Health

By Trevor Stewart

Scott Fishman, M.D., UC Davis Health director for the Center for Advancing Pain Relief, has seen firsthand the pervasive pain problem plaguing the United States over the past several decades. Fishman’s proposed Big Idea would commission a UC Davis Pain Relief Center, which would serve as a hub for education, research and integrative care –– a groundbreaking resource for clinicians to rethink how to view pain relief and pain management.

Concern about mass shootings has lifted spending on studies and attracted a new generation of researchers.

In the largest non-pharmacological trial ever in children with fragile X syndrome (FXS), UC Davis researchers found that large-scale, in-home cognitive interventions are feasible and may be beneficial for individuals with the syndrome and potentially other intellectual disabilities.

Leaders of UC Davis Health announced Thursday that the state of California has awarded its scientists and clinicians $8.8 million – or almost 42 percent – of a $21 million package earmarked for the study of Alzheimer’s disease.

Via The Sacramento Bee

Next month, veterinarians at the UC Davis Veterinary Medical Center are expected to place a small balloon into a dog's heart valve to improve blood flow and assuage the heart murmur.

Via Fox 5 San Diego

An enzyme inhibitor developed by Bruce Hammock, PhD, professor of entomology, and colleagues at University of California (UC), Davis, reduced inflammation in the brains of mice born to mothers with maternal immune activation as described in a study in PNAS. 

Via Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News

UC Davis researchers announced Tuesday that, after studying brain tissue from 423 Americans of Latino, African and non-Hispanic white descent, they have discovered startling variations in the causes of dementia among people of different races and ethnicities.

Via Modesto Bee

 

Seventeen-year-old Justin Silver was five when he was diagnosed with fragile X syndrome. Despite living across the country in New York, the family traveled to the UC Davis MIND Institute in Sacramento, Calif., where they met the world’s leading experts in the field.

Researchers at UC Davis zoomed in on a group of children whose older siblings already had an autism diagnosis. Across 241 kids, 14.1 percent of those whose mothers took prenatal vitamins during their first month of pregnancy went on to develop autism, versus 32.7 percent amongst the group whose mothers didn’t take the vitamins.

Via Popular Science

Charles DeCarli, neurologist and director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center, and Kimberley McAllister, director of the Center for Neuroscience and professor in the neurology and neurobiology, physiology and behavior departments, are taking an interdisciplinary approach to rethink how brain health is defined as champions of the Healthy Brain Aging Initiative: Brain Health Across the Lifespan Big Idea for UC Davis.