Lung
LabBook June 29, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THIS […]
Grasping at Straws while Gasping for Air
The phone call came in early October, 2011. “You could sense the tone of it right away,” recalls pulmonologist Imre Noth, MD, who runs one of the country’s largest practices for patients with pulmonary fibrosis. “There was just something about the voice on the line.” The conference call came from the data and safety monitoring […]
Mitochondria and Cancer: The Trigger Becomes the Treatment
Once considered the cause of cancer, a tiny organelle known as the “powerhouse of the cell” may soon spawn a new treatment. In 1955, Otto Warburg, recipient of the 1931 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology, attributed cancer to damage to the mitochondria, tiny structures within each cell that are involved in energy production, the […]
When Geography Trumps Need in Lung Transplants
Few people realize the important role that math plays in organ transplants. Complex formulas convert medical information about each patient, including diagnosis, age, and test results, into a single “allocation score” that determines who has priority when an organ becomes available. One factor not included in these calculators is proximity of the organ to a […]
Linkage 8/26: Abortion Access, Bronchial Thermoplasty & Facebook
Since the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, abortion has been a woman’s legal right (with ever-changing state-specific restrictions) in the United States. But one factor often trumps the legal status of abortion: access. Though abortion training is required for medical residents studying to become obstetrician-gynecologists, physicians are not required to perform the procedure or […]
Linkage 7/15: Chest Scan Caution & Under the Influence of Flags
Cancer used to be a black box, a disease that physicians could only monitor through surgical biopsies and indirect measures. But for the last thirty years, the use of computed tomography imaging, better known as CT scans, has allowed oncologists and cancer researchers to keep close watch on the growth or shrinkage of a tumor […]
Linkage 5/20: Predicting Cardiac Arrest & Scolding McDonalds
A Magic 8-Ball for Cardiac Arrest Cardiac arrest is one of the most common ways that people die, and hospitals need to be constantly vigilant about the threat of heart stoppage in their patients. So physicians have long sought to develop a way of predicting who is most at risk for cardiac arrest when checked […]
Saving Lives & Lungs with Cleaner Stoves
By Dianna Douglas Cooking indoors over firewood and dung is a tough habit to break for billions of poor people around the world. But Sola Olopade, MD, professor of medicine and family medicine, found a way. He wanted to stop women from hunching for hours over open fires inside their houses, cooking with babies strapped […]
Year in Review: UChicago Research 2010
ScienceLife ran 219 posts in 2010, and choosing the best of them is as hard as picking a favorite gene. So here’s a month-by-month scan of a busy year at the University of Chicago Medical Center, full of exciting discoveries in the laboratory and the clinic. The impact of some of this research is already […]
Dr. FAQ: Kyle Hogarth on Lung Disease & Bronchoscopy
Endoscopy and colonoscopy are well-known tools of the physician, minimally invasive devices that navigate the channels of the digestive system to spot cancers, ulcers, and other defects once difficult to spot without major surgery. In the shadow of these procedures lies bronchoscopy, which uses similar technology to explore the labyrinth of the lungs. With the […]
