Faculty Bibliography

African Americans with high blood pressure (BP) can benefit greatly from therapeutic lifestyle changes (TLC) such as diet modification, physical activity, and weight management. However, they and their health care providers face many barriers in modifying health behaviors. A multidisciplinary panel synthesized the scientific data on TLC in African Americans for efficacy in improving BP control, barriers to behavioral change, and strategies to overcome those barriers. Therapeutic lifestyle change interventions should emphasize patient self-management, supported by providers, family, and the community. Interventions should be tailored to an individual's cultural heritage, beliefs, and behavioral norms. Simultaneously targeting multiple factors that impede BP control will maximize the likelihood of success. The panel cited limited progress with integrating the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) eating plan into the African American diet as an example of the need for more strategically developed interventions. Culturally sensitive instruments to assess impact will help guide improved provision of TLC in special populations. The challenge of improving BP control in African Americans and delivery of hypertension care requires changes at the health system and public policy levels. At the patient level, culturally sensitive interventions that apply the strategies described and optimize community involvement will advance TLC in African Americans with high BP

Since this new virus contains some parts of old flu viruses, it appears that most of those who are infected are exhibiting some immunity to it. [...] it's encouraging that we're dealing with a swine flu rather than a bird flu.\n

Seven Pounds [Motion Picture] -- 'A lobe of the liver is about 2 pounds, but the kidney and a lobe of the lung are only a quarter-pound each, and the heart is only a pound,' says Dr. Lloyd Ratner, director of renal and pancreatic transplantation at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In the real world, potential bone marrow donors are HLA (human leukocyte antigen) typed by DNA analysis before being entered into a national registry

'When I saw her then, she'd been getting three to four hours of sleep a night for weeks,' said Jeffrey P. Koplan, a former director of the C.D.C. 'They did what they needed to do.' 'With any new disease, it's difficult to understand the full picture,' she said. 'One has to be modest to understand that we are competing against an enemy, the virus. And trying to understand it and reduce the anxiety of the world and reduce the suffering of people, that's not easy.' 'The world's response in a 10-day period was remarkable,' said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, 'and W.H.O. deserves credit for being a big part of it.'

'She is superbly qualified to deal with emergencies like the one we have been living through,' said Dr. Julio Frenk, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health who was [Margaret Chan]'s chief rival when she won the top WHO post in 2006. { SB 'She is the first director-general who has been able to wield these new powers,' said Dr. David L. Heymann, who recently left the organization to become chairman of the Health Protection Agency in Britain. In her announcement on April 29, Chan made it clear that she alone had decided to raise the pandemic alert. 'With any new disease, it's difficult to understand the full picture,' she said. 'One has to be modest to understand that we are competing against an enemy, the virus. And trying to understand it and reduce the anxiety of the world and reduce the suffering of people, that's not easy.'

Scientific reports taught him that many such patients developed tiny bleeding ulcers in the stomach and small bowel. Since at least 1906, doctors reported seeing curved bacteria in the stomach of patients who died with ulcers.

Two other chimpanzees injected with S.I.V.cpz in captivity did not show such changes. [...] scientists have known little about S.I.V.cpz's effects on chimpanzees in the wild, because they lacked the means to identify and monitor chimp behavior there

'Walt Stamm was a giant in the field of infectious diseases in general and made many seminal clinical research contributions over decades that have transformed the diagnosis and treatment of urinary tract infections and pelvic inflammatory disease,' said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a federal agency that paid for many of Dr. Stamm's studies.

In this paper, I argue that social science and genomics can be integrated; however, the way this marriage is currently occurring rests on spurious methods and assumptions and, as a result, will yield few lasting insights. However, recent advances in both econometrics and in developmental genomics provide scientists with a novel opportunity to understand how genes and environment interact to produce social outcomes. Key to any causal inference about the interplay between genes and social environment is that either genotype be exogenously manipulated (i.e. through sibling fixed effects) while environmental conditions are held constant, and/or that environmental variation is exogenous in nature, i.e. experimental or arising from a natural experiment of sorts. Further, initial allele selection should be motivated by findings from genetic experiments in model animal studies linked to orthologous human genes. Likewise, genetic associations found in human population studies should then be tested through knock-out and over-expression studies in model organisms