Emergency Physician, Educator, Researcher, interested in the microbiome, evolution, and medicine
A recent meta analysis concluded that statins, though effective at reducing cholesterol, are not helpful in sepsis. Statins have a variety of anti-inflammatory effects that were hypothesized to reduce harmful host inflammation in sepsis. It did not work. Read the results here: Thomas. Statin therapy in critically-ill patients with severe […]
Are our priorities mixed up in the in the emergency department? A recent study suggests so. Dvorkin and colleagues compared how quickly pain and fever is treated in kids in the emergency department. Turns out we treat fever with much greater alacrity, perhaps because of standing orders that allow nurses […]
The commonly prescribed medications azithromycin and levofloxacin are probably killing people. A recently study by Rao and colleagues in the Annals of Family Medicine had a pretty eye-popping result: “Compared with amoxicillin, azithromycin resulted in a statistically significant increase in mortality and arrhythmia risks on days 1 to 5, but […]
Are you interested in the nexus between gut microbiota, behavior, and evolution? Athena Aktipis PhD may have a job opportunity for you. Athena is my collaborator and co-author on the recent Bioessays article “Is eating behavior manipulated by the gastrointestinal microbiota? Evolutionary pressures and potential mechanisms.” I cut and pasted […]
I grew up in a home without an automatic dishwasher, meaning that mealtimes were generally followed by arguments about whose turn it was to wash dishes by hand. Despite much hand-wringing about hand dishwashing, a new study by Hesselmar and colleagues in the journal Pediatrics indicates that my parents were […]
According to Charles Darwin, “extreme disgust is expressed by movements round the mouth identical with those preparatory to the act of vomiting.” Recently disgust and its associated behaviors gained attention as an unappreciated arm of the immune system. This idea was recently explored in a paper by Steve Gangestad and […]
The case of carbapenem resistant Enterobacteriaceae at UCLA It is rare that a news story encapsulates three of my major interests in evolution and disease. The evolution of resistance to antimicrobials is a recurring theme on this blog. So is the importance of human-microbiome co-evolution. I am also interested in […]
A recent article in Lancet describes the spread (read: selective advantage leading to evolutionary change) that is now occurring in Burma, a.k.a Myanmar. Read the New York Times summary of this article here.
A cool new paper by Saxena and Young examined the relationship between temperature and outcomes of patients with CNS infection and stroke in the Intensive Care Unit. This was an observational study that measured the peak temperature in patients with a variety of CNS diseases, including meningitis. They reasoned that […]
Why do we feel so terrible when we get sick? Recently, it has been cold, flu and RSV season here in New Mexico, as in most of North America. So, I have been seeing patients in the emergency department with body aches, fever, and nausea, elevated heart rates and breathing […]
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