The University of Kansas Health System is treating a total of 55 COVID patients today, same as Tuesday. Other significant numbers:
- 28 with the active virus today, 33 Tuesday
- 6 in ICU, 5 Tuesday
- 2 on a ventilator, 2 Tuesday
Key points from today’s guests:
Morning Rounds – Updates on Recent News
Bob Page, president and CEO, The University of Kansas Health System, on the role team doctors and medical staff played in the Super Bowl run:
- With the quality of the medical staff and resources we have, we give the Chiefs a competitive advantage.
- If a player gets hurt, they go right to our clinic right there on site.
- The players get what they need and it’s really a wonderful relationship.
Dr. Michael Abraham, director of stroke research, KU Medical Center, on a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on stroke research:
- A substantial proportion of stroke patients were not able to be treated correctly, resulting in higher mortality rates or admissions to nursing homes.
- This trial focused on those patients with “large vessel occlusion strokes” – and 20 percent of trial patients had a good outcome versus only 7 percent in the standard of care group.
- The ability to ambulate independently happened for 38 percent of trial patients versus only 18 percent in the standard of care group.
Focus Topic
Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer, The University of Kansas Health System
- Heart failure affects six million Americans and kills about 700,000 each year.
- Heart failure means your blood is not pumping enough blood and it may cause your organs to not work well, leading to serious problems.
Brian Pitts, study participant
- Brian discovered he had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in 2007 when he collapsed in full cardiac arrest at a wedding and the bride did CPR on him for seven minutes until EMTs arrived and shocked him back to life.
- He just had a heart transplant last April.
- As part of his overall treatment, he entered a clinical trial for a bloodless blood test.
- It gave him a sense of wellbeing knowing that he is constantly being monitored or watched with the recording of data. It gave him confidence during a time of real instability where he was pretty scared.
Eva Adams, clinical research nurse coordinator, KU Medical Center
- The goal of the trial is to collect date from the patients through a watch – heart rate, weight, sleep patterns, activity, and other factors that typically require a blood draw.
- Heart failure fluctuates with how much fluid you drink, what you're eating, so it can change from day to day. It is just difficult to manage it now. You can manage it with medications. There are also some devices called like CardioMEMS, for example, implanted in your pulmonary artery. The good thing about this study is that it is non-invasive.
- We're very grateful for patients like Brian who are willing to participate in research
COVID Updates
Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director of infection prevention and control, The University of Kansas Health System
- What we're seeing now with COVID-19 is this continued baseline of people coming into the hospital.
- We are testing only those people that are symptomatic for disease. We are not testing everybody who's coming into the hospital.
- So our COVID patients are here because of COVID or maybe COVID has pushed their chronic comorbid conditions a little bit over the edge -- whether it's heart disease, lung disease, kidney disease, if they are immunosuppressed, and things of that nature.
- So unfortunately, I think we are at a new baseline of having regular COVID patients, but we are still going to continue to endorse vaccination because we know that helps reduce risk of hospitalization and death.
Thursday, February 16 is the next Morning Medical Update. For a local drummer, it felt like heartburn, but it was serious heart trouble instead. He's back behind his drums after a complicated surgery. We’ll show you how doctors pulled off a rare quintuple bypass.
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