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Vital Signs
Media Mentions: DMS and DHMC in the News
Among the people and programs coming in for
prominent media coverage in recent months
was a DMS pharmacologist who commented on a
study suggesting that a smear of broccoli extract
may prevent damage from ultraviolet light and arrest
skin cancer. The Washington Post was among
the news outlets reporting on
the finding: "'It's very important
work,' said Michael Sporn, professor
of pharmacology at Dartmouth
Medical School, who for nearly
two decades headed the National
Cancer Institute's program
on cancer prevention by
means of natural products. 'The use of dietary substances,
like the antioxidant vitamins C and E,
has been pretty much a colossal failure for protection
against almost any kind of human disease,'
Sporn said, 'because when you eat them they
don't go where you want them to . . . and as soon
as your body uses them up, they're gone.'"
Public Radio International's Fair Game featured
Dr. Diane Harper, a member of the DMS faculty and
"a lead researcher in the development of new
HPV [human papillomavirus] vaccines." She told
PRI: "This is the most common virus that infects
humans and yet, most of the time, it goes away.
But when it stays, it can actually cause cervical
cancer . . . without any symptoms or any warning
at all." Harper also commented
on the claim that the vaccines
promote promiscuity, saying, "In
part, that was propagated by the
fact that there was a big push
put on to make sure that young
girls, prior to sexual activity,
were vaccinated." Now, she
said, evidence shows "that the vaccines are equally
effective in women who have and have not had
previous HPV infections."
The Boston Globe wrote about football helmets fitted with motion-sensing chips to help doctors study concussions. "'Over the last 10 years, there's been an increasing recognition that even though we classify concussion as a 'mild' brain injury, there is a group of people . . . who don't seem to get better,' said Dr. Tom McAllister, director of neuropsychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School, who works with [Dartmouth's] football team. 'The helmet research helps us understand sports-related concussion and perhaps will lead to improvements in helmet technologies, or perhaps rule changes.'"
"U.S. plans for an influenza pandemic have failed
to take into account children, who will likely be
among the biggest spreaders of the disease and its
most vulnerable victims," reported Reuters News
Service. "Federal and state governments
haven't stockpiled
enough flu-fighting drugs, and
no one has laid out a coherent
plan for what to do with tens of
millions of schoolchildren if
schools and day-care centers are
closed, the experts said. 'We at
this point are not adequately prepared to insure
the health and well-being of our nation's children
if and when a pandemic strikes,' said Henry Bernstein,
of the Children's Hospital at Dartmouth."
"When young grade-schoolers find an animal or
character they like, it's common for them to fixate
on it," reported Parenting magazine in an article
on kids' obsessions. "Sometimes
it's a coping mechanism—if a best friend's just moved
away, for instance, he may develop
an intense interest in a favorite
book series or hobby as a
way to deal. Repeating a certain
kind of play can also help kids
master skills, says Craig Donnelly, M.D., chief of child
psychiatry at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical
Center. Other kids are simply imagining what life
as a pirate or princess is like, and they can spend
days—or months—acting out that fantasy."
"With their efforts to win more government funding
stymied in Washington, medical researchers
. . . are taking their lobbying campaign on the
road—and into the presidential campaign," according
to the Baltimore Sun. "The doctors and
scientists plan to raise the profile of their issue by
advertising and organizing in the early voting
states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and
South Carolina. . . . Despite intense lobbying,
funding has not kept up with inflation since
the National Institutes of Health's budget
climbed to $27 billion in 2003. . . . Advocates
will assert in ads and
e-mails—and when confronting
candidates at
campaign events—that an
effective and affordable
health-care system depends
on the scientific advances
that research
brings. 'In the long run, funding of NIH is
going to equate into saving lives, saving
money,' said John Wahrenberger, a cardiologist at
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center."
Dr. James Weinstein, chair of orthopaedics at DMS, was featured on National Public Radio's Fresh Air. He described a national study he heads to evaluate the effectiveness of surgical and nonsurgical methods of treating back pain. Interviewer Terry Gross also asked his opinion of acupuncture and the Pilates exercise method. "There is some science" to acupuncture, he responded. "Probably modern medicine needs to do more work to understand [it] at the very basic level." Of Pilates he said, "I think it's fantastic. . . . I think core body strength for the spine, which Pilates focuses on, is really important." (Weinstein is also the newly named director of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice—formerly the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. See the feature "Braveheart" for more on this transition.)
A Canadian Press article on early TV viewing
quoted "Madeline Dalton, director of the
Hood Center for Families
and Children at Dartmouth
Medical School,
[who said] . . . it's possible
that 'parents may be more
likely to sit their children
in front of the TV if they
have behavioral problems.'
However, 'time spent watching TV is
likely to reduce the amount of time children
spend interacting with adults and other children,'
Dalton said. 'Therefore it is not surprising
that thismay have an impact on ability
to interact socially.' She added, 'We are
raising our children in a media-saturated
world. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but
our knowledge of how media affects children—both in terms of behavior and health—has clearly lagged behind its use.'"
"Vital question, for patients and politicians:
howmuch of the differences in life spans can
be attributed to differences in medicine?" So
began an editorial in Forbes. "Yes, access to
care makes all the difference if the population
you are looking at is the world's," it
went on. But in the U.S.,
"there is still a great dispersion
in outcomes; the
standard deviation in life
spans is in the neighborhood
of 12 years. Who or
what is to blame if some
people die young? . . . Dr.
Elliott Fisher and researchers with him at Dartmouth
Medical School studied differences
in Medicare utilization across the country
and came to the surprising conclusion that
extra spending does not confer longer life."
"Infertile couples may be wasting time and
money and setting back their chances of
pregnancy by delaying IVF [in vitro fertilization]
in favor of hormone- injection
treatment," the
London Times reported recently.
"Most clinics put
patients through several
treatments before trying
IVF. Yet one of these treatments,
the injection of follicle-
stimulating hormone (FSH), achieves
nothing more than lengthening the time it
takes couples to conceive, according to a
study . . . led by Dr. Richard Reindollar of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New
Hampshire. . . . 'Use of FSH injections with
IUI [intra-uterine insemination] does not
offer any added benefit,' Dr. Reindollar told
the American
Society for Reproductive
Medicine
conference in
Washington. 'What we
have shown is that there is no need for
women to add the middle step.'"
A DMS study in the Journal of the American
College of Surgeons,
on paradoxical disparities in cancer care, was
covered by the New York
Times. "It seems only natural
to assume that when
cancer strikes people who
live in rural areas, more
time will pass before it is
discovered than for people
in cities. In fact, a study reports, the opposite
seems to be true. Urban residents are
more likely to see a doctor
later than those in the
country are, a lapse that
can make cancers harder
to treat. . . . The researchers,
Dr. Ian Paquette
[upper photo] and Dr.
Samuel Finlayson [lower photo]
of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center,
based their findings on a review of information
about almost 300,000 cancer patients
gathered by the National Cancer Institute."
"Tests intended to detect cancers early, before patients have symptoms, are made to be exquisitely sensitive, so as not to miss potential cancers," reported the Boston Globe. "The result is that they wrongly indicate potential cancer of the breast, colon, cervix, and other organs 5% to 15% of the time, which translates into a cancer scare for at least 20 million Americans as a result of routine screening, according to a Dartmouth researcher. . . . Dr. H. Gilbert Welch . . . contends that, even with mammograms, many more women suffer cancer scares or unnecessary treatment for every life saved. . . . 'We have oversold screening greatly,' said Welch, a professor at Dartmouth Medical School."
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