Office of Medical Communications

(SEPTEMBER 4, 2024) Bader Chaarani, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry, was quoted in a Tulalip News story about the community benefits of connecting kids and cops through video games.

Local and health system-wide investments in care and treatment for patients across Vermont and northern New York who suffer from a collection of rare, progressive and deadly heart-and-lung related conditions have earned University of Vermont Medical Center’s Pulmonary Hypertension Program national accreditation as a Pulmonary Hypertension Care Center (PHCC) – a designation that highlights the program’s clinical excellence and will improve access to national clinical trials and support groups for patients across the rural region served by the hospital.

(SEPTEMBER 3, 2024) HealthDay featured a study by Brian Sprague, Ph.D., professor of surgery, et al. investigating the effect of false-positive mammogram results on women’s willingness to return for future screening.

Art Papier, M.D.’88, was a first-year medical student when he attended a lecture by the late Lawrence Weed, M.D., which focused on the advantages of keeping detailed, shareable medical records to improve patient care. Papier was fascinated by Weed’s work. That fascination eventually led Papier to create a clinical decision tool that visually shows, describes, and categorizes thousands of diseases. The tool, VisualDx, today is used in clinics and medical schools throughout the nation and across the globe. It delivers time-sensitive, clinically relevant information for diagnosing and treating common and rare diseases and brings public health to the point of care.

Larner students work with real patients in the first year of medical school. In Doctoring in Vermont, a course that pairs students with physicians in the community, they provide direct patient care and practice history-taking and examination skills. First-year students also shadow nurses in the hospital, investigate social determinants of health, and do clinical work in community settings.

(AUGUST 31, 2024) In a column on injury prevention for the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, Lewis First, M.D., M.S., professor and chair of pediatrics, explains how to put together a family first aid kit.

(AUGUST 28, 2024) Stephen Leffler, M.D.’90, president and COO of the UVM Medical Center, was quoted by the Valley News in an article on Vermont’s ever-escalating health insurance prices.

(AUGUST 28, 2024) Kirk Dombrowski, Ph.D., vice president for research and economic development at the University of Vermont, spoke with Seven Days about the university’s efforts to secure its future by building up its research.

In a new publication in the Journal of Cachexia and Sarcopenia of Muscle, post-doc Deena Snoke, Ph.D., shares her research findings that lung cancer patients experience a 20 percent reduction in muscle fiber size after two months of conventional treatment despite no measurable changes in muscle at the whole-body or whole-tissue level.

(AUGUST 27, 2024) Joseph Kennedy, M.D., director of toxicology education, spoke with the New York Times about people’s concerns about the effect of DEET bug spray on human health.

(AUGUST 23, 2024) Christopher Brady, M.D., M.H.S., associate professor of surgery, commented to Healio about his research on the use of large language models (LLMs) in generating scientific abstracts.

(AUGUST 23, 2024) UVM Extension 4-H has partnered with UVM Larner College of Medicine to offer a series of interactive Health Heroes Workshops for Youth for teens this fall that promote practical health and wellness knowledge, the Rutland Herald reports.

In a recent paper, titled “Vasohibin Inhibition Improves Myocardial Relaxation in Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction,” Matthew Caporizzo, Ph.D., assistant professor of Molecular Physiology & Biophysics, along with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, have created a powerful small molecule vasohibin inhibitor (VASHi) to block MTN detyrosination in live animals. Detyrosination is the enzymatic removal of the tyrosine (an amino acid that is used by cells to build proteins) residue from the C-terminal end of tubulin (a protein that forms microtubules), which makes the microtubules sticky, impeding the heart cells from relaxing properly.

(AUGUST 16, 2024) Jessica Badlam, M.D., assistant professor of medicine and director of the pulmonary hypertension program at the UVM Medical Center, spoke with the Burlington Free Press about the hospital’s Pulmonary Hypertension Care Center receiving national accreditation from the Pulmonary Hypertension Association.

Health equity improves when the health sciences workforce reflects the diversity of the community and health care systems invest in marginalized communities. The Robert Larner, M.D. College of Medicine at UVM, along with the College of Nursing and Health Sciences and the College of Education and Social Services, has recently been granted a substantial award by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—an R25 Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA)—to sponsor a new mentorship and science enrichment cohort program, New American Youth on the Rise (NAYR), aimed at guiding girls from immigrant backgrounds into college careers in health sciences.

(AUGUST 12, 2024) Researchers including Matthew Caporizzo, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, have discovered a promising new treatment for heart disease, WVNY-TV reports.

(AUGUST 11, 2024) A study led by Andrew Wilcock, Ph.D., adjunct assistant professor of family medicine at the Larner College of Medicine and a visiting fellow at Harvard Medical School, suggests reasons for the continuing drop in hospital admissions for heart attacks in the U.S., Yahoo News reports.