December 2012 Archive - Penn Medicine News Blog

Taking a look back, 2012 has been a year marked by breakthroughs in medical research, system-wide growth, and landmark philanthropic support for Penn Medicine. As we set our sights on the year ahead, we also celebrate the past year's accomplishments and give thanks to the outstanding faculty, staff, and students...

Across Penn Medicine, practices continuously seek out ways to support their communities. During this season, those sites also aim to bring joy to patients and staff; some of whom may not be able to spend the holiday season with loved ones. Many Penn Medicine community practices, Clinical Care Associate practices,...

No one wants to be in the hospital, but being there during the holidays –- away from family and friends -– makes a difficult situation even harder. That’s why staff at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania go out of their way to bring the holiday spirit into patient...

This time of year has me pretty run down, with birthdays, holidays, concerts, you name it -- all manner of good and bad stress that weighs on one’s immune system. But I never knew my T cells could get exhausted, too. Two papers from the lab of E. John Wherry,...

When Maxine Hobson, program coordinator of Penn’s Biological Basis of Behavior program (BBB) invited schools to this year’s Penn KidsJudge! Neuroscience Fair, she explained that the third graders would not only be learning through hand-on activities, but they would also judge the work of Penn undergraduate and graduate students. One...

Steve Berkowitz, MD, director of the Penn Center for Youth and Family Trauma Response and Recovery, outlines some strategies for helping children and teens process their feelings in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting.

“We showed for the first time that clotting is reversible,” says John Weisel, Ph.D., professor of Cell and Developmental Biology, in contrast to a long-standing assumption that it isn’t. Weisel and colleagues showed how these sometimes dangerous knots of protein and cells are actually a dynamic, mutable structure this month...

While most artificial hip joints in use today will last 10-20 years, like all devices, the artificial hip joint – which replaces the natural hip bone with a metal ball and resurfaces the hip socket with a metal shell and plastic liner – wears out over time. For younger patients, this means a second surgery (and maybe even a third) will be required to replace the artificial joint. Fortunately, a rare procedure now being offered by specialists at Penn Medicine provides a long-term alternative for younger patients with chronic hip pain.

In an effort to cut through the constant communications clutter – websites, e-newsletters, targeted text messages and mailings, plus a plethora of pregnancy and parenting magazines – that bombards women during pregnancy and during early motherhood, Pennsylvania Hospital is taking a fresh approach to help educate and inform staff and...

Despite their use in approximately 60,000 surgeries per day in the U.S. alone, medical researchers don’t know exactly how anesthetics cause unconsciousness – or what the true long-term impact of their use could be on the brain and the rest of the body. "The development of anesthetic drugs has been...

Nathan Francis Mossell, MD, the first black student in Penn’s School of Medicine, received his medical degree in 1882. On his first day, he later wrote, he was “accompanied by a storm of protest” as his fellow incoming students sounded their displeasure. “I was not perturbed in the least,” wrote...

As a Digital Communications Editor, much — if not all — of my typical day is spent behind a keyboard in a regular office separate from our clinical facilities. For someone who is relatively new to Penn Medicine, this can create issues of scale. You’re told from the very beginning...