Features File:
Stories about our people and programs
Dialing up the degrees to fight cancer
“My wish is simple, but I wouldn’t have given it a second thought this time last year,” Joe Castelli said as his eyes welled up with tears. “I want to see my children grow up. I have two daughters who are nine and seven.”
This longing began soon after he felt pain on his left side last summer. After taking Ibuprofen for a couple of weeks, his physician did a CAT scan. Looking back, Castelli remembers hearing, “There is a spot we are worried about.”
The day after Thanksgiving he had his diagnosis: stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
New program aims to help save young athletes from sudden death
Adrian, William, Jocelyn and Kailynn—all athletic teenagers from the Greater Houston area and all victims of sudden cardiac arrest.
Adrian and William survived. Jocelyn and Kailynn, both just 13, did not.
“In each of these cases, the problem that caused the sudden cardiac arrest could have been detected with more in-depth screening than typical athlete physicals,” said John P. Higgins, M.D., assistant professor of medicine at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston.
UT Houston Pediatric Dentist Trains Colleagues at 2009 Special Olympics World Winter Games
Sanford Fenton, D.D.S., could feel the electricity in the air.
Everywhere he turned, he saw smiling faces as his ears filled with the excited voices of this year’s athletes in the 2009 Special Olympics World Winter Games held Feb. 17-13 in Idaho.
Fenton, chair of pediatric dentistry at The University of Texas Dental Branch at Houston, played a vital role in trying to keep the teeth in those smiling faces healthy through free dental screenings of the athletes.
UT School of Public Health launches farmer’s market to combat obesity
To fight an epidemic of obesity and its life-threatening complications in the Brownsville area, faculty and students at The University of Texas School of Public Health Brownsville Regional Campus have come up with a strong weapon: a farmer’s market loaded with fresh fruits and vegetables.
Research has shown that the predominately Hispanic community of Cameron County in the Valley has twice the national average of diabetes, a co-morbidity of obesity. According to the Texas Diabetes Council 2008 Fact sheet, Hispanics ages 18-44 have the highest prevalence of diabetes (6.8 percent) among all ethnic age groups in Texas. In 2002, The U.S.-Mexico Border Diabetes Prevention and Control Project noted diabetes as the fourth leading cause of death among Hispanics in Texas.