Research

My grandfather, Thomas Purinton, enlisted in the Navy at age 16 in 1899 and was assigned to the square-rigger USS Essex, and my Massachusetts ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, so I was favorably disposed to military service. When I was a second-year medical student in 1971, one of my colleagues was accepted into the Medical Osteopathic Scholarship Program, which is the Department of Defense program to recruit future physicians.

Images from a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner show the location of the cancer. This type of drug appears to be the best diagnostic tool for staging prostate cancer and determining whether it has metastasized, says Dresser, the chief of nuclear medicine at the Truman VA.

In a double-blind trial, Krystal and his team will compare the drugs trazodone, eszopiclone, and gabapentin to placebo. All three contain sleep-inducing ingredients but work in different ways.

Now, VA investigators are examining the effectiveness of a clinical, trauma-sensitive yoga intervention to help women Veterans who experienced military sexual trauma (MST) and went on to develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

A combination of telehealth coaching and web-based skills training can significantly improve clinical outcomes and social functioning for Veterans who have experienced military sexual trauma (MST), says a VA study published in October 2021 in the Journal of Rural Health.

To date, more than 60 VA medical centers have been involved in trials on COVID-19 therapeutics (see sidebar), including antiviral drugs such as remdesivir, monoclonal antibodies, convalescent plasma, and immunomodulators. Other therapeutics are in the pipeline for clinical trials, but only one has received FDA approval.

The researchers examined VA data on 41,658 Veterans (12.3% women) who had been screened for both military sexual trauma (MST) and suicidal ideation between 2008 and 2013, and who had no prior mental health visits or antidepressant medications in their electronic medical record.

The initiative is called the Interagency Resource Coordinating Center for Preclinical TBI Research (IRCC). It will focus on making the most of federal investments in pre-clinical TBI, with scientists working together to identify the preclinical models that best represent TBI in humans and sharing data in more uniform ways.

At the time, Kilmer recalls, Baker ingrained in him a philosophy that he takes to heart today as director of the VA Eastern Colorado Health Care System: Good clinical work supports good research, and good research supports good clinical work.

Doctors often stop a patient’s heart during a major cardiac surgery. In this situation, a perfusionist operates a heart-lung bypass machine. The machine supplies needed blood and oxygen to the patient, whose heart is on hiatus.

Dr. Drew Helmer, an internist at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston, co-authored the 2021 paper. He and his colleagues first identified whether drinking Concord grape juice is linked to increased levels of polyphenols in the blood. They then tried to learn whether these increases correlate with improved cognitive performance in 26 Veterans with Gulf War illness.

Common statins are atorvastatin (sold as Lipitor), fluvastatin (Lescol XL), and pitavastatin (Livalo). More than 35 million Americans take the prescription drugs to help control cholesterol.