UCI Alzheimer’s Study Raises Questions About Estrogen Treatment
Thirteen Orange County hospitals have received a total of $2.2 million from Proposition 10 funds to pay for a full-time healthcare professional in each hospital to support families following the birth of a child.
The grants were the first of $48 million in Prop. 10 funds that will be distributed in OC this year, under a funding plan recently approved by the OC Children and Families Commission, which oversees the funds locally.
Proposition 10 was approved by voters in November 1998. It added a 50 cents a pack to the state cigarette tax, with the funds to be used for education support and healthcare and child-care programs that promote healthy early childhood development from prenatal to age 5. The initiative created citizens’ commissions in each county to decide how to spend the money.
Other programs approved by the OC commission for funding this year include expanded health services at family-resource centers, child-care assistance for high-risk families, and perinatal residential substance-abuse treatment services.
The effect these funds will have is “simply enormous” and will “improve the well-being of the community,” said Kimberly Cripe, President and CEO of Children’s Hospital of Orange County, at a contract-signing ceremony held at the hospital less than three weeks before the March 7 vote on Prop. 28, which would repeal the Prop. 10 tax hike.
How will the money be used by the hospitals? Officials at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange said they already have a mother/baby assessment center, but the funds will allow them to expand the program by hiring a full-time case-management professional to be in charge of the program. The assessment center provides consultation for parents on everything from immunization to breast feeding to circumcision.
Besides CHOC and St. Joseph, the hospitals receiving the initial funding are: Coastal Community Hospital, Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center, Garden Grove Hospital and Medical Center, Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, Irvine Medical Center, Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center, Saddleback Memorial Medical Center, Santa Ana Hospital Medical Center, St. Jude Medical Center, UCI Medical Center and Western Medical Center.
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A study recently released by UC Irvine College of Medicine counters previous research that suggested possible benefits from giving estrogen to women who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.
The study published in the Feb. 23 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that estrogen has no effect on the course of the disease in older women.
“Several studies have suggested that estrogen helped improve the cognitive impairment that is seen in Alzheimer’s disease,” said Ruth Mulnard, associate director of UCI’s Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia and leader of the study’s research team.
“But we were surprised that over the long run patients did not benefit from estrogen,a finding that strongly suggests that estrogen treatments should not be used to treat Alzheimer’s. However, our study does not rule out the possibility that estrogen can help prevent the disease or treat it successfully in its very early stages,” she said.
The 120 nationwide participants were given either a placebo or estrogen. After a year, the women taking estrogen showed no significant differences in the course of their disease. Researchers noted a slight improvement in cognitive abilities of estrogen-taking women after two months, but the improvement disappeared over the full year.
Mulnard and her colleagues are continuing Alzheimer’s research by conducting similar studies on men, using testosterone.
More news from UCI: The College of Medicine has received an $