Monthly Archives: August 2022

Register Now for “A Seat for All: Communicating Health Equity and Research in a Digital World”

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Join us and learn about Health Affairs’ Health Equity initiative aimed at increasing diversity among authors, identifying new voices, and addressing biases within their publishing process. Strategies for promoting research and the impact social media plays on disseminating health equity content will also be discussed. 

In addition, there will be time for attendees to pose questions and contribute to an interactive conversation.

Date: Thursday, September 15, 2022
Time: 12:00 PM to 1:15 PM, EST
Location – Zoom Webinar – Register Now

Speakers

Dr. Vabren Watts, Director of Health Equity, Health Affairs
Dr. Vabren Watts is the Director of Equity at Health Affairs. He is an expert in health equity and a science and health journalist who has authored more than 300 articles about the latest advancements in medicine for news media outlets including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Psychiatric News, and WebMD.

Before joining Health Affairs, Dr. Watts served as advocate for health equity for marginalized and minority populations, having served as a spokesperson for the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association, and the Deputy Director in the Division of Diversity and Health Equity at the American Psychiatric Association.

Dr. Watts received his Doctor of Philosophy in pharmacology from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN and completed his postdoctoral training in the Division of Cardiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Patti Sweet, Director of Digital Strategy, Health Affairs
Patti Sweet is the Direct of Digital Strategy at Health Affairs. She focuses on digital strategy and the ways in which Health Affairs can promote itself and its content in digital spaces and to diverse audiences.

She built her career working in digital marketing agencies and volunteering with service organizations and nonprofits, with half of her work based in London and the other half in the US. Patti received her bachelor’s degree in International Studies and Spanish from Michigan State University, and she holds a master’s degree from the Hult International Business School in London.

Who Does Twitter Elevate?

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Social media offers valuable, accurate medical information—if you know who to trust. Unfortunately, identifying reliable sources of information remains a challenge for even the most savvy web users.

Dr. Fumiko Chino

Dr. Fumiko Chino. Photo: Richard DeWitt.

A recent Axios article reviews the problem of information and misinformation on Twitter. In it, MSK’s Dr. Fumiko Chino describes a recent study she coauthored in JAMA Network Open. Verified accounts (the ones with those blue checkmarks) of physicians on Twitter are more likely to be from male doctors in the United States. It is unclear why some accounts receive verification while others do not.

While Twitter worked to make the verification process more transparent last year, Dr. Chino believes room for improvement remains. She concludes, “It charges me to put a fine eye in terms of who I’m elevating, who I’m retweeting.”

Sugar Metabolism in Cancer New Research, “Forever Chemicals” and Liver Cancer and More

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  • A new study by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis challenged an established view of sugar as a cancer driver because of the cancer cells’ high glucose uptake.. The study demonstrated that cancer cells don’t use all the energy from glucose but discard most of it as waste. Until now, the rate of glucose consumption by cancer cells was used in cancer diagnosis and staging. Also, avoiding access to dietary sugar has been viewed as one of the anti-cancer strategies. The new findings don’t support the role of glucose metabolism as a good therapeutic target in cancer. The study was published in Molecular Cell.
  • An international group of researchers, funded by Cancer Research UK, have developed a technique called spatial transcriptomics, which allows non-invasive mapping of tumors at a very high-resolution depth. The researchers have created a detailed three-dimensional prostate map, including both healthy and cancerous cell areas. The study also discovered that individual prostate tumors have multiple genetic variations and revealed that healthy tissue in a prostate already had genetic characteristics associated with cancer. The new technique will help study the characteristics and development of cancer on a cellular level. The technique and the finding of the study will have a significant impact on cancer diagnosis and treatment. The study was published in Nature.
  • Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology developed a revolutionary detection method that shows how cancers metastasize and what stage they are. They created a new type of chip called the Cluster-Well, which can capture circulating tumor cell (CTC) clusters in blood, which are the vehicles of tumor spread. According to the Principal Investigator on the study, this new technology allows circulating tumor cell clusters “virtually in any cancer to be accessed with precision and practicality that has not been possible before.” The study was published in Nature Communications.
  • A researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health conducted a retrospective study to evaluate the long-term relationship between cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease. The findings supported the pattern already established by the prior research into a short term relationship, that of the inverse relationship between the two conditions: “…dementia patients with cancer history demonstrated better cognition at dementia diagnosis and declined slower than dementia patients without cancer history”. The study was published in Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
  • Researchers at the University of Southern California have found that exposure to “forever chemicals,” also known as PFAS, which are chemicals used in nonstick cookware and certain types of makeup, is associated with elevated liver cancer risk. The study was published in JHEP Reports.