Paul Govern

Taking an interest in electronic message threads between surgical patients and their health care teams, a research group at Vanderbilt University Medical Center has tested how well certain commonly used machine learning algorithms can classify such exchanges according to their clinical decision-making complexity.

Among the 35 new fellows of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics are three Vanderbilt University Medical Center faculty members — Steven Brown, MD, MS, Bradley Malin, PhD, MS, MPhil, and Martin Were, MD, MS. All three have primary appointments in the Department of Biomedical Informatics.

Surgical patients are being given more opioids than they need for postsurgical pain management, raising the risk of addiction.

In laboratory experiments, a chemical compound found in the shell of the cashew nut promotes the repair of myelin, a team from Vanderbilt University Medical Center reported Aug. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

With the aid of an $18.2 million, five-year grant renewal from the National Institute on Aging, the Vanderbilt Memory and Aging Project (VMAP) will advance interdisciplinary research into abnormal brain aging and cognitive decline in older adults, with continuing emphasis on the role of blood flow changes in the heart and brain.

Six weeks of aerobic exercise can lead to sustained increases in endogenous opioid function and significant relief for chronic low back pain, according to a randomized controlled trial by Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Stephen Bruehl, PhD, and colleagues, reported in Pain.