This month, the UVA Center for Telehealth was awarded a nearly $1 million grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to create the Mid-Atlantic Telehealth Resource Center. UVA, in partnership with telehealth networks across the region, will link rural and urban healthcare providers to expand telehealth capabilities and expertise.
Building upon more than 17 years of technical and policy experience, this resource center will bring together providers in the District of Columbia and six states: Virginia, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina and West Virginia.
“We are delighted that HRSA has provided us with this opportunity to share models of care provided via telehealth with our partners across the mid-Atlantic region,” says Karen Rheuban, MD, Director of UVA’s Center for Telehealth. “It will be a privilege to collaborate with distinguished institutions to further improve access to care using advanced and innovative technologies.”
Through UVA’s telemedicine network, patients receive care provided by UVA physicians and other health professionals in more than 40 subspecialties. The UVA telemedicine network includes more than 85 locations across Virginia. Thousands of Virginians receive care annually through telemedicine, enabling them to access services not available within their own community. UVA estimates that its telemedicine program has saved Virginians more than 6.7 million miles of travel for medical care, says David Cattell-Gordon, Director of UVA’s Office of Telemedicine.
Last year, Governor Bob McDonnell signed into law a bill requiring insurance companies to cover clinical services provided through telemedicine. Virginia is the only state in the mid-Atlantic region that mandates insurance coverage for telemedicine.
While telemedicine provides many benefits to rural communities, Cattell-Gordon says, patients residing in urban areas, such as the District of Columbia, are also positively impacted by these advanced technologies. “This grant provides an opportunity to greatly expand telehealth offerings and partnerships across the mid-Atlantic region.”
UVA expects to launch the Mid-Atlantic Telehealth Resource Center in early October.
]]>Local high school students will have an opportunity to tour a medical simulation center and participate in hands-on medical demonstrations, while college students will shadow UVA health professionals at the UVA Medical Center. A panel discussion for high school students will feature UVA students pursuing careers in healthcare talking about their experiences and the preparation needed to become a health professional.
Two keynote speakers will discuss the increasing diversity of healthcare and how this has impacted the training of health professionals and patient care:
Most of Monday’s events take place at the Claude Moore Medical Education Building, located at the intersection of Lane Road and Jeanette Lancaster Way. A schedule of events is below.
Monday’s schedule
Members of the media: If you plan to cover any of these events, please contact Jason Ellis at 924.5679 or jke9p@virginia.edu by 9 a.m. Monday to let him know which events you plan to cover.
]]>The multisite study determined that adding the acid-reflux drug lansoprazole to standard inhaled asthma treatments did not improve asthma symptoms in children. Instead, it slightly increased their risk of sore throats and other respiratory problems.
Doctors have believed that acid reflux, common in children with asthma, increased their respiratory symptoms. “This drug and others in its class have been given for years to children with poorly controlled asthma,” said W. Gerald Teague, MD, the study’s senior investigator and Division Chief of Pediatric Respiratory Medicine at UVA Children’s Hospital. “However, we learned that treatment with lansoprazole to decrease stomach acid was not only ineffective, but associated with increased upper respiratory infections. The results of this study hopefully will change clinical practice so that children with asthma with no clear symptoms of acid reflux do not receive unnecessary treatment.”
Researchers at UVA and 17 other medical centers across the U.S. evaluated 306 children, ranging in age from 6 to 17, whose asthma was inadequately controlled. Participants received a daily dose of lansoprazole, which suppresses stomach acid, or a placebo. Twenty-four weeks later, researchers found no significant differences in the severity of the children’s asthma symptoms.
Similar results were seen in the subgroup of children, approximately 40 percent, who suffered from acid reflux, a condition where stomach acid makes its way into the esophagus. Unlike in adults, acid reflux in children does not produce symptoms such as heartburn.
The results of the study are published in the Jan. 25 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
FOR REPORTERS: Dr. Teague will be available for interviews from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 26. To schedule an interview, please contact Josh Barney at 434.243.1988 or jdb9a@virginia.edu.
]]>The research, led by Anindya Dutta, MD, PhD, Chairman of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, upends the commonly accepted notion that DNA is wholly contained within long chromosomes. Dutta’s team detected the short, circular microDNAs in both mouse and human cell lines, shedding new light on the makeup of mammalian DNA.
The team determined that the generation of microDNAs leads to genetic variation within cells of the same tissue. Mistakes made as the DNA-copying machinery does its work prompt “micro-deletions” as the faulty microDNA is removed. This creates a mosaic of genetically varied cells within the same tissue, possibly leading to functional differences among them. Because of the nature of the process, there is an element of chance in which genes will be intact and which will suffer micro-deletions, Dutta says.
“The resulting genetic variation in our tissues could be important for diseases like schizophrenia or autism that have genetic predisposition but for which a single gene with a causative mutation has not yet been found,” he says.
In addition, the findings may help explain genetic behavior in plants that appears to defy the laws of genetics put forth by Gregor Mendel, the Austrian known as the father of genetics.
The new research findings have been published online today in the journal Science. The team includes researchers at UVA and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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