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NEWS:
One in a Million - Lung Transplant Patient Completes 12 Races–1 for Each Month Since Surgery
Antonia "Toni" Perez is one in a million. She’s one of 1 million patients in the U.S. who have received an organ transplant, a milestone the nation celebrated last month.
Perez recently celebrated her own individual victory: showing her pulmonologist, Reinaldo Rampolla, MD, medical director of the Lung Transplant Program at Cedars-Sinai, the 12 race medals she has earned–one for each month since her double lung transplant.
In 2009, Perez had been diagnosed with hypersensitivity pneumonitis–an allergic reaction that causes inflammation in the lungs. Perez said she likely developed the condition after helping her mother clean bird droppings from a backyard deck. The condition made it hard for Perez to breathe. This was devastating news for Perez, who had run competitively on track teams in high school and at East Los Angeles College.
"I started getting tired, running out of my breath
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Lingering Symptoms Common After COVID Hospitalization
About half of adults treated at hospitals for COVID-19 have experienced lingering symptoms, financial difficulties, or physical limitations months after being discharged, according to a National Institutes of Health-supported study published in JAMA Network Open.
After six months, more than 7 in 10 adults surveyed in the study experienced cardiopulmonary problems, such as coughing, rapid or irregular heartbeat, and breathlessness, while about half had fatigue or physical limitations – all symptoms associated with long COVID. Additionally, more than half of the adults said they faced financial challenges.
The findings came from the PETAL Network's Biology and Longitudinal Epidemiology: COVID-19 Observational (BLUE CORAL) study, which is supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH.
“My clinic patients often want to know how soon they’ll get back to th
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Heart Rhythm Disorders: What You Need to Know
Heart rhythm disorders like atrial fibrillation and sudden cardiac arrest have made headlines in recent months, prompting many to learn more about how the heart beats.
It is an exciting time in the field of cardiac electrophysiology, with many treatment options newly available to patients and many more on the horizon," said Michael Shehata, MD, a cardiac electrophysiologist and director of the Interventional Electrophysiology Laboratory in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai. "The field is unique in that we treat patients across the age spectrum with myriad conditions, many of which we can cure and treat completely."
Shehata says the most common heart rhythm disorders he treats are atrial fibrillation--an irregular, often rapid, heart rate that causes poor blood flow and is expected to affect 12.1 million Americans by 2030--and ventricular arrhythmia, an abnormal heart rhythm.
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MU Researcher Studies Childhood Obesity Prevention Programs In Rural Schools
Since 1990, obesity rates in American children — particularly in rural and underserved areas — have skyrocketed due to a variety of factors, including more sedentary human behavior and an increase in food swamps, or communities with both limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables as well as excessive access to fast food.
In a recent study, Crystal Lim, a researcher and pediatric psychologist at the University of Missouri, and her team reviewed 72 obesity prevention programs that were implemented in rural elementary, middle and high schools from 1990 to 2020 across the United States, England and Australia to identify the strategies that worked best to help young people live healthier lifestyles. They found that programs that combine both nutrition and exercise components over an extended period of time had the most success in changing students’ daily behaviors.
The findings can help
