Health Sciences In The Media

Health experts say there shouldn’t be any concern about getting both the COVID vaccine and a flu shot at the same time. “The immune system is pretty good at handling multiple things at once,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, a professor of immunobiology at the College of Medicine – Tucson. He noted how children often receive multiple vaccines at visits to their pediatrician.

There is widespread agreement about the importance of improving fitness levels for the management of obesity, as advocated by the fat-but-fit approach. However, there are concerns among the scientific and medical community about the degree of emphasis on weight loss and other factors associated with obesity. “It is important to recognize obesity is a multidimensional health issue with multifactorial contributors. Thus, being physically active is not a license to maintain a poor diet or to ignore other contributors to obesity. Other contributors to obesity may include issues with sleep, certain medications, the microbiome, and many more,” said Jennifer Bea, PhD, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Arizona Health Sciences.

A new University of Arizona Health Sciences Workforce Education and Training Program has been designed to help people impacted by opioid and substance use disorders. In the state of Arizona, 31 out of every 1,000 children are affected by the opioid crisis that is ravaging the nation. A new training program, known as PeerWORKS, hopes to change that.

Health professionals say our indoor-dominant lives are costing us, and are prescribing time in contact with natural elements to offset this deficit. “The power of nature is being used widely in the integrative medicine community both through activity, diet, surroundings as well as herbal medicine,” said Ann Marie Chiasson, MD, MPH, CCFP, associate professor of clinical medicine at the College of Medicine – Tucson and fellowship director with the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine.

“This winter might mark a different turning point,” said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist and adjunct professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. Instead of the end of the pandemic and the start of an endemic, this winter might introduce us to a different, and unsettling, stage. One where we are no longer in lockdown but learning to treat a deadly virus as a normal part of our lives.

Over a dozen College of Medicine – Phoenix students are going to be taking a very close two-year look at community needs in Tonto Basin. Judith Hunt, MD, site director for the College of Medicine – Phoenix program in Rim Country, has been practicing medicine and training medical students and residents in the rural community of Payson, Arizona, for nearly 22 years. Her classroom is 100 miles north of the downtown Phoenix. “The best part of rural medicine is the care of the community. There is nothing that I would trade for being able to see a baby that I helped care for throughout the years, now married with their own children. It’s just amazing to be a part of that young person’s life all the way through.”

Rachna Shroff, MD, chief of the section of GI medical oncology at the University of Arizona Cancer Center, joins a roundtable of healthcare providers to discuss the current unmet clinical needs in cholangiocarcinoma (CCA), a rare and aggressive bile duct cancer.

University Arizona Distinguished Professor of Public Health Dr. Richard Carmona, the 17th Surgeon General of the United States, is interviewed about his role as Gov. Doug Ducey's senior advisor on public health emergency preparedness.

The addition of pembrolizumab to chemotherapy, with or without bevacizumab, significantly improved PFS and OS among women with persistent, recurrent or metastatic cervical cancer, results of the randomized phase 3 KEYNOTE-826 study showed. Bradley J. Monk, MD, FACS, FACOG, a professor at the College of Medicine – Phoenix and director of gynecologic oncology research at US Oncology Network, said KEYNOTE-826 will rapidly launch pembrolizumab as the global standard of care in first-line metastatic cervical cancer.

A clinical study at the University of Arizona is underway, working to understand COVID-19 infection and the transmission of the virus among vaccinated people. Elizabeth Connick, MD, chief of infectious diseases and professor of medicine and immunobiology at the College of Medicine – Tucson, said their goal is to answer the question of whether or not vaccinated people who are exposed to COVID-19 still shed the virus from their nose and mouth and infect others.