Resident Research Day at BIDMC
Posted 6/29/2010
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Does drinking red wine regularly reduce the risk factors of cardiovascular disease for patients with high cholesterol? Does the brain try to rewire itself after a stroke? How does the brain process and place into a hierarchy the information it receives from your five senses?
These were just three of the seven questions that were posed and subsequently answered - at least in part - during Resident Research Day presentations made as part of Education Week at BIDMC.
The day's judges had a tough task ahead of them. Richard Schwartzstein, MD, Vice President of Medical Education; Gordon Strewler, MD, Vice Chair, Department of Medical Education; Sean Kelly, MD, Director, Graduate Medical Education (GME); and Carrie Tibbles, MD, Associate Director, GME; chose two runners up and one winner.
"This was a tough decision as these were all high quality presentations," Kelly said.
Matthew Hansen, MD, Anesthesia, tied for second place. He proved that the drug dexamethasone could be administered to ambulatory arthroscopic knee patients, reducing their level of post-operative pain and minimizing the number of pain medications they consumed after surgery.
The second runner up was Kathryn Volz, MD, Emergency Medicine. Volz, who rushed to the review from jury duty, argued that only Troponin, not Troponin and CK MB, was needed for the initial screening of a patient at risk of or suspected of having a heart attack. CK MB stands for the enzyme Creatine Kinase, which can have subunits that are Muscle type or Brain type.
Volz proved that screening solely for the heart attack indicator Troponin positively identified which patients were at risk for acute myocardial infarction. Based on her study, BIDMC's Emergency Department no longer gives physicians the option to screen a suspected heart attack patient for CK MB. Eliminating the CK MB tests saves the medical center $39 a patient or about $700,000 a year, Volz said.
Volz and Hansen received $100 each, as the main award and prize money of $200 went to Brett Young, MD, OB/GYN. Young hypothesized that rapid strep tests given to women while they were in labor were more accurate at screening women for Group B streptococcus (GBS) than the current test give three weeks before the anticipated delivery date. She said two-thirds of babies in BIDMC's NICU were born to GBS negative mothers under the old means of testing. The rapid test provided quicker results and can reveal which mother's have GBS at the most crucial point in pregnancy - their delivery. GBS early onset sepsis of the newborn is the leading cause of infection and mortality for newborns, Young said.
"I am so pleased and honored to get this award," she said. "It was wonderful to participate in Resident Research Day and see a cross section of the research being done by my colleagues in different departments at the medical center."
The remaining residents who presented received $50 each.
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