Researchers have found that dentists practicing in the U.S. write 37 times more opioid prescriptions than dentists practicing in England. And, the type of opioids they prescribe has a higher potential for abuse.
Researchers examining post-mortem brain tissue from people ages 79 to 99 found that new neurons continue to form well into old age. The study provides evidence that this occurs even in people with cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease, although neurogenesis is significantly reduced in these people compared to older adults with normal cognitive functioning.
The University of Illinois at Chicago has received a $100,000 grant from Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant will enable the expansion and testing of a clean drinking water system in two informal urban settlements located in Kisumu, a city of 500,000 people in Kenya.
In most animals, body size shrinks when food becomes scarce, but some parts are protected from shrinkage. In humans without enough food, the body becomes small, but the size of the head stays the same, hinting at biological mechanisms that act to preserve the all-important brain. In arthropods such as the fruit fly, whose lifespan is about 45 days and where reproductive success is the sole purpose of its life, the size of the male genitals are preserved under poor nutritional conditions.
The University of Illinois at Chicago will launch a new effort to reduce the health disparities experienced by women and babies living in historically underserved and marginalized communities, thanks to a $4.7 million Healthy Start grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration, or HRSA. Efforts will include leveraging community health workers, social workers and doulas in the Chicago neighborhoods of Auburn-Gresham, Englewood and South Shore to improve health outcomes for pregnant women participating in the program and their children.
The University of Illinois at Chicago will lead a $14.6 million, multi-center research project to determine which of two drugs — azithromycin, an antibiotic, or roflumilast, an anti-inflammatory medication — is the most effective at treating chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is also known as COPD.
Participants in a phase I/II clinical trial of a new enzyme-based treatment for severe dry eye disease experienced reduced signs of disease and discomfort, according to a paper in Translational Vision Science and Technology.The trial compared eye drops containing a biosynthetic form of an enzyme called DNase with eye drops without the enzyme.
The University of Illinois at Chicago and Deerfield Management will establish West Loop Innovations, LLC to accelerate the commercialization of therapeutics developed at UIC. Deerfield will provide up to $65 million in translational research funding and commercialization expertise to advance promising UIC discoveries.
The new Institute for Healthcare Delivery Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago has a unique mission: to transform the health care system into one that is intentionally and expertly designed with people — patients, families and clinicians — at the center.
The University of Illinois at Chicago will launch a new mobile research clinic to facilitate enrollment in the All of Us Research Program — a landmark National Institutes of Health program that aims to advance individualized prevention, treatment and care for people of all backgrounds. The program seeks to enroll 1 million participants across the nation.
Research shows that when pharmacies close, people stop taking widely used heart medications — like statins, beta-blockers and oral anticoagulants — that have known cardiovascular and survival benefits. Declines in adherence — including the complete discontinuation of medication — were highest among people using independent pharmacies, filling all their prescriptions at a single store, or living in low-access neighborhoods with fewer pharmacies.
Numerous studies have reported on the association between long work shifts and an increased risk of getting injured on the job. Fatigue, fewer breaks and psychomotor impairments resulting from long hours are believed to play a major role in the increased risk of injury for people who work shifts longer than 9 hours. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago examined how and why long work shifts increase the risk for injury among miners of all kinds.
A year in space seems to have a small but significant, transient effect on the gut microbiome, according to a new paper on the NASA Twins Study published in the journal Science.The microbiome findings, authored by a team of researchers in Chicago, are among the results from 10 other research teams examining how the human body responds to spaceflight that are reported in the paper.
Lithium batteries are what allow electric vehicles to travel several hundred miles on one charge. Their capacity for energy storage is well known, but so is their tendency to occasionally catch on fire – an occurrence known to battery researchers as “thermal runaway.” These fires occur most frequently when the batteries overheat or cycle rapidly.
The eyes may be the window to the soul, but to scientists, they are also the window to the brain. In particular, the retina, a delicate light-sensing neural network with specialized cells at the back of the eyeball, is linked directly to the brain via the optic nerve and is considered by some to be part of the brain itself. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago are developing imaging techniques that will allow them to study minute changes in the retina that indicate the early stages of brain diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
A $1.5 million grant from the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation will support the University of Illinois Cancer Center’s efforts to reduce cancer disparities in Chicago.
The University of Illinois Cancer Center and the University of Illinois at Chicago Colleges of Medicine and Dentistry will provide free head and neck cancer and oral cancer screenings at community health centers around Chicago April 8-12.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have found that some preterm babies born without haptoglobin, a protein in blood cells, have higher odds of brain bleeding, cerebral palsy and death. Their findings suggest that the absence of the protein could serve as a potential biomarker indicating a need for increased monitoring or other preventive interventions.
White individuals disproportionately affect the environment through their eating habits by eating more foods that require more water and release more greenhouse gases through their production compared to foods black and Latinx individuals eat, according to a new report published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.The report takes an in-depth look at what different demographic populations eat, how much greenhouse gas those foods are responsible for, and how much land and water they require.
Scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago have developed a way to identify the beginning of every gene — known as a translation start site or a start codon — in bacterial cell DNA with a single experiment and, through this method, they have shown that an individual gene is capable of coding for more than one protein.
Most techniques to prevent frost and ice formation on surfaces rely heavily on heating or liquid chemicals that need to be repeatedly reapplied because they easily wash away. Even advanced anti-icing materials have problems functioning under conditions of high humidity and subzero conditions, when frost and ice formation go into overdrive.
The University of Illinois at Chicago continues to be recognized for its academic strength in the U.S. News & World Report Best Graduate Schools rankings.
A growing body of evidence supports the idea that alcohol exposure early in life has lasting effects on the brain and increases the risk of psychological problems in adulthood. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have found that adolescent binge drinking, even if discontinued, increases the risk for anxiety later in life due to abnormal epigenetic programming.
The Coordinated Health Care for Complex Kids program, or CHECK, has been approved by the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services as an Integrated Health Home.
An intervention combining behavioral weight loss treatment and problem-solving therapy with as-needed antidepressant medication for participants with co-occurring obesity and depression improved weight loss and depressive symptoms compared with routine physician care, according to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Queensland University of Technology of Australia, have developed a device that can isolate individual cancer cells from patient blood samples. The microfluidic device works by separating the various cell types found in blood by their size. The device may one day enable rapid, cheap liquid biopsies to help detect cancer and develop targeted treatment plans.
A growing collection of anecdotal stories raises the possibility that nerve injury in an arm or a leg can act as a trigger for the development amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS — a progressive neurodegenerative disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, named after the famous New York Yankee who died of it in 1941.The connection between ALS and athletes runs deeper than a single ballplayer; people who engage in intense physical activities, such as professional athletes and people in the military, are more likely to be affected by ALS.
Produced by the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the report provides a framework for the region to plan and carry out future projects that deal with public health and the environment, social equity, and economic development.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have received a grant that will allow them to study how to improve care for heart disease patients struggling with hopelessness.
Artificial leaves mimic photosynthesis — the process whereby plants use water and carbon dioxide from the air to produce carbohydrates using energy from the sun. But even state-of-the-art artificial leaves, which hold promise in reducing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, only work in the laboratory because they use pure, pressurized carbon dioxide from tanks.
The University of Illinois at Chicago will lead a $3 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to design, develop and evaluate a system that will identify security vulnerabilities in web software. UIC will receive $1.4 million of the funding, and the rest will support co-investigators at the University of Texas at Dallas and The Johns Hopkins University.
Binge drinking in adolescence has been shown to have lasting effects on the wiring of the brain and is associated with increased risk for psychological problems and alcohol use disorder later in life.Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago Center for Alcohol Research in Epigenetics have shown that some of these lasting changes are the result of epigenetic changes that alter the expression of a protein crucial for the formation and maintenance of neural connections in the amygdala — the part of the brain involved in emotion, fear and anxiety.
Free supportive therapy and survivorship programs now offered in Chicago, thanks to a collaboration between Wellness House and the University of Illinois Cancer Center.
The nature of gang violence in Chicago has been changing but policies and practices to address it have not, according to a new report from the University of Illinois at Chicago's Great Cities Institute.
The University of Illinois at Chicago has received a $12 million contract from the National Institutes of Health to continue its role as the Chicago field center of the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos, or HCHS/SOL — the largest-ever prospective epidemiological study of this diverse population.“This study is crucial because Hispanics/Latinos now comprise the largest minority population in the United States, and we need to know more about their unique health risks so that we can educate the community and prevent cardiovascular and other chronic diseases in this population as it ages,” said Dr.
The University of Illinois at Chicago is working with the Illinois and Cook County departments of corrections to establish its community health center in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood as a medical home for individuals transitioning from secure custody and parole back to community life.
A new $1.7 million grant from the National Cancer Institute will enable researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago to study the fruit and its potential as a treatment for prostate cancer.
The University of Illinois at Chicago’s online bachelor’s degree program rankings continue to rise.
According to the latest rankings in U.S. News & World Report, UIC’s online programs — in health information management, business administration and nursing — are fifth in the nation, up from 15th last year. UIC tied with Pennsylvania State University – World Campus and University of Florida.
Lithium-air batteries are poised to become the next revolutionary replacement for currently used lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles, cell phones and computers.Lithium-air batteries, which currently are still in the experimental stages of development, can store 10 times more energy than lithium-ion batteries, and they are much lighter.
Clinical services to prevent and treat wounds, abscesses and infections caused as a result of injection drug use are now being offered at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Community Outreach Intervention Project’s, or COIP, west side field office. Services will be provided by physicians, nurses and students from UIC’s Urban Global Medicine Program and the UIC College of Nursing.
Changing demographics, cultural influences and the increasing number of college-bound youth have led to the emergence of new peer groups and perceptions among adolescents.