Health and Medicine

Nursing faculty are in short supply nationally and this shortage is directly linked to the inability of schools of nursing to prepare enough entry level and advanced practice nurses to meet demands. The University at Buffalo School of Nursing has received a $1.47 million Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) grant to fund a program over the next three years that helps maximize the capacity to educate future PhD nurse faculty.

Traditions surrounding childbirth are an intrinsic part of a culture, and when people emigrate and cultures intersect, fundamental beliefs surrounding labor and delivery can collide.

A University at Buffalo researcher will spend the next two years studying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the long-term effects of Hurricane Katrina on police officers who worked during the disaster.

In the first study of its kind, researchers have found compelling evidence that our best and worst experiences in life are likely to involve not individual accomplishments, but interaction with other people and the fulfillment of an urge for social connection.

Human oral microbial biofilm is the plaque that dentists warn us about, and is composed of numerous genetically distinct types of bacteria that live on host surfaces. These biofilms are essential for oral bacteria to adapt and thrive and can cause oral infections. University at Buffalo researcher Chris (Chunhao) Li has been awarded a $1.6 million research grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop processes, possibly leading to therapeutic compounds, which prevent biofilm formation of oral bacteria.

If you want to know how people become addicted and why they keep using drugs, ask the people who are addicted. Thirty-one of 75 patients hospitalized for opioid detoxification told University at Buffalo physicians they first got hooked on drugs legitimately prescribed for pain.

Two University at Buffalo researchers are challenging the "myth of the well-adjusted Asian American," detailing how members of one of the country's fastest-growing ethnic groups face crucial disadvantages preventing them from receiving quality health care taken for granted by other, more culturally assimilated Americans.

Neurosurgeons at the University at Buffalo successfully implanted a stent in an artery inside the skull of a 14-year-old boy to prevent a stroke, a procedure thought to be the first conducted in an adolescent.

Lawrence Wrabetz, MD, head of the myelin biology unit at San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, Italy, has been appointed director of the Hunter James Kelly Research Institute (HJKRI) at the University at Buffalo. Laura Feltri, MD, who heads the neuroglia unit at the Italian institute and is Wrabetz's spouse, also has been recruited to the HJKRI, which was established in 2004 by UB and the Hunter's Hope Foundation.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2009, no state had met a target of reducing obesity prevalence among adults to 15 percent. Why is obesity so prevalent in America? And what can we do to combat the problem? University at Buffalo researcher Teresa Quattrin, MD, who is leading a more than $2.5 million study to test an innovative program for preventing and treating obesity in children aged 2 to 5, offers her expert opinion.