Reynolds Foundation award helps to establish geriatrics training program

The Medical School will lead a new program, Training Excellence in Aging Studies (TEXAS), to promote geriatrics training for physicians through a prestigious $2 million award from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation and $1.25 million in matching funds.

“This will allow us to teach geriatric medicine principles to everyone from the most junior medical student to practicing physicians. With the reach of Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital and Memorial Hermann – Texas Medical Center, we intend to impact nearly 12,000 medical students, residents, non-geriatrics faculty, practicing physicians, and geriatricians over a four-year period,” said Dr. Carmel Dyer, director of the Division of Geriatric and Palliative Medicine and professor and associate chair of internal medicine. “We’ll also be able to add elder abuse training in emergency rooms and community health clinics.”

This is the fourth round of geriatrics training grants from the Reynolds Foundation’s Aging and Quality of Life Program, which was created to improve the quality of life for older people by preparing physicians to provide better care for them. The Reynolds Foundation’s goal is to train all physicians to better care for frail elderly people, regardless of their specialty or practice. According to Steven Anderson, the Foundation’s president, the Medical School was chosen for its strong leadership, high level of institutional support, and creative new methods for the training of medical students, residents, non-geriatrics faculty, and practicing physicians in geriatrics.

“With this program, our medical school is taking a defining step in becoming a leader in educating physicians in the care of the elderly, who are among our most vulnerable and complex patients,” said Dean Giuseppe Colasurdo. “We are grateful to the Reynolds Foundation, Memorial Hermann, and the UT Health Science Center supporters who are allowing us to better serve this growing need in our community and beyond.”

Matching funds came from the late Roy Huffington, Huffington Endowed Lecture Series, Othello “Bud” and Nelwyn Hare, Memorial Hermann Foundation, Harris County Hospital District, and the Dean’s Office.

TEXAS has five components:

• creating a medical school curriculum including case-based learning in a virtual world in all four years;
• establishing an educational program using electronic “sound bytes” with geriatric principles and follow-up geriatrics case studies for residents from internal medicine, family and community medicine, emergency medicine, neurology, orthopedic surgery, general surgery, urology, and physical medicine and rehabilitation;
• creating a program to educate faculty from multiple disciplines to reinforce geriatric competencies among residents in their specialty areas;
• including the Reynolds Visiting Professor Program that will bring in experts from other Reynolds Foundation sites to share their expertise;
• and implementing elder abuse education seminars, an area of expertise for Medical School geriatricians, for teams in the university’s affiliated emergency centers and outpatient clinics.

The grant will be a collaborative effort for the Health Science Center. Dr. Elmer Bernstam, associate professor at the School of Health Information Sciences at Houston and the Medical School, and director of the Biomedical Informatics Core of the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences, will lead the information technology component of TEXAS. And Dr. Sharon Ostwald, professor in the Center on Aging at the School of Nursing, is director of evaluation for the program.

“We will be working to collect and analyze data from all the different educational interventions to see what changes occur in knowledge, attitudes, and skills in geriatrics, and also monitoring changes in the care of geriatric patients over the four-year grant,” said Ostwald, holder of the Isla Carroll Turner Chair in Gerontological Nursing.

-D. Mann Lake

Young Medical School researchers honored

Three Medical School faculty members were honored Nov. 18 at the UT Health Science Center’s fourth annual Young Investigators Luncheon.

They included:

Dr. Danielle Garsin, an assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, focuses her research on C. elegans as a model host for understanding the genetics of bacterial infection. Before moving to Texas, Garsin received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Jianping Jin, an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, works on ubiquitin signaling pathway and DNA damage checkpoint control. He recently was named a 2008 Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Jin will receive $240,000 over four years to support his research into the molecular machinery responsible for protein degradation. He received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University and performed postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School, Baylor College of Medicine, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Dr. Michael Lorenz, is an assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, works on the molecular basis of fungal infections. He received his Ph.D. from Duke University and was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT Whitehead Institute.

The young investigators were selected by Dean Giuseppe Colasurdo for their track record of research.
“I am very proud of these young investigators, who represent the risk-takers in whom we want to invest,” Dean Colasurdo said.

Cole’s book focuses on faculty health

What happens when the doctors, nurses, researchers, and teachers we depend on to care for patients and teach our students become overwhelmed, burn out, and maybe even get sick themselves? Dr. Thomas Cole, director of the John P. McGovern, M.D. Center for Health, Humanities, and the Human Spirit, along with Thelma Jean Goodrich and Ellen Gritz of the UT M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, provide some startling and sobering answers to this question in their new book “Faculty Health in Academic Medicine: Physicians, Scientists, and the Pressures of Success.”

The book is based on a working conference on faculty health funded by the McGovern Foundation in collaboration with M. D. Anderson. Conference participants examined the relationship between the health of academic faculty members and the culture of the organizations in which they work, while considering the effect of faculty health on patient care and quality of work. The book also includes a look at some of the supports and interventions being implemented to improve faculty health in health science centers across the country.

The book features contributions from some of UT’s most distinguished physicians, including an introduction by former President Dr. James Willerson; a preface by Dr. Ken Shine, interim chancellor of the UT System and executive vice chancellor for health affairs; and an afterword by UT M. D. Anderson President Dr. John Mendelson. Dr. Henry Strobel, a biochemist and associate dean for faculty affairs, has an inspiring chapter titled “Retaining and Reclaiming the Call of Medicine."

