The University of Kansas Health System is treating a total of 17 COVID patients today, 18 Monday. Other significant numbers:
• 8 with the active virus today, 8 Monday
• 1 in ICU, 1 Monday
• 1 on a ventilator, 1 Monday
Key points from today’s guests:
Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer, The University of Kansas Health System
- HIPEC is Hyperthermal (hot), Intra (inside), Peritoneal (abdomen lining), Chemotherapy and it is undergoing new research to treat cancer patients.
- Basically, it involves a doctor gently pushing on a patient’s abdomen repeatedly to help deliver the chemotherapy in a more effective way.
- One of the things about science is you must break it down and answer questions before you can go forward. You must be very patient. Sometimes it takes years, people get frustrated, but at the end of the day you have good answers.
- What we're trying to do is discover the truth and make sure we've asked the right questions. We've designed studies the right way, so we can agree on what those outcomes are and deliver the real data. This is what we believe in.
Dr. Mazin Al-Kasspooles, surgical oncologist, The University of Kansas Cancer Center; director, Regional Cancer Therapies Program
- HIPEC addresses a certain kind of metastasis or spread. When you think about an organ within the abdomen that has cancer in it, usually the cancer cells get in the bloodstream. They travel in the bloodstream, and then they go inside an organ like the liver, for instance, and it gets into the meat of the liver and forms all tumors.
- There is another type of spread where the actual tumor has penetrated through the wall of the organ, and it just sheds cells, or seeds, and those seeds are floating around the abdomen. And then these seeds land on the surfaces of the inside of the abdominal wall or on the organs in the cavity and then they form little tumors, which then can become big tumors and can become big problems.
- Once the tumor is out, we give the chemotherapy. We place inflow and outflow tubes with temperature probes and those tubes are attached to a reservoir with a roller pump and heat exchanger. So, the patient receives a continuous perfusion of heated chemotherapy and the purpose of it is to destroy any microscopic cells that you can't see or feel.
- We then agitate the abdomen and the purpose of that is to allow everything to flow better so you have better distribution of the chemotherapy.
- Education is everything. We need to educate more patients and referring doctors that this is a viable treatment here.
Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director, infection prevention & control, The University of Kansas Health System
- We know long COVID can affect even those people that didn't really have significant illness or severe enough illness to go to the hospital.
- But it can still affect their daily lives with things such as brain fog, cough, shortness of breath, and fatigue for months and even a year or two.
- These are some of the things that we are looking at in the science community as we try to determine why is someone at risk but also how we can prevent it.
- We know that vaccines do help prevent or reduce your risk of long COVID.
Friday, June 9 at 8 a.m. is the next Morning Medical Update. A bride needed heart valve surgery and had to put her wedding plans on hold – but not for long thanks to a new procedure that helped her avoid open heart surgery and had her out of the hospital in one day.
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