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NEWS:
How a Brain Tumor Helped Cyclist Chris Baccash Change His Life
Being a professional cyclist with an optimistic disposition and an adventurous spirit comes in handy when, after having a seizure at work and waking up in a hospital, you eventually learn that you have a large brain tumor.
This happened to then-27-year-old Chris Baccash in December 2019. It turned out that he had a diffuse astrocytoma — a slow-growing malignant brain tumor. The recommended course of action: two surgeries, three weeks apart with neurosurgeon Donald M. O'Rourke, MD, at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP), to remove as much of it as possible. It would have been understandable for him to feel despondent, afraid, or worried about the road that lay ahead. But he had a different reaction to the news.
At the time, Baccash had a job Monday-Friday managing a business analytics team for a company in New Jersey and spent his weekends racing and training with the
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Penn Nursing & Columbia School of Social Work Team Up to Educate Social Workers & Nurses about Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy
Thanks to a $1 million grant from the Joe & Sandy Samberg Foundation and the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) and the Columbia University School of Social Work (CSSW) are developing a collaborative initiative to educate social workers and nurses about psychedelic-assisted therapy in anticipation of FDA approval of this type of treatment. This effort will help improve access to affordable, safe treatment facilitated by a large workforce of highly qualified practitioners.
 The grants will fund the development of an educational training curriculum which will be piloted at Penn Nursing and CSSW with plans to expand to Columbia School of Nursing and Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2). In addition to offering the curriculum to enrolled students, there are plans for curriculum targeting post-graduate nurses and
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UCI Study Examines Distorted Time Perception During Pandemic
The passage of time was altered for many people during the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from difficulty in keeping track of days of the week to feeling that the hours themselves rushed by or slowed down. In prior work, these distortions have been associated with persistent negative mental outcomes such as depression and anxiety following trauma, making them an important risk factor to target with early interventions, according to a study by University of California, Irvine researchers.
The study, recently published online in the journal Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, documents how pervasive the experience, known as “temporal disintegration” in psychiatric literature, was in the first six months of the pandemic. The team also found that pandemic-related secondary stresses such as daily COVID-19-related media exposure, school closures, lockdowns and financial
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Monoclonal Antibody Reduces Asthma Attacks in Urban Youth
A monoclonal antibody, mepolizumab, decreased asthma attacks by 27% in Black and Hispanic children and adolescents who have a form of severe asthma, are prone to asthma attacks and live in low-income urban neighborhoods, a National Institutes of Health clinical trial has found. This population has been underrepresented in previous clinical trials of asthma therapeutics. The findings were published today in the journal The Lancet.
The study investigators undertook an innovative exploratory analysis of gene activity in cells collected from study participants’ nasal secretions at the beginning and end of the trial to try to help explain how mepolizumab works and link this to its clinical effect. The antibody tamped down the activity of three networks of genes associated with airway inflammation and asthma attacks in the study population but did not reduce the activity of six other such net
