Focus: Hidden - Utah

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Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah will head an international study to find out how lifestyle and other health factors impact colon and rectal cancer outcomes. HCI was awarded an $8.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to lead and expand an ongoing project in colon cancer research.

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There's new hope for patients with liver disease who are waiting for a donor liver to become available for transplantation. Doctors at Intermountain Medical Center in Salt Lake City have found a way to safely use a damaged liver to replace a dying liver, then cure the damaged liver of its disease.

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New research from BYU exercise science professors finds that pro-inflammatory molecules actually go down in the knee joint after running.

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University of Utah researchers will be among the approximately 24,000 scientists convening in San Francisco for the annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union Dec. 12-16. Below are summaries of select presentations at the meeting, along with the time and date of the presentation and primary contact information. All times are in Pacific Standard Time.

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Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany give to recognize Opitz's lifetime of work as one of the world's foremost authorities in the field of medical genetics.

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Scientists from the University of Utah and University of Washington have developed blueprints that instruct human cells to make a virus-like delivery system that shuttles custom cargo from one cell to another. As reported online in Nature on Nov. 30, the research is a step toward a nature-inspired means for bringing therapeutics directly to specific types of cells.

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Religious and spiritual experiences activate the brain reward circuits in much the same way as love, sex, gambling, drugs and music, report researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine. The findings will be published Nov. 29 in the journal Social Neuroscience.

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The University of Utah College of Pharmacy’s Anticonvulsant Drug Development (ADD) Program has been awarded a five-year $19.5 million contract renewal with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to test drugs to treat epilepsy.

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A new study coauthored by BYU researchers may lead to a more accurate system for early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of prostate cancer. It’s a promising development given prostate cancer is the second most common cancer among men worldwide, responsible for 308,000 deaths in 2012 and estimated to take 26,120 lives in the U.S. alone in 2016.

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A newly created school at the University of Utah aims to provide an intellectual foundation for understanding and addressing some of the most pressing issues surrounding race and gender in American society. That goal is reflected in its name: School for Cultural and Social Transformation—the first school in the Intermountain West to make the intersection of race, gender and social justice its focus.

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Sessions will explore tackling cancer with precision medicine, the ethics of access and precision medicine, patenting precision medicine and other issues. The symposium comes as increased national attention is being paid to precision medicine, including an initiative by Vice President Joe Biden’s known as “Cancer Moonshot,” which hopes to accelerate the cure for cancer using big data and precision oncology techniques.

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Atrial fibrillation patients who use the drug, warfarin, to prevent harmful blood clots from forming in their hearts to lower risk of stroke are at higher risk of developing dementia than patients who use warfarin for non-atrial fibrillation conditions, according to a new study from the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute.

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Many people who experience chest pain but don’t have a heart attack breathe a big sigh of relief when a stress test comes back negative for blockages in their blood vessels. But a new study by cardiac researchers at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Salt Lake City found they may not be off the hook after all.

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Depression has been known to be associated with poor cardiovascular outcomes, but if patients who are depressed attend cardiac rehabilitation after heart surgery, their risk of death is significantly reduced, according to a new study.

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Two differing blood clot prevention medications are just as safe and effective for patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention, a non-surgical procedure to open blood vessels narrowed by plaque buildup, according to a new study.

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Atrial fibrillation patients with a prior history of stroke who undergo catheter ablation to treat the abnormal heart rhythm lower their long-term risk of a recurrent stroke by 50 percent, according to new research from the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute

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Sunshine matters. A lot. The idea isn’t exactly new, but according to a recent study, when it comes to your mental and emotional health, the amount of time between sunrise and sunset is the weather variable that matters most.

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A University of Utah electrical and computer engineering associate professor Rajesh Menon and his team have developed a cloaking device for microscopic photonics integrated devices in an effort to make future processing chips smaller, faster and consume less power.

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More than 90 percent of ivory in large seized shipments came from elephants that died less than three years before, according to a new University of Utah study.

