Research Roundup
Editor’s Note: The following information on MCG research is abridged from articles posted at www.mcg.edu/news.
Volunteers needed for cervix study
There may be an alternative to surgery for young women with precancerous
changes of the cervix.
Dr. Daron Farris, family medicine physician, colposcopist and director of the Gynecologic Cancer Prevention Center at MCG, is researching a new gene therapy treatment to remove cervical dysplasia, or moderate to severe cellular changes that may indicate cervical cancer. Injections of an immunotherapeutic agent may direct the immune system to attack precancerous changes as well as human papillomavirus, the most common sexually transmitted disease in the country and the major cause of cervical cancer. If proven effective, the treatment could replace current surgical approaches to remove affected cells and adjacent tissue.
MCG is enrolling women age 25 or younger with moderate to severe cervical dysplasia who have not yet had surgery. Two-thirds of the women will get the agent and a third will get placebo.
All participants will be followed for 12 and one-half months with regular Pap smears and colposcopic examinations. Women who get placebo will receive a standard surgical treatment after the study if needed. Women who begin to show signs of advancing disease during that year will be pulled out of the study and get surgery.
For more information, call Dr. Ferris’ office at 706-721-2535.
Role of nervous system in fatal heart rhythm
Finding out why seemingly healthy people experience ventricular
fibrillation, a fatal irregular heart rhythm, could eventually lead to
better methods of early detection.
Dr. Autumn Schumacher, in the MCG School of Nursing recently won the American Heart Association’s Martha N. Hill New Investigator Award for her research on what effect adrenaline has on the electrical patterns in the heart. Dr. Schumacher uses various drugs to simulate autonomic nervous system imbalance in an isolated animal heart. Then she photographs fluorescent images of the electrical activity while recording the heart’s rhythm with an electrocardiogram.
“We know that autonomic imbalance and too much adrenaline can contribute to the conditions promoting ventricular fibrillation,” said Dr. Schumacher. “This research aims to find out why.”
Stroke risk in children with sickle cell disease
MCG researchers have evidence that blood transfusion in children with sickle
cell disease lowers stroke risk.
A study of children whose stroke risk was reduced by blood transfusions found that within a few months of halting transfusion, 14 of the 41 children resumed at-risk status and two children had strokes. None of the 38 children who continued transfusions resumed at-risk status or had a stroke. Dr. Robert J. Adams, MCG neurologist and stroke specialist, authored the article in the Dec. 29 New England Journal of Medicine.
The study, headquartered at MCG and involving 25 sites in North America, was to enroll 100 patients, but the Data and Safety Monitoring Board appointed by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute recommended early closure in late 2004 because so many children resumed their at-risk status. The NHLBI issued a clinical alert in December 2004 to coincide with the closure saying the 10 percent of children with sickle cell disease who have a high stroke risk need ongoing transfusions.
The NHLBI funded the $11 million STOP II study looking at whether children needed to continue transfusions after their stroke risk normalized. That followed another NHLBI-funded study, led by MCG, which showed monthly transfusions cut stroke risk by 90 percent.