Research

Student-run free health clinics, a hallmark of most medical schools across the country, not only provide valuable clinical experience for the students who volunteer there, but may actually reduce hospital utilization by the patients in their care, according to a Vanderbilt study recently published in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved.

A research-dedicated PET/CT scanner installed recently in the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science (VUIIS) will expand opportunities for Vanderbilt researchers to conduct studies of a wide range of disorders, from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease.

New research from Vanderbilt suggests that repeated seizures reduce brainstem connectivity, a possible contributor to unexplained neurocognitive problems in epilepsy patients.

Thirty years ago when she was 16, Katie Niemeyer was prescribed carbamazepine for depression. Three weeks later she was in a St. Louis, Missouri, burn unit with second and third degree burns all over her body. “My parents were told the chances of me surviving were slim,” she said.

Just because you stopped smoking years ago doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods when it comes to developing lung cancer.  That’s the “bad” news. The good news is your risk of lung cancer drops substantially within five years of quitting.

A team of investigators led by Fabien Maldonado, MD, associate professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt, and Tobias Peikert, MD, assistant professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, has identified a new technology to address false positives in CT-based lung cancer screening. The study was published in the latest issue of PLOS One.

Vanderbilt University’s transformational Trans-Institutional Programs initiative heads into a fourth year with grants awarded to seven interdisciplinary projects that involve more than 60 faculty members.