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For years, scientists have known that someone who is thin could still end up with diabetes. Yet an obese person may be surprisingly healthy. Now, new research published Nov. 3, 2016, in Cell Metabolism online by scientists at University of Utah College of Health points toward an answer to that riddle. Accumulation of a toxic class of fat metabolites, known as ceramides, may increase the risk for type 2 diabetes.

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Computer scientists from the University of Utah’s College of Engineering have developed what they call “sentiment analysis” software that can automatically determine how someone feels based on what they write or say. To test out the accuracy of this software’s machine-learning model, the team used it to analyze the individual sentiments of more than 1.6 million (and counting) geo-tagged tweets about the U.S. presidential election over the last five months.

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Stanford Medicine and Intermountain Healthcare award more than $500,000 in seed grants to research projects focused on transforming healthcare.

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Concerned about both safety and the skyrocketing costs of EpiPen, University of Utah Health Care (UUHC) nurses were already searching for solutions before the media storm hit. At a summer meeting, the group voted to ditch the EpiPen and instead create “epi-kits” that could be used to reverse deadly allergic reactions. With the EpiPen controversy still raging, the switch to “epi-kits” at UUHC comes at just the right time. The kits — which, at $3.50 each, cost less than 1 percent of the EpiPen’s price — are set to roll out to University hospitals and clinics starting on Nov. 1.

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A first-of-its-kind study of 900,000 hospital admissions from an integrated health system has yielded insights into shifts in the epidemiology of multi-drug resistant organisms (MDROs) in the community.

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In the past decade, ophthalmologists have been prescribing nutritional supplements to be taken daily to prevent or slow vision loss from age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Now, using nutritional supplements for eye health has become more common. But does increasing the recommended dose increase your protection? A case report appearing online in JAMA Ophthalmology from the Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah reveals what can happen when a patient takes more of a supplement than their body needs.

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More than 4,000 children and teens are diagnosed with brain cancer each year and the disease kills more children than any other cancer. Writing this week in the journal Cell Reports, researchers at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah report they have identified an existing group of drugs that appear to reduce or eliminate a certain subgroup of childhood brain cancers while sparing normal brain tissue. The research was conducted using a new zebrafish animal model system developed by the researchers, which closely resembles an aggressive subtype of pediatric brain tumors.

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Engineers from the University of Utah are launching a $1.6 million project to research cost-effective, carbon-friendly methods of turning coal-derived pitch into carbon-fiber composite material, and whether it can help revitalize threatened coal communities.

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Biologists at the University of Utah recently used light-weight geolocation technology to follow a species of songbird on its 10,000-kilometer migration from the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa.

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National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense grants will be used to investigate Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement treatment for chronic pain

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University of Utah electrical and computer engineering professor Massood Tabib-Azar and his team of engineers have come up with a way to produce microscopic electronic switches for appliances and devices that can grow and dissolve wires inside the circuitry that instantly connect and disconnect electrical flow.

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"Coffee" was the most tweeted food in the continental U.S. between mid-2014 to mid-2015 followed by "beer" then "pizza". Besides hinting at which foods are popular, scientists at the University of Utah are finding that tweets reveal something about our health. Communities that tweeted more often about physical activities, or expressed positive sentiments about healthy foods, had better overall health.

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Should marijuana be legalized in the United States? That controversial question will be the subject of the 33rd Annual Jefferson B. Fordham Debate on Oct. 19, sponsored by the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law.

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Bolstering antimicrobial stewardship programs to ensure appropriate use of antibiotics in smaller community hospitals is necessary to combat the global threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria known as superbugs, according to a new study.

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Parental occupation and neighborhood income influence risks for getting melanoma, breast, cervical and prostate cancers, Huntsman Cancer Institute researchers report.

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Researchers at Intermountain Medical Center, along with researchers from four other centers, including Harvard Medical School, have found that patients with a lower heart rate who are in septic shock have a better chance of survival than those with an abnormally rapid heart rate.