Research

While active surveillance sounds like a logical approach for men with low-risk prostate cancer, especially given that prostate removal and radiotherapy can lead to urinary, bowel, and sexual dysfunction, convincing patients to buy into it can be a challenge all its own.

Enter THRIVe. That’s shorthand for a center that VA has created to help Veterans bloom within their communities—by finding work, engaging recreation, making friends, and keeping in contact with family.

Experts believe the precipitous rise was driven by abuse of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left many drug users feeling isolated and unable to get treatment or other support. Fentanyl is believed to be much more potent than heroin and morphine.

Al-Aly heads up both the Clinical Epidemiology Center and the Research and Development Service at the VA St. Louis Health Care System. He is also a nephrologist—a doctor who specializes in kidney disease—and a clinical epidemiologist with expertise in big data. His group analyzes huge data sets too complex for conventional computer software.

Hochberg is a researcher at the Providence VA Medical Center in Rhode Island, with more than 17 years’ expertise. He is director of the BrainGate clinical trials—conducted by leading laboratories in neuroscience and neuroengineering—which are focused on developing and testing intracortical brain-computer interfaces (BCI). 

As a result of her grandmother's death from Alzheimer’s disease, a would-be fourth generation farmer embarked on a different career path.

I have had a series of mentors over the years. Air Force Brigadier General Charles “Chuck” Yeager, the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound, took me on my first flight in an F100F fighter in 1958. Air Force Colonel Henry Godman, a pilot in the first full squadron to fly the B-17 Flying Fortress during World War II and later the head of Strategic Air Command, taught me to fly a propeller AC.

In 1974, Gross received the prestigious Lasker Award for his discovery of what became known as the Gross mouse leukemia virus. His work in the 1950s, the Lasker Foundation said, opened the field of tumor virology in mammals and “laid the foundation for the subsequent discovery by others of cancer-inducing viruses in animals of various species ranging from rodents to the higher primates.”

Initially, I served with the United States Army Reserve in St. Cloud, Minnesota. I was a technical engineer, which means that I learned how to do so soils testing, drafting, and surveying. (I think it’s funny that I now work on a totally different kind of survey as a researcher.)

Custis was born in Goshen, Indiana, on July 23, 1917. In 1939, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Wabash College in Indiana, before being commissioned ensign in the U. S. Naval Reserve. While on inactive duty, he completed his medical degree at Northwestern University in Illinois in 1941.

Dr. Paula Schnurr, executive director of VA’s National Center for PTSD, was the lead author of the study, which was also the largest PTSD psychotherapy study to date in any population in the total number of participants: 916. The findings appeared in JAMA Network Open on Jan. 19, 2022.

Dr. James E. Blevins of the VA Puget Sound Health Care System completed the study with colleagues from Seattle Children’s Research Institute; the University of Washington; Harvard Medical School; and OXT Therapeutics, Inc. The research focused on ASK1476, a human-made peptide with a structure similar to that of oxytocin.