Virtual reality aimed at easing stress may be an adjunctive therapy for children and adults with inflammatory bowel disease and other abdominal complaints, linked to significant reductions in pain and anxiety, researchers have found. Stress is known to exacerbate disease activity and symptoms in IBD, while mindfulness-based interventions have been shown to improve emotional distress, pain and inflammation in children and adults with chronic illness and pain. Although few mindfulness-based interventions have been explored for IBD, VR is increasingly prevalent in children’s hospitals, making the combination of VR and medication appealing. In one study, presented at the 2020 Crohn’s and…
Author: Praveen Suthrum
Linda Lee, MD, Medical Director of Endoscopy at Boston-based Brigham and Women’s Hospital, shared eight things Brigham and Women’s Hospital is executing in 2021 to have a successful year. Note: Responses were edited for style and content. Question: What will make or break your practice in 2021? Dr. Linda Lee: As no one could predict we would be living through a historic once-in-a-century pandemic, none of us knows what 2021 will bring, although we all hope for a reprieve. Some factors that will be important for allowing academic GI practices to thrive include the following: 1. Protect patients: Patients have expressed…
The ACG Education Universe is a robust online educational library featuring video presentations from ACG’s national and regional meetings. To help guide you through the wealth of content available FREE to ACG members, each week Editor David T. Rubin, MD, FACG, and an Associate Editor select a video to highlight. The focus is on clinically-relevant topics that delve into issues you see commonly, as well as practice management insights to enhance your success. If CME is available for watching this video, a link will be included below. If you wish to review the video without earning CME, an open-access link is provided.
Automated text message reminders and instructions did not improve outpatient colonoscopy attendance and bowel preparation adherence versus usual care, according to results from a pragmatic randomized trial. Among 753 randomized patients, achievement of the primary outcome of appointment attendance with good or excellent bowel preparation was similar in the intervention and control groups at 53.1% and 54.4%, respectively (P=0.73). This finding held after patient stratification by time of enrollment (early or late). Similarly, no significant differences emerged in secondary outcomes, including appointment attendance rate, bowel preparation quality graded as poor or inadequate, fair or adequate, and good or excellent, and…
Researchers at 12 hospitals in Canada and Denmark prospectively analyzed data from 41 women with IBD who received vedolizumab (VDZ; Entyvio, Millennium Pharmaceuticals) during pregnancy. According to the authors, 16% of women miscarried, all during the first trimester. Among the live births, one newborn had a low Apgar score at five minutes, two infants were born preterm, and three babies were small for their gestational age. No neonates experienced congenital malformations.
Exact Sciences provided the Kentucky Department for Public Health a grant for 1,000 Cologuard kits, the department announced Jan. 20. The tests are available to residents in the state through the Kentucky Colon Cancer Screening Program. The state made increasing colon cancer screening a priority in 2008. Since then, colon cancer-related mortality has fallen 33 percent, and colon cancer incidence rates have fallen 30 percent.
Abraham Verghese, MD: Hi, everyone. It’s a pleasure to welcome you to another episode of Medicine and the Machine with my co-host, Eric Topol. We are delighted to have as our guest Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance. I met Seth a couple of years ago, but I heard him speak at a TED conference well before that, and I’ve been blown away by the breadth of the impact he’s made on the world. He’s a physician and an infectious disease epidemiologist. He joined Gavi as its CEO in 2011. During its existence, Gavi has vaccinated more than 820 million children…
In this special GI Forging Forward edition of the AGA podcast Small Talk, Big Topics, hosts Matthew Witson and Nina Nandy have a conversation with Susan Reynolds, MD, PhD, an emergency physician, medical center CEO, Chief of Staff Boot Camp® program director and author. Dr. Reynolds is also heavily involved with AGA, and beyond medical leadership, her career focuses on wellness and burnout among medical practitioners. This conversation complements the previous episode on resiliency featuring Laurie Keefer, and addresses the topics of wellness and burnout. Matthew and Nina are excited to discuss what these terms mean, how to identify burnout, resources to foster…
Established companies in the life sciences, technology, and retail sectors are among the businesses entering the digital health market, along with thousands of start-ups. All seek to create value by applying technology to address the current issues in the delivery and management of healthcare. From our experience in business-model innovation and business building, we believe there are six interconnected building blocks required to build a scalable business (Exhibit 1). To illustrate how these elements apply to digital health, we interviewed six leaders of digital health companies to distill their experiences into key learnings.
Physicians should encourage patients with inflammatory bowel disease to get the COVID-19 vaccination despite lack of studies on the cohort, according to a presentation at the Crohn’s and Colitis Congress. “For patients with IBD we would advocate, based on [International Organization for the Study of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IOIBD)], that patients get vaccinated, acknowledging that there is a lack of data specifically in IBD patients,” Ryan C. Ungaro, MD, MS, gastroenterologist with Mount Sinai Hospital’s Feinstein IBD Center, told Healio Gastroenterology. “But we think the benefits out weight the risks and based on prior experience with vaccinations in IBD patients.”