Co-authored by Jenny Higgins, PhD, MPH, a professor of gender and women’s studies and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
A new treatment was available for Brody’s form of Batten, delivered biweekly through unusual infusions directly into the brain. A UW Health team traveled to Chicago to learn how to give it, allowing Brody, now 6, to be treated near home.
Dubbed ‘Wisconsin Medicine,’ this philanthropic campaign is making an effort to drive innovation and progress in research, education, patient care, and health equity.
Kelly Marie Ward, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Department of Sociology, is working to demystify abortion healthcare through her research on reproductive healthcare workers.
The campaign called Wisconsin Medicine seeks to raise $500 million from 100,000 individual donors by the end of 2025. The money will help fund research for new cures and treatments, and purchase new technology for the hospital and school.
Noted: In 2019, the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office partnered with the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee — one of the oldest public-interest law firms in the nation — for a project called the Public Interest Justice Initiative. They reviewed the cases of 50 people sentenced to life in prison for crimes committed when they were children to determine eligibility for early release and parole.
The initiative was launched after the Remington Center at the University of Wisconsin Law School found that more than half the 128 inmates serving life sentences for juvenile offenses were from Milwaukee County. The idea is to see if adjustments should be made, said District Attorney John Chisholm.
Noted: Diets high in plant-based carbs and fats and low in meat and processed food may be best for longevity, according to the researchers, Valter Longo, a professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, and Rozalyn M. Anderson of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
In September 2020, just as the first major peak of COVID-19 transmission began, Dr. Michael Repplinger opened Monarch Health, an addiction treatment clinic in Downtown Madison. An emergency room doctor at UW Hospital who also works at ERs in Darlington and Portage, Repplinger said he was prescribing initial doses of the addiction treatment medication buprenorphine, or Suboxone, to ER patients who had overdosed to help them avoid withdrawal and cravings. But he said he couldn’t find clinics to send them to for follow-up care.
Noted: An hourly wage of $35.80 equates to about $74,400 in annual income. The average hourly wage stood at $31.73 in March, or about $66,000 annually, according to the latest government data. That means many families are falling behind in their ability to afford the basics, said Marjory Givens, co-director at the County Health Rankings, which is a program of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.
Newly released rankings on the health of people in each county in the United States has Black Hawk and Bremer counties on opposite ends of the spectrum.
The rankings, put together by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute using new data, are meant to help people “understand what influences how long and how well we live.”
A family and college community are mourning the loss of a 21-year-old track star at University of Wisconsin-Madison who died by suicide. Sarah Shulze, a cross-country athlete, died on April 13, according to a statement from her parents and two sisters.
A million-dollar grant will help pay for a new collaboration designed to help combat the rise in substance abuse and addiction. The effort, dubbed Wisconsin Rural Health & Substance Use Clinical Support (or RHeSUS, for short), kicked off this month and targets improving care for patients in rural areas.
The Wisconsin Hospital Association and the UW School of Medicine and Public Health are partnering to help rural Wisconsinites get access to substance abuse treatment.
Noted: At the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s school of nursing, Associate Deans of Academic Affairs Barbara Pinekenstein and Lisa Bratzke said several students graduating this year had already accepted job offers at the end of the fall semester.
Admissions applications are also starting to stack up. Though it may be too soon to tell if the pandemic has caused more people to be interested in nursing as a career, Rentmeester said 367 people applied for Bellin College’s undergraduate and graduate nursing programs for the upcoming fall, up from a usual of about 320 pre-pandemic.
Saturday’s event was about raising awareness and providing potentially life-saving healthcare.
Ryann DeGraff, chief operating officer at the hospital, explained that the name better reflects what it offers to the patients and community. This includes surgical and emergency care.
According to UW Health, head and neck cancers tend to be very curable, especially when they are found early. However, Dr. Tiffany Glazer, a head and neck cancer surgeon at UW Health, said that more and more people are coming in with severe cases and during late stages of the cancer.
About 66,000 cases of head and neck cancer are diagnosed each year. Unfortunately, Dr. Tiffany Glazer said recent patients with these illnesses have come in with more severe and later-stage cases.
From Mars missions to moon colonies, the human species has some ambitious travel plans in the works — ones that stretch way beyond our planet.
“Space exploration is the big challenge of this century,” said Elena D’Onghia, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
DeVon Wilson, Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and the School of Letters and Science at UW-Madison, experienced deep loss and grief near the beginning of the pandemic with the passing of one of his best friends. He says, “grieving during a pandemic is difficult … I learned that I couldn’t do it alone.” In this episode of Black Oxygen, DeVon discusses his journey to Wisconsin, the difference in community needs between Beloit and Madison, and his experience of navigating grief after losing a dear friend. Near the end of the episode, DeVon shares, “grief is an indicator of the positive impact folks had on your life.”
April is Minority Health Month. In recognition of the month, the University of Wisconsin Madison’s Center for Community Engagement and Health Partnerships is getting as much information as possible out about health to communities. The Center houses two major programs, the UW All of Us Milwaukee site and the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute Regional Milwaukee Office. Dr. Bashir Easter, associate director for UW All of Us Milwaukee and Dr. Nia Norris, associate director of the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute and administrative manager with UW All of Us
Milwaukee join us to talk about their efforts they believe are crucial to keeping the community healthy.
Quoted: “It is an honor and a privilege to be here today to celebrate a revolutionary change, a revolutionary paradigm shift,” said Dr. Tiffany Green, assistant professor of population health sciences and obstetrics and gynecology at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and co-chair of the Black Maternal & Child Health Alliance of Dane County. “It is a program and this is a process that’s going to center the lives of Dane County’s Black women and birthing people in solving our persistent and frankly shameful disparities in birth outcomes.”
UW-Madison is welcoming a new club that is launching the week of April 22nd. IfYou’reReadingThis.org is a national organization whose purpose is to create a support network for mental health for students by students. It currently has twelve chapters at universities throughout the country, and its thirteenth is in the process of being established on our very own campus.
On the University of Wisconsin campus, the decrease in STI testing has caused concern among advocacy groups such as Sex Out Loud, a peer-to-peer resource on campus that uses sex-positive language to promote sexual health on campus, according to their website.
Wisconsin doctors are seeing a steady increase in the number of children diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes — a disease that primarily affects adults — which may be linked to COVID-19.
Data released last week by UW Health Kids shows a nearly 200 percent increase in the number of cases of Type 2 diabetes over the past four years.
While this is a trend medical experts have noticed for years, Dr. Elizabeth Mann, a pediatric endocrinologist and director of the Type 2 Diabetes Program at UW Health Kids, said it’s taken a worrisome turn recently.
Noted: Anne Marsh serves in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health. Her 8-year-old son Ryan is transgender.
“Our son has grown up in a household where from the day he shared with us who he is, he has faced nothing but unconditional love and welcoming and celebration of who he is,” Anne said. “How do you teach a child that the world is going to perceive them differently and treat them differently? It’s a hard conversation to have with a young child as a parent.”
A University of Wisconsin-Madison study finds many cannabidiol, or CBD, products sold in southwestern Wisconsin don’t deliver what they promise on the label. One of the study’s authors says a lack of regulation and oversight is to blame.
Shereen Siewert welcomes vaccine expert Dr. Jonathan Temte, of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, for a review of the latest science surrounding vaccination, boosters, new treatments and the state of the COVID-19 pandemic.
UW Health Kids Type 2 Diabetes Program Director Dr. Elizabeth Mann said the percent of new onset diabetes patients with Type 2 at UW Health Kids went from 5.8% in 2018 to 16.4% in 2021.
An increase in children at UW Health being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which is mostly seen in adults, could be tied to isolation and decreased physical activity from the COVID-19 pandemic, a UW doctor said.
Noted: With rapid at-home tests becoming much more widely available since late 2021, an unknown but potentially large number of positive test results are going unreported. While this dynamic may pose a challenge to public health officials tracking COVID-19, the challenge is not insurmountable. That’s according to Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The fact that we have home-based testing is a good thing,” Sethi said. “While it may compromise our ability to have a good record of cases that are in the community, we don’t necessarily want to abandon this very important way that people can test and take action, so we have to find a workaround.”
Quoted: The report’s findings confirm other research that has shown the link between poverty and COVID-19, says Tiffany Green, a University of Wisconsin economist who researches the impact of race and economics on health.
“This is not about individual behavior,” Green said in an interview. “It’s about what kinds of social conditions place people at risk.”
Early in the Wisconsin pandemic, outbreaks occurred in the meatpacking industry in Brown County. “And because of the way our occupational system is structured, they were disproportionately likely to be Hispanic immigrants,” Green says. “And they were working under conditions that were not properly regulated, that were not safe, when it comes to trying to prevent COVID.”
If you’ve been paying more for eggs recently, you have the bird flu to thank, according to egg producers.
UW-Madison scientists say they are fighting back.
Across the nation, tens of thousands of birds have had to be put down in recent weeks as the bird flu ravages flocks, and farmers say while it’s already making eggs expensive, it won’t stop there.
UW-Madison scientists say this is an issue that comes and goes, which is why they’re looking to bring a vaccine for the birds to market.
“Knock on wood, we’ve been doing okay in Wisconsin. We’ve had two outbreaks here in Wisconsin,” said UW-Madison Poultry Specialist Ron Kean.
Pregnant women with mild high blood pressure and their babies can benefit from treatment, according to a large study co-authored by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine Saturday, could change guidelines to make treatment of mild chronic hypertension the standard of care for pregnant women as it is for other people, said the UW doctor who led the local arm of the study. “This is clear evidence that treating women at a lower threshold for their chronic hypertension effectively reduces maternal risk and is safe for the baby,” said Dr. Kara Hoppe, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
UW Health provided $700,000 in tuition reimbursement for its nurses in the past year and has created a nursing care partner job, spokesperson Emily Kumlien said. The role is like an inpatient version of SSM Health’s clinical support assistant. UW Health’s rolling 12-month turnover rate for nurses is 13.8%, compared to the national average of more than 21%, Kumlien said.
Noted: In a 2011 study, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison compared the impact of enhanced, high-empathy medical care with what they called “standard care.” When patients with colds rated their care “perfect in empathy” they had shorter and less serious illness than peers who rated their care less than perfect, an indication that even the perception of empathy makes a difference.
Moreover, the body’s own chemistry reflected the difference in care. Patients who perceived their care to be high in empathy showed higher levels of neutrophils ― a type of white blood cell that fights infections ― than those given standard care.
The difference between the standard and the more empathetic care affected the doctors, too.
“When they pulled the card to provide standard care, they felt terrible. When they pulled the enhanced care card, they felt great,” said David Rakel, lead author of the study and chairman of the department of family medicine and community health at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. The study was published in the journal Patient Education and Counseling.
Patrick Remington, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Preventive Medicine Residency Program, said doctors who do not prescribe ivermectin to COVID-19 patients are upholding the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm to patients by making decisions according to the consensus of available credible medical research.
“We strive to get it right. We do the best job we can to do no harm and this is an example that would be unthinkable to me to ask a physician to prescribe a medicine that is at best, ineffective and at worst, harmful,” Remington said. “There are valid debates about the best ways to treat serious illnesses and science is iterative, that as we go along we learn by experimentation, we learn by carefully conducted research.”
Lisa Arkin saw more swollen, discolored toes during the early months of the pandemic than she had during her entire career. Arkin, a pediatric dermatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, treated just a couple of patients with temporary skin lesions called pernio, or chilblains, each year. But in April 2020, when COVID-19 cases first surged, she saw 30 chilblain patients.
A new study by researchers at the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy found inaccurate labels on some non-prescription CBD products sold in the Badger State.
The hospital was designated an “LGBTQ+ Healthcare Equity Leader,” after earning a top score of 100 by the foundation’s Healthcare Equality Index. The index measures performance in Foundational Policies and Training in LGBTQ+ Patient-Centered Care, LGBTQ+ Patient Services and Support, Employee Benefits and Policies, and Patient and Community Engagement.
A new project from a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to answer the question: What do dogs like to watch on television?
She’s asking dog owners to contribute to her research by sharing their own pups’ preferences.
The survey is part of a larger and more ambitious research project by Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist and professor at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, to learn more about how canine vision degrades over time and what factors contribute to it. That research could have implications for the treatment of human eyesight, as well.
Today, there are strict rules and laws that separate recreational and medical drug use. There are also plenty of drugs that are legal, and others that are illegal. But in Regency England, these boundaries didn’t exist. “The legal structures just weren’t in place,” says Lucas Richert, PhD, a historian of drugs and medicines at the University of Wisconsin—Madison School of Pharmacy.
There is no doubt that farming can be extremely rewarding, yet also stressful and demanding. Various risk factors including weather, economic uncertainty, as well as, ever-evolving supply and demand changes, can take a toll on farmer’s mental health.
In order to address some of these issues, the University of Wisconsin–Madison Division of Extension will be offering virtual and in-person educational programs to help the Wisconsin agricultural community identify and respond to a variety of behavioral health challenges.
The four-year-olds participated in this weeks-long clinical trial to help people they’ll never meet. UW Health lead COVID-19 vaccine investigator Dr. William Hartman said that makes them heroes.
UW Health played an important role in gathering research that led to Moderna’s announcement Wednesday that its COVID-19 vaccine works in babies, toddlers and preschoolers.
After state agriculture officials confirmed the presence of bird flu in Wisconsin, one poultry management expert shared safety tips for poultry farmers and what risk exists to humans.
Ron Kean, a faculty associate and extension specialist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences, also explained what costs farmers can and cannot get covered if the flu hits their farm.
The nation may have its eyes on the college basketball brackets, but another March Madness event unfolded Friday at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, where the Class of 2022 graduates received their long-awaited residency placements.
UW anesthesiologist and second-generation Ukrainian American Dr. Adrian Pichurko has made the two-hour drive from Madison to Bensenville every weekend since learning about UMANA’s project.
Place and other nurses said UW Health should work with the nurses union to address understaffing, overwhelming patient loads and high turnover rates that have stemmed from cost-cutting measures over the years. While the union contract expired in 2014, nurses at UW Health have sought to revive it since 2019. UW Health administrators are also aware of the nurses’ grievances, but they argue the 2011 state law known as Act 10 — which eliminated collective bargaining rights for most public employees — leaves them with their hands tied.
Corresponding research: Research led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine and the University of Tokyo, indicated that other antivirals such as Paxlovid, remdesivir and molnupiravir were effective against the BA.2 variant. Kawaoka’s research team found that AstraZeneca’s Evusheld was the most effective against the BA.2 variant out of the antibody treatments that were tested.
Abby Turner has helped perform dozens of surgeries to treat migraines. But in 2019, when she began having migraines of her own, she knew who to call.
A new procedure called “radiofrequency ablation” is bringing relief to people who suffer from migraine headaches. The procedure uses heat delivered via electrical stimulation through wires and probes to nerves in the head.
Dr. Alaa Abd-Elsayed, medical director, UW Health Pain Services and Pain Management Clinic, says with one visit, patients can see relief for months.
“Around a year for most of the patients we see. It can actually for some patients go for two years,” he said.
Quoted: Ajay Sethi, a professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he expects to see plenty of people continuing to wear masks long into the future. In addition to COVID-19, masks can help protect against other respiratory pathogens like rhinovirus, enterovirus and RSV, Sethi said.
“If you’re around somebody who’s coughing or sneezing, it may not be SARS-CoV-2,” he said. “So wearing a mask protects against all those things that spread by large droplets and to some degree, the aerosolized pathogens too.”
Patricia Téllez-Girón, professor of family medicine at UW-Madison, remembers occasionally seeing people wearing masks before 2020, especially while traveling. She remembers thinking that was unusual, and wondering if those people were really sick. Now, she’s changed her perspective.
“No, they were smart!” she said. “They already have learned what we just learned.”
Dr. David Kiefer, an MD who is medical director of UW Health’s Integrative Health Consult Clinic, said NDs can help fill unmet health care needs around the state. Kiefer did family medicine training in the Seattle area, where he was on the faculty at Bastyr University, the naturopathic medical school Henkel attended.
If life had gone as planned, Maria Alice Lima Freitas would be in medical school, inspired by the career of her father, a surgeon who practiced in Brazil. But instead of changing careers, the 49-year-old therapist retired from University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Researchers in Wisconsin continue to study the spread of black-legged “deer” ticks and the long-term impact of Lyme disease. In a recent presentation, Susan Paskewitz, a medical entomologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said ticks have “invaded our state entirely” and, as the climate warms, are marching into Canada.
Xia Lee, a tick biologist in Paskewitz’s lab, has studied the insects for more than a decade. Lee says Lyme-bearing ticks “are always born uninfected,” but they pick up infections as they feed on animal hosts.
Lee notes that Wisconsin never got the proper recognition as the site of the first case of the disease.
“We like to joke about it and say that Wisconsin was actually the first state where Lyme disease was detected,” he says, “but we never got the glory for naming (it).”
Quoted: Over the past three decades, Susan Paskewitz, a medical entomologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, has documented the growing prevalence of ticks in Wisconsin.
Paskewitz found that deer ticks, also called black-legged ticks, have moved steadily from northwest to southwest, and then into the central and eventually slowly into the eastern and southern Wisconsin.
“They invaded our state entirely,” Paskewitz said in a 2021 Wednesday Nite @ The Lab episode. She said the regeneration of forests decimated by logging in the early 1900s and rebounding of the deer population are the main drivers in Wisconsin. Paskewitz said warming temperatures caused by climate change are expected to lengthen the tick season and accelerate their northward march into Canada.
A UW System initiative will provide incentives to twice as many student health care workers with additional funding from the Wisconsin Partnership Program.
This UW School of Medicine and Public Health program is providing $500,000 for the effort, doubling the total funding for the incentive program that was announced in December 2021. The state Department of Health Services provided the initial funds.
UW Health and the UW School of Medicine and Public Health received a $5.5 million grant from the Bernard Osher Foundation Friday to support research and implementation of integrative health for Wisconsin communities.
James Thomson, the University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist who first isolated and grew human embryonic stem cells, inspiring a generation of researchers, and igniting a furious ethical debate that he would later help resolve, will be retiring in July after more than 30 years with the school.