According to Cole, one goal of the publication is to provide administrators with information about the small but growing number of faculty health programs being implemented across the country and to encourage them to develop programs at their own institutions. In addition, the book aims to compel individual faculty members to take their own health and well-being seriously, not only because it is good for them, but because they have an ethical obligation to their patients to be at their best.

“We’ve been spending a lot of time over the last 25 years saying the doctor has to treat the patient as a whole person, but there are two whole people in that room,” Cole said.

Dean Giuseppe Colasurdo and Strobel have reviewed a proposal to bring one such program to the Medical School. The program would establish an office of faculty health and install a director who would bring various lecture series on wellness and stress reduction, instruction in renewal and meditation, and a host of other resources to the campus. The office would provide consultations to department chairs to assess the particular stressors affecting their faculty and assist in creating helpful solutions, as well providing personal, confidential referrals for individual physicians.

Because the doctors, nurses, researchers, and teachers who make up academic faculty face very real pressures — pressure to generate clinical income, pressure to compete for limited research funding, and pressure to juggle demands on their time from patients, students, and bosses, — they often neglect their own health. And to make things worse, a culture of silence ensues around these issues.

“It’s as if you socialize people to hold their hand over a flame and say it doesn’t hurt, but of course it does hurt, and it can burn you up if you are not paying attention”, Cole said.

“Faculty Health in Academic Medicine: Physicians, Science, and the Pressures of Success” will be released Jan 3. through Humana Press www.springer.com/humanapress , and with it, Cole hopes, will come a powerful and timely dialogue about why it’s good for everyone when doctors are good to themselves and what can be done do to protect the precious human resources that make modern medicine possible.

-D. Heeth

Research challenges visual noise theory

A new published study from researchers in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy challenges the existing scientific thought that heterogeneous, or 'noisy', cellular responses in the cerebral cortex are detrimental.

In the visual cortex, neurons encode information when confronted with stimuli such as orientation, color, and contrast. It has long been known that the same stimulus causes variable responses in the same cells as well as in nearby cells.

“The traditional thinking has been that this heterogeneity reflects noise and must be averaged out to understand how the brain truly encodes information,” said lead researcher Dr. Valentin Dragoi, assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy. “What we have found is that it is not noise but a property of the nervous system for encoding information, which proves to be beneficial, not detrimental as previously thought.”

Dragoi and Mircea Chelaru, a post doctorate fellow in his lab who is now in Canada, studied various species of animals to obtain the data that appears in “Efficient coding in heterogeneous neuronal populations” which was published in the Oct. 14 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

“We are looking at the population coding of stimuli – that is looking at the response and correlation of cells in conjunction with their neighbors,” Dragoi explained, adding that the systems neuroscience field is still dominated by single-cell research. “So instead of just looking at one pixel on the television screen, we are looking at the whole picture.”

Dragoi believes that this surprising result will open up new avenues of discovery as the application of this finding can be applied anywhere in the brain.

“Understanding these group responses can help us understand how cell networks represent information and what makes dysfunctional networks, such as epilepsy and Alzheimer’s, dysfunctional,” he said.

The next step of this research will be to understand the chain of events in these reactions “to dissect the circuits, the parts and the whole, and to understand how populations in different brain areas talk to one another,” Dragoi said.

Dragoi joined the Medical School in 2003, following a post doctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. from Duke University and is the recipient of nationally renowned awards from the Pew Scholars Program (2004) and the James S. McDonnell Foundation (2005).

-D. Brown

Parents’ organization creates Santa Fund

The Organization of Parents and Friends is organizing a Santa Fund for Medical School students with small children. The holidays fall between student loan checks, making it difficult for some students to buy gifts for the children.

If you would like to play Santa, please send a check payable to Parents and Friends (in the memo please write Santa Fund) by Dec. 10. Any amount is greatly appreciated. Please send your checks to:

Office of Development and Alumni Relations
6431 Fannin, JJL 450
Houston, TX 77030

If you have any questions please contact Claire Lindsay at (713) 500-5181 or Claire.Lindsay@uth.tmc.edu

Medical School Research Retreat set for Friday

The Medical School Research Retreat will start at 8 a.m. Friday, Dec. 5 in the Fayez S. Sarofim Research Building Beth Robertson Auditorium.

The daylong event includes a welcome by Dean Giuseppe Colasurdo; an update on clinical and translational research by Dr. Peter Davies, executive vice president of research; three data blitz sessions; and remarks from President Larry Kaiser.

The event also includes a symposium on immunology, from 2:30 p.m. – 4:15 p.m., with four presenters, including Dr. Jeffrey Actor, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine.

The day concludes with the keynote address from Dr. Douglas Fearon, of the MRC Centre of the University of Cambridge, who will present the Hans Muller-Eberhard Memorial Lecture on “The Activated CD8+ T Cell and Immunological Memory: Developmental Plasticity Avoids Senescence.”

For more details, see http://med.uth.tmc.edu/administration/research-affairs/retreat/index.htm

 

A Day for Research

Research took center stage as the Health Science Center hosted the annual Research Day Friday, Nov. 21, at the Institute for Molecular Medicine.