honors nurses and holds events such as the Nursing Exemplar Awards Ceremony to highlight their work and achievements during the past y…
IN THE NEWS: Most transplanted kidneys come from people whose organs were donated upon death. Living kidney donations offer significant advantages: They have a lower risk of rejection and they function better and longer than kidneys from deceas…
The post Views on physician-assisted death following amyloid PET disclosure – Dr. Joshua Grill comments appeared first on UCI MIND.
The public is invited to learn more about men’s health and urology, executive health, sleep medicine and behavioral health services offered at the state-of-art UCI Health medical facility opened last year in Newport Beach. The free one-hour lectu…
Contributed by Bryce Mander, PhD The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently required some sleep medications which are commonly used to treat insomnia to add black box warning labels. The reason for this decision is because there have been reported incidents of individuals engaging in activities that commonly occur during wakefulness during sleep while on these medications, including sleep walking, sleep driving, sleep eating, and sleep cooking. On rare occasions, these symptoms have resulted in serious injuries or life-threatening incidents, which has led to the inclusion of the black box label. The FDA has also issued a contraindication for…
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Contributed by Craig Stark, PhD Researchers from the UK have just released a report showing how we can extract valuable cognitive data out of video game performance. Using the mobile game Sea Hero Quest, which relies heavily on spatial memory and navigation, the researchers were able to discriminate healthy aging from those at-risk for Alzheimer’s. By using games that are fun and engaging, but are designed to tap into specific brain processes, we can usher in a new era of diagnosis. Research in my lab here at UCI is further looking at whether playing certain kinds of video games can actually…
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In honor of nurses week, occurring this year May 6-12, UCI Medical Center nurses are collecting and assembling care packages to send to the troops.
Nursing staff will be gathering, assembling and shipping boxes containing a variety of care items. A tha…