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DALLAS – Oct. 29, 2020 – About half of all tumors have mutations of the gene p53, normally responsible for warding off cancer. Now, UT Southwestern scientists have discovered a new role for p53 in its fight against tumors: preventing retrotransposons, or “jumping genes,” from hopping around the human genome. In cells with missing or mutated p53, the team found, retrotransposons move and multiply more than usual. The finding could lead to new ways of detecting or treating cancers with p53 mutations.

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DALLAS – Oct. 28, 2020 – Mice fed diets high in sugar developed worse colitis, a type of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and researchers examining their large intestines found more of the bacteria that can damage the gut’s protective mucus layer.

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DALLAS – Oct. 28, 2020 – Two new studies suggest Medicare’s system of penalizing hospitals if too many patients are readmitted within 30 days should also look at whether the patients were well enough to remain in their home during that time.

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DALLAS – Oct. 28, 2020 – An X-ray test commonly used to assess hardening of the arteries could help doctors decide whether the benefits of taking aspirin to prevent a first heart attack or stroke outweigh the risks of bleeding from its use, UT Southwestern research suggests.

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Key Points: - As North Texas braces for a second COVID wave and flu season, a major COVID-19 study by UT Southwestern and Texas Health Resources is expanding. - The study is expanding from its original invitation-only format to offer more members of Dallas and Tarrant County communities a chance to participate. - Testing in the study is still free and includes testing for active and past infections.

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DALLAS – Oct. 22, 2020 – Two new UT Southwestern studies published today report some surprising findings: Only half of practicing physicians are registered to vote, and the most common obstacle faced by resident physicians is the lack of time to vote. The researchers say finding ways to increase voter participation among doctors is critical as the nation tackles health care issues.

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DALLAS – Oct. 19, 2020 – Ralph DeBerardinis, M.D., Ph.D., a professor at the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI), has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine.

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DALLAS – Oct.15, 2020 – When a child has a rare blood disorder, clinicians can struggle to find the best diagnostic and treatment methods. New research led by UT Southwestern shows the effectiveness of a treatment for aplastic anemia and reveals the range of diagnosis and treatment options used by hospitals around the country for a related disease – myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS).

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DALLAS – Oct. 12, 2020 – By far, the most common injuries seen in emergency rooms in the United States are those affecting extremities. Immobilization is the most common treatment, and yet, until recently, it was unknown exactly why this technique worked to advance healing.

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DALLAS – Oct. 8, 2020 – UT Southwestern has received the 2020 Health Professions Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award from INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine, the oldest and largest diversity-focused publication in higher education. This is the third consecutive year the University has received the national honor.

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DALLAS – Oct. 8, 2020 – The COVID-19 pandemic has led to new rules and expectations for clinical trials. Following guidance from federal agencies, institutions such as UT Southwestern adjusted clinical trial operations. To protect patient safety, changes such as utilizing remote consents, conducting telehealth study visits, and shipping oral study treatment to patients’ homes have streamlined the clinical trial participation process.

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DALLAS – Oct. 7, 2020 – Endocannabinoids, signaling molecules produced in the body that share features with chemicals found in marijuana, can shut down genes needed for some pathogenic intestinal bacteria to colonize, multiply, and cause disease, new research led by UT Southwestern scientists shows.

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DALLAS – Oct. 1, 2020 – When newborn babies or children with heart or lung distress are struggling to survive, doctors often turn to a form of life support that uses artificial lungs. This treatment, called Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO), has been credited with saving countless lives. But in some cases, it can also lead to long-term brain injury.

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DALLAS – Sept. 23, 2020 – Administering neuropsychology evaluations to children online in the comfort of their own homes is feasible and delivers results comparable to tests traditionally performed in a clinic, a new study led by UT Southwestern researchers and Children’s Health indicates. The finding, published online this month in the Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, could help expand access to specialists and reduce barriers to care, particularly as the popularity of telemedicine grows during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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DALLAS – Sept. 24, 2020 – Two studies led by UT Southwestern researchers shed light on the biology and potential vulnerabilities of schistosomes – parasitic flatworms that cause the little-known tropical disease schistosomiasis. The findings, published online today in Science, could change the course of this disease that kills up to 250,000 people a year.

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DALLAS – Sept. 17, 2020 – When used to manage infections, the drug itraconazole is generally given at a single, fixed dose to all patients. But determining the correct dosage of the drug to help treat cancer isn’t that simple, new research by UT Southwestern suggests.

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DALLAS – Sept. 15, 2020 – Conditions related to obesity, including inflammation and leaky gut, leave the lungs of obese patients more susceptible to COVID-19 and may explain why they are more likely to die from the disease, UTSW scientists say in a new article published online in eLife. They suggest that drugs used to lower inflammation in the lungs could prove beneficial to obese patients with the disease.

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DALLAS – Sept. 11, 2020 – For more than a century, hospitals have relied on traditional conferences, surgical meetings, and case reviews to identify opportunities to improve training, quality, and patient outcomes. Now UT Southwestern Medical Center is adopting innovative technology to propel those reviews into a new era.

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DALLAS – Sept. 9, 2020 – The switch from brand name to generic cholesterol medications that occurred between 2014 and 2018 has saved Medicare billions of dollars, even as the number of people on cholesterol-lowering drugs has increased, UT Southwestern scientists have calculated. Their data, published in the journal JAMA Cardiology, suggest that policymakers and clinicians could help cut Medicare costs even further by switching more patients to generic drugs.

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DALLAS – Sept. 8, 2020 – A program that asks patients to mail in stool samples to screen for colon cancer is an effective way to expand screenings to underserved and underinsured communities and offers an alternative to in-person testing during the pandemic, according to a study conducted by UT Southwestern.

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DALLAS – Sept. 7, 2020 – Like wrenches made of Legos, SWI/SNF chromatin remodeling complexes tighten or loosen DNA in our cells to control how genes are turned on and made into proteins. When assembled correctly, these complexes play a crucial role in the development of normal tissues, and when broken, they can lead to the development of cancer. These complexes are commonly disrupted by mutations in the genes that encode them – but how this leads to cancer is poorly understood.

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DALLAS – Sept. 3, 2020 – A new technology that allows researchers to peer inside malignant tumors shows that two experimental drugs can normalize aberrant blood vessels, oxygenation, and other aspects of the tumor microenvironment in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), helping to suppress the tumor’s growth and spread, UT Southwestern researchers report.

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DALLAS, Sept. 2, 2020 – Less than three weeks after getting on an organ transplant list for HIV-positive patients, John Welch got the call. A liver was available from a deceased donor, and it was an excellent match.

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As you drift into unconsciousness before a surgery, general anesthetic drugs flowing through your blood are putting you to sleep by binding mainly to a protein in the brain called the ɣ-aminobutyric acid type A (GABAA) receptor. Now UT Southwestern scientists have shown exactly how anesthetics attach to the GABAA receptor and alter its three-dimensional structure, and how the brain can tell the difference between anesthetics and the psychoactive drugs known as benzodiazepines – which also bind to the GABAA receptor. The findings were published online today in the journal Nature.

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DALLAS – Sept. 1, 2020 – Roger H. Unger, M.D., a longtime Professor of Internal Medicine, a preeminent authority on glucagon and the development of diabetes, and the founding Director of the Touchstone Center for Diabetes Research at UT Southwestern Medical Center, died Aug. 22. He was 96.

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DALLAS – Sept. 1, 2020 – Expanded telehealth services at UT Southwestern have proved effective at safely delivering patient care during the pandemic, leading to an increase in patients even in specialties such as plastic surgery, according to a new study.

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DALLAS – Aug. 31, 2020 – Three anticonvulsant drugs commonly used to stop prolonged, potentially deadly seizures each work equally well, according to a national study led by physicians at UT Southwestern. The results provide reassurance to patients who may have drug allergies and to physicians and hospitals that may not have supplies of all three.

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DALLAS – Aug. 25, 2020 – Breastfeeding secures delivery of sugar and fat for milk production by changing the insulin sensitivity of organs that supply or demand these nutrients, a new study led by UT Southwestern scientists suggests. The findings, published in this month’s print issue of Diabetes, could explain how different tissues cooperate to start and maintain lactation and offer strategies to help improve breastfeeding success for mothers who have insufficient milk production.

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DALLAS – Aug. 24, 2020 – The immune protein STING has long been noted for helping protect against viruses and tumors by signaling a well-known immune molecule. Now, UT Southwestern scientists have revealed that STING also activates a separate pathway, one that directly kills tumor-fighting immune cells. Among other implications, the finding could lead to development of longer-lasting immunotherapies to fight cancer.

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DALLAS – Aug. 20, 2020 – A pregnant mother who tested positive for COVID-19 transmitted the virus causing the disease to her prematurely born baby, UT Southwestern physicians report. Both were treated and recovered.

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DALLAS, Aug. 19, 2020 – UT Southwestern Medical Center is the first facility in Dallas and the surrounding region to participate in the international COLCORONA trial. This study is evaluating the therapeutic benefit of colchicine as a treatment to prevent complications and death related to severe cases of COVID-19. Recently diagnosed patients or individuals who are showing symptoms and have a household member diagnosed with COVID-19 over the age of 40 and from Dallas and the surrounding areas can enroll in this free, at-home clinical trial.

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August 19, 2020 (DALLAS, TEXAS) – For decades, physicians have known that many kinds of cancer cells often spread first to lymph nodes before traveling to distant organs through the bloodstream. New research from Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) provides insight into why this occurs, opening up new targets for treatments that could inhibit the spread of cancer.

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DALLAS – Aug. 18, 2020 – The amount of calcified plaque in the heart’s arteries is a better predictor of future heart attacks than of strokes, with similar findings across sex and racial groups, according to new research from UT Southwestern.

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DALLAS – Aug. 18, 2020 – As soon as the foodborne pathogen Vibrio parahaemolyticus infects a human intestinal cell, the bacteria are already planning their escape. After all, once it is in and multiplies, the bacterium must find a way out to infect new cells.

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DALLAS – Aug. 12, 2020 – In an animal model of multiple sclerosis (MS), decreasing the amount of a protein made in the liver significantly protected against development of the disease’s characteristic symptoms and promoted recovery in symptomatic animals, UTSW scientists report.

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DALLAS – Aug. 10, 2020 – By offering the same level of care and expertise to two very different populations, UT Southwestern physicians were able to eliminate the sociodemographic disparities in survival and cancer recurrence rates typically seen nationally in testicular cancer patients.

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DALLAS – Aug. 7, 2020 – UT Southwestern scientists have developed a genetically engineered mouse and imaging system that lets them visualize fluctuations in the circadian clocks of cell types in mice. The method, described online in the journal Neuron, gives new insight into which brain cells are important in maintaining the body’s master circadian clock. But they say the approach will also be broadly useful for answering questions about the daily rhythms of cells throughout the body.

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DALLAS – July 28, 2020 – UT Southwestern Medical Center is the No. 1 hospital in Dallas-Fort Worth – the nation’s fourth-largest metro area – and ranks among the top 50 hospitals nationally in 10 specialties ranging from brain to heart care, according to U.S. News & World Report’s annual Best Hospitals report released today. Six of the specialties rank in the top 25.

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DALLAS – June 22, 2020 – For decades, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol has been dubbed “good cholesterol” because of its role in moving fats and other cholesterol molecules out of artery walls. People with higher HDL cholesterol levels tend to have lower rates of cardiovascular disease, studies have shown.

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DALLAS – July 23, 2020 – Deleting a key gene in mice in just their fat made tissues throughout these animals insulin resistant, in addition to other effects, a new study by UT Southwestern researchers shows. The findings, reported in a recent issue of PNAS, could shed light on Type 2 diabetes and other insulin resistance disorders, which remain poorly understood despite decades of study.

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DALLAS – July 22, 2020 – One member of a larger family of oxygen sensing enzymes could offer a viable target for triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), UTSW researchers report in a new study. The findings, published online this week in Cancer Discovery, might offer hope to this subset of patients who have few effective treatment options and often face a poor prognosis.

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DALLAS – July 21, 2020 – Surgeons at UT Southwestern have developed and analyzed the benefits of a cutting-edge technique that provides patients with facial paralysis the ability to close their eyes. They concluded that the surgery – which is only performed at a handful of institutions around the world, including UTSW – not only allowed patients to blink and voluntarily close their eyes, but also protected them against the progressive damage to the cornea that’s typically seen with facial paralysis.

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A team led by UT Southwestern researchers has identified brain circuitry that plays a key role in the dysfunctional social, repetitive, and inflexible behavioral differences that characterize autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The findings, published online this week in Nature Neuroscience, could lead to new therapies for these relatively prevalent disorders.

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DALLAS – July 6, 2020 – UT Southwestern researchers have identified vast webs of small snippets of the genome that interact with each other and with genes to promote prostate cancer. Their findings, published June 22 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, could lead to new ways to treat the most common type of malignancy in American men other than skin cancer.

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DALLAS – July 2, 2020 – Two new studies led by UT Southwestern scientists outline how individual cells maintain their internal clocks, driven both through heritable and random means. These findings, published online May 1 in PNAS and May 27 in eLife, help explain how organisms’ circadian clocks maintain flexibility and could offer insights into aging and cancer.

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DALLAS – July 1, 2020 – A new report from cardiologists at UT Southwestern raises the hope that doctors will be able to visually check the jugular venous pressure of heart failure patients remotely, using the camera on a smartphone. The finding is especially timely as telemedicine expands during the pandemic.

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DALLAS – June 22, 2020 – For decades, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol has been dubbed “good cholesterol” because of its role in moving fats and other cholesterol molecules out of artery walls. People with higher HDL cholesterol levels tend to have lower rates of cardiovascular disease, studies have shown.

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DALLAS – June 17, 2020 – The molecular changes that lead to Fuchs’ endothelial corneal dystrophy (FECD) occur decades before the disease causes blurry vision and other noticeable symptoms in patients, new research by UT Southwestern scientists shows. This insight into this earliest stage of FECD may eventually lead to new ways of screening for and treating the common condition, which affects an estimated 4 percent of U.S. adults over the age of 40.

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DALLAS, June 16, 2020 – Dr. Beth Levine, UT Southwestern Professor of Internal Medicine and Microbiology, Director of the Center for Autophagy Research, and holder of the Charles Cameron Sprague Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science, died Sunday after a battle with breast cancer.

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DALLAS – June 14, 2020 – Recently developed MRI techniques used to more precisely target a small area in the brain linked to Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor may lead to better outcomes without surgery and with less risk of negative effects, a new study led by UT Southwestern researchers suggests.