UTMB News Articles

UTMB was one of a three institutions in the Houston area to receive funding for cancer treatment and prevention from the state agency, Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). Almost $2.5 million was for expansion of a program at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston that supplies HPV vaccinations for new mothers.

UTMB researchers will be able to expand their work into gun-related violence thanks to a $2 million grant from the CDC. UTMB’s Jeff Temple told the Chronicle that the study would be nonpartisan—focused exclusively on finding ways to reduce injuries and deaths from firearms—and focused on southeast Texas.

Current research suggests the inflammatory response may provoke or exacerbate anxiety and depression in many individuals write Dr. Samuel Mathis and Dr. Hasan Yasin. The inflammatory process leads to inflammation in brain tissues via immune-mediated pathways, which may give rise to increasingly disordered thoughts and feelings, they write.

KTRH published the news release on UTMB’s latest research on teen violence. UTMB’s Dr. Elizabeth Baumler and Dr. Jeff Temple are quoted.

The city of Houston is developing a firearm dashboard in an effort to make the city safer and is partnering with UTMB’s Dr. Bindi J. Naik-Mathuria—who will lead coordination efforts with area trauma centers.

UTMB’s Dr. Gulshan Sharma is listed among the 130 chief medical officers to know by Becker’s Hospital Review.

An opinion piece written by UTMB’s Dr. Peter Cram is quoted in this Healthcare Innovation column on the problems faced by physician owned hospitals. “The Federal government's restrictions on physician-owned hospitals create an unfair playing field that protects the interests of powerful hospitals,” wrote Cram and his coauthors.

There is no connection between rising COVID-19 cases and the electoral process. The U.S. has seen rises in COVID-19 cases that coincide with election seasons in November — but they have also occurred during the summer, according to UTMB’s Dr. Janak Patel.

Many patients with mild traumatic brain injury have central sensitization, a pain that requires a different therapeutic approach than nociceptic pain, according to a study by UTMB student Christopher File, BSA, and colleagues.

“Part of the story about the Hispanic Paradox,” said Kyriakos S. Markides, a professor of aging at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, “is that the non-Hispanic white population is not doing as well as it should.” Markides coined the term “Hispanic Epidemiological Paradox” in a 1986 paper showing Hispanics in the American Southwest lived as long, or longer, than white people.

The number of West Nile virus cases will vary greatly from year to year. “The effect of climate on vector-borne diseases is very complicated,” said Scott Weaver, PhD, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Warmer temperatures are extending the geographic distribution of mosquitoes and ticks in the US. But rates of human disease also depend on the habitats and migratory patterns of animal hosts that harbor the pathogens that infect mosquitoes and ticks. “These are all being affected by climate change,” Weaver said.

“The medical establishment, even within the field of OB-GYN, does not have a good understanding of pseudocyesis,” UTMB’s Dr. Shannon M. Clark tells National Geographic. Understanding what’s happening in the body of a woman with pseudocyesis would help treat the condition and reduce the stigma, Clark says.

In their latest column, Drs. Norbert Herzog and David Niesel write about scientists have been studying members of a large extended family in Colombia who develop early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in their 40s or earlier.