Resuscitation techniques have come a long way. Just a few years ago, there were only a handful of hospitals using therapeutic temperature management (TTM), also known as therapeutic hypothermia, to treat cardiac arrest patients. Now, it’s becoming a standard tool of resuscitation, but studies show ‘cooled’ patients with good outcomes...

The Fall 2014 issue of Penn Medicine, redesigned for a more contemporary look, includes a very contemporary feature that would have been unimaginable when I became editor of the magazine. The article about Wendy Sue Swanson, MD, who earned her medical degree and master’s degree in bioethics from Penn in...

After only seven weeks of being pregnant, Keri Heickert’s life as she knew it was no longer. Hers was a difficult pregnancy. In the fall of 2012 at only 20 weeks along, Keri – who was carrying fraternal twin girls – was admitted to monitored bed rest in Pennsylvania Hospital’s...

Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and the fourth leading cause of death among African Americans. Once patients have the disease, there is no treatment available that can stop its progression. The Penn Memory Center seeks to change that. Last month, the Penn...

Strengthening the Nurse-Patient Connection Advances in health treatment and technology have improved patient outcomes, but this fast-paced and sometimes stressful environment can take a toll on the nurse-patient relationship. Much of nursing now centers more on technology, often in the areas of collecting and monitoring. Sometimes that means that nurses...

Over the past 20 years, advancements in research and the understanding of genetics have created a boom in patient demand for genetic tests. According to the National Library of Medicine, less than 300 genetic tests were available in the 1990s; in contrast, at the end of 2012, almost 3,000 genetic...

The annual infection diseases conference known as ID Week kicked off in Philadelphia yesterday, and it couldn’t be more timely. And it’s not just because of Ebola. A slew of other outbreaks have been in the public eye as of late: enterovirus, MERS, dengue fever. The program organizers have shifted...

Anil Vachani, MD, director of the Lung Nodule Program and assistant professor of Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the Veteran's Administration Medical Center; Attending Physician, Philadelphia Veterans Administration Medical Center. Lung cancer is the deadliest of all cancers, and cigarette smoking causes 85 percent of...

Rotenone exposure is also associated with Parkinson’s disease (PD) in humans, but the exact mechanism is unknown. In fact, rotenone is used to induce a rodent model of PD. Mitochondrial abnormalities have been well documented in PD patients, often coinciding with elevated markers of oxidative stress. Despite this evidence, not much is known about how nerve cells die because of the stress.