Week 4 - Robert Hawkins

Clinical - This week was another slower week as a couple more cognitive assessments took place, but the participant declined to have students observe. However, tomorrow morning I will be able to observe the cognitive assessment of a subject with Alzheimer's disease who is currently participating in a Phase 2 clinical trial for a potential new therapeutic targeted towards women with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease. I look forward to seeing how this assessment goes and am curious to learn if there has been any change since their last assessment. 

Research - I have continued working with R and a national Alzheimer's database, which has been going well. I have been able to find some interesting relationships between neutrophils/neutrophil adhesion and biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease, but unfortunately many of these relationships have already been reported. This week, I was also able to join Austin in Dr. Schwartz's lab to watch the implantation of a PDMS cranial window into a mouse, which we have been trying to do in our lab back in Ithaca but have been running into problems. We were able to learn how their methods differ slightly from ours and I think we will be able to fix the problems we were having. 

Life - It feels like each week has gone faster than the last and it is hard to believe we only have two weeks left! Last weekend, a few of us went to a couple breweries in Brooklyn and then walked to Dumbo, which are both very nice areas, and also got some good food at a couple different Italian restaurants. Overall, I have liked the city a lot but it will be nice to get back to Ithaca!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 1

For my first week of immersion I attended the OR's of a few different physicians as my clinical mentor Dr. Jason Spector of plastic surgery and reconstruction was on vacation this week. I was able to see three different hernia repairs, and one double mastectomy and bilateral DIEP flap.  I think my favorite thing I saw was the double mastectomy and bilateral DIEP flap. From what I understand, this is a procedure in which both breasts were removed and fat from the stomach is used to reconstruct the breasts. The novelty of the DIEP flap is that it does not require the removal of muscle which allows patients to recover quicker. Additionally, blood vessels from the fat in the stomach are left in tact and "hooked up" to corresponding vessels in the breast. All in all, the procedure essentially amounted to a breast reconstruction and tummy tuck. It was a 10 hour surgery that required multiple doctors and departments, as this was not just a purely cosmetic procedure- the patient ...
Read more

Week 1 - Samantha Bratcher

Image
Hi, everyone! My name is Samantha Bratcher. My clinical immersion is with Dr. Adam Talenfeld and Dr. Kyungmouk Steve Lee in the Interventional Radiology (IR) department. Although it's not very related to my field at the university (biomechanics/mechanobiology), the clinical experience has still been very interesting. The IR department is super friendly and all the clinicians have been very available to letting me shadow them. It's only been one week, but I've already learned a lot! Every day has been watching something new, from angioplasty to biopsy to embolization. I find it so crazy that they're able to thread a wire through someone's veins to practically any area of the body. It's always a bit crazy to watch. I got a video of a balloon angioplasty using this method. The balloon is inflated inside a person's veins to expand them and increase blood flow. The second video shows the veins and their quality. The rate at which the contrast dye flows through is...
Read more

Week One - Shenghao Tan

I am working with Dr. Mirella Salvatore from the infectious disease division. My research project will revolve around associations of COVID 19 patient clinical characteristics with their hostresponses throughout their hospitalization and recovery.   On the patient care side I have been following Dr. Ole Vielemeyer in ID consultation. A large part of the round is to discuss the choice of antibiotics, itsdosage and duration from lab results and examination reports. Some of the cases this week have been quite complicated and chronic; therefore, joint effort were required to provide adequate treatments. One patient had to battle both Crohn's disease and histoplasmosis, where the immunosuppressant and antibiotics used must be carefully considered to treat the histoplasma and maintain some immune system function, while not severing the GI tract. A part of medical care I learned that I haven't considered much of is the inpatient - outpatient transition: how is the treatments adjusted ...
Read more