Week 5- Maggie Elpers

This week I spent the majority of my time on my clinical research project. Dr. Hsu is aiming to submit an abstract with this data the first week in August, and as I just got access to EPIC last week, we are in a bit of a time crunch to collect all the data and send it off to our statistician for analysis. Most of my work consists of going through patient charts and pulling specific lab results at specific time points and looking through the patients’ medication history to collect dosing of specific medications we are interested in. I’ve worked with the PharmD on the clinical team who has been great in helping me understand all the dosing of different medications for specific chemo regimens that patients are on. Overall, I’m enjoying working on this project, and I’m learning a ton about how clinical research works. 


I also spent some time in the clinic with Dr. Hsu this week. One patient we saw was an individual who had leukemia and was almost a year post stem cell transplant. This patient has been dealing with chronic kidney problems likely due to graft vs host disease (GVHD) damaging the kidney post-transplant. The nephrologist and oncologists are very interested in this case because very little is known about how stem cell transplants affect the kidney compared to other organs. Another case was a consult for a patient who likely has myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). MSD is considered a type of cancer but can also progress to leukemia. This patient will undergo more tests to confirm diagnosis and monitoring to see if and how quickly the disease progresses.


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