First-year students Kathryn Barbon and Alexia Loyless recently had dinner with a physician-intern who was 5,000 miles from home – and who made quite an impression on them.

Kateryna Telehina (pictured right), who visited the College of Medicine in February, is finishing her medical training in a small town near Kiev, while pursuing a
graduate degree in public health and lobbying the Ukrainian parliament for health-care reform. But she must be innovative with the resources available to her.

“They’re lacking in equipment for training both for education and health-care delivery,” said Senior Associate Dean Myra Hurt, who joined them at the dinner. “They have great needs. Kateryna said they have a lot of people in the practice of health care, but they don’t have the latest cutting-edge equipment and medicines.”

Telehina, 24, was accepted for an exchange program for post-Soviet countries through the Open World Leadership Center. She was among seven delegates pursuing health-care reform in Ukraine accepted for the U.S. trip, with stops in Washington, D.C., and Tallahassee. Their FSU activities were arranged by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), whose Friendship Force International volunteers hosted the delegates. Telehina has traveled to several European countries and the United Arab Emirates, but this was her first experience in the States.

“She was talking to us about her visit to the college the entire time,” said Barbon. “She kept saying, ‘You guys are so lucky.’ It made me really grateful for being able to go to school here.”

The students and Hurt observed Telehina’s repeated observations about technological disparities.

“We have the idea that people over there have universal health care,” said Hurt, “but the care is different from what we have. I think they have a lot of people that are trained in the finer arts – listening and the healing arts – but they don’t necessarily have all the technology that we have.”

While appreciative of technology, Loyless also saw the advantages of Telehina’s training.

“They’re more trained with their ears and their hands and their eyes,” said Loyless. “They’re very intuitive in that way. Kateryna said they don’t have the manikins to hear heart murmurs, so they have to figure it out on their own. It benefits her.”

They also noticed what Telehina did not talk about.

“Ukraine is a place that I read about every day in the newspaper that has this horrible sectarian violence going on, and the Russians are taking advantage of that,” said Hurt. “And here’s this young woman who works in a little town delivering health care near Kiev. That disconnect between knowing what was going on in her country, and this very normal person who cares a lot about her profession, struck me. I was kind of awed.”

Joedrecka Brown Speights is the principal investigator on a two-year project designed to enhance mentorship opportunities and diversity within the national Society of Teachers of Family Medicine.

The group’s executive committee awarded the “Quality Mentorship Through STFM” project $20,000 over two years.

As proposed by the STFM groups on minority and multicultural health and Latino faculty, the project has these long-term goals:

• Enhance mentorship opportunities of excellence for STFM members.
• Improve resiliency and retention of underrepresented-in-medicine-minority family medicine faculty members.
• And increase educational and leadership diversity for the STFM.

Brown is an associate professor in the College of Medicine’s Department of Family Medicine and Rural Health. She has three co-investigators on this project: Judy Washington, M.D., of New Jersey Institute of Technology, Student Health Services; Evelyn Figueroa, M.D., program director, Family Medicine Residency at University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine; and Edgar Figueroa, M.D., MPH, Student Health Services at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Additional investigators are Y. Monique Davis-Smith, M.D., program director, Navicent Health Family Medicine Residency, and Manuel Idrogo, M.D., Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine.
 

For the second time in two months, a paper from Associate Professor Daniel Kaplan’s lab is being published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The latest paper, “Dpb11 helps controls assembly of the Cdc45-Mcm2-7-GINS replication fork helicase,” was first published online Feb. 6. It is tentatively scheduled for print publication in April.

Kaplan, in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, said the paper was mostly the work of Nalini Dhingra, a Vanderbilt graduate student who is studying here at the College of Medicine. Kaplan was an assistant professor at Vanderbilt before he came to Florida State.

Among the co-authors of the paper is Irina Bruck, an assistant scholar scientist in Kaplan’s lab. Bruck was Kaplan’s co-author on another recent paper, “The Dbf4-Cdc7 Kinase Promotes Mcm2-7 Ring Opening to Allow for Single-stranded DNA Extrusion and Helicase Assembly.” It was first published online in Biological Chemistry on Dec. 3, then appeared in print Jan. 9.
 

Dennis Tsilimingras, former director of the Center on Patient Safety at the College of Medicine, recently published results of a study he undertook at Florida State with the help of a $900,000 grant from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Working with the Tallahassee Memorial Hospitalist Group, Tsilimingras monitored approximately 600 patients - about half of them from rural areas - for three weeks after they were discharged from the hospital. The goal was to evaluate how safe the health-care system is for patients transitioning from hospital to home, and to see if being from a rural area had any effect on those outcomes.

"Post-Discharge adverse events among urban and rural patients of an urban community hospital: a prospective cohort study," was published by the Journal of General Internal Medicine online.  College of Medicine faculty who served as co-authors include John Agens (Department of Geriatrics), Stephen Quintero (Family Medicine and Rural Health) and Gail Bellamy (director of the Center for Rural Health Research and Policy).

"This was the first comprehensive study of post-discharge adverse events that included rural patients," Tsilimingras said. "Surprisingly, there were no differences in the incidence of post-discharge adverse events between urban and rural patients, but adverse events in urban patients were associated with hypertension, Type 2 diabetes mellitus, and secondary discharge diagnoses."

Link to the published article [pdf}

The Escher Fund for Autism is funding Pradeep Bhide's project on "Transgenerational Effects of Nicotine Exposure." 

Bhide, Ph.D., is the College of Medicine's Rodgers Chair Professor of Developmental Neuroscience and director of the Center for Brain Repair. This is a one-year, $5,000 project.

On its website, www.germlineexposures.org/about-us.html, the Escher Fund explains that its primary work is to address this core message: "All humans start life as fragile and vulnerable mega-molecules called chromatin. Molecular disruption of chromatin through induced epigenetic or other means can lead to enduring impacts on development."

 Assistant Professor Jose Pinto is one of the authors of a paper published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The article is "Constitutive Phosphorylation of Cardiac Myosin Regulatory Light Chain in vivo."

Pinto is in the College of Medicine's Department of Biomedical Sciences. The paper's corresponding author is James Stull of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. The other co-authors are from either UTSW or the University of California San Francisco. 

An article by Systems Librarian Susan Epstein and Public Services Librarian Robyn Rosasco has been published in the latest edition of The Reference Librarian. The title of the article in the peer-reviewed journal is "Connecting Faculty Researchers to Librarians via Departmental Associates." 

Epstein and Rosasco both work in the College of Medicine's Charlotte Edwards Maguire Medical Library.

Ed Forster, M.D., a faculty member at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital's Family Medicine Residency Program, has been named the program's Compassionate Physician of the Year. Forster is also on the clerkship faculty for the College of Medicine's Tallahassee Regional Campus.

In a column in the April 2015 edition of Today’s Geriatric Medicine, Rosemary Laird writes about the importance of exercise for older adults, and the benefits of specific types of activities.

The bottom line in her column, titled “Move It or Lose It”: Walking is as important as all of the other exercises combined.

Laird, a member of the College of Medicine’s Orlando Regional Campus clerkship faculty, writes that there’s never been so much evidence of the benefits of regular physical activity for older adults. She offers many examples, such as the following:

• It reduces the risk of developing chronic diseases such as heart disease.
• It improves chronic illness such as high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and high cholesterol.
• It improves the ability to function and stay independent in the face of caregiving challenges.
• It improves nighttime sleep patterns.

“Research has clearly shown,” she writes, “that you can improve your level of physical fitness well into your 90s. Regular exercise is one of the most important ways to reduce fall risk because it builds strength and helps you feel better, both physically and mentally. Thirty minutes per day on at least five days per week of moderate exercise (moderate means you can have a conversation while doing the exercise) is ideal.”

The six exercises she calls best bets for older adults are walking, swimming, tai chi/yoga, weights, chair exercises and treadmills or other equipment. She calculated their impact on endurance, strength, balance and flexibility. Walking and swimming, she says, benefit all four of those areas.

Laird is a geriatrician, medical director of the Health First Aging Institute in Merritt Island, and past president of the Florida Geriatrics Society. She is a co-author of “Take Your Oxygen First: Protecting Your Health and Happiness While Caring for a Loved One With Memory Loss.”