Study: Pre-pregnancy weight loss may reduce maternal complications and provide long-term benefits to offspring

Ann Arbor — Women with obesity before and during pregnancy are at risk of more complications than leaner women, including hypertension, gestational diabetes and increased need for Caesarian delivery.  Their children also have an increased risk of obesity and other metabolic problems. Some of the risk in children may be due to programming of the…

New professorship honors two Taubman scholars

Taubman Emerging Scholar Kanakadurga Singer, MD, has been designated as the inaugural Valerie Castle Opipari, MD Professor at Michigan Medicine. This new professorship honors Dr. Opipari, a pediatric oncologist-hematologist and the first woman chair of Michigan Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics, a post she held from 2003-2018.  As a physician-researcher, Dr. Opipari also is a founding…

Video: Covid-19 and Addiction

COVID-19 has generated a public health crisis that affects every household. And it’s exacerbating another widespread public health crisis that already was ongoing when the pandemic arrived: addiction and other mental health problems. During the pandemic, complications from substance use, and overdose deaths, have been increasing even faster than before. At the same time, it…

Taubman Institute Emerging Scholar hosting AD researcher at Neurology/Neuroscience seminar

Emerging Scholar Sami Barmada, MD, PhD, has invited Dena Dubal, MD, PhD, to speak at Michigan Medicine’s Neurology/Neuroscience seminar Friday, September 25 at Noon-1 pm via Zoom. Dr. Dubal’s presentation is titled, “Mechanisms of Sex Bias in Alzheimer’s Disease: X Marks the Spot.” Whether sex chromosomes contribute to sex difference in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is…

Precision Medicine for Ocular Diseases

Studying and deciphering vision-related diseases is complicated by the delicate structure of the eye itself. While biopsies and samples from many other bodily systems are relatively easily obtained by physicians, collecting the vitreous fluid from within the eye is a more challenging task and often fails. The lack of a standardized process to collect and…

Laboratory research paves the way for a clinical trial to see if an FDA-approved drug used to prevent organ transplant rejection can work against these aggressive brain tumors.

Funding from the Taubman Institute has helped a team of researchers develop a new approach to treating aggressive brain tumors. Daniel Wahl, MD, PhD, a radiation oncologist and researcher at Michigan Medicine, says an existing drug used to prevent organ transplant rejection may make radiation therapy more effective for glioblastoma patients by targeting a critical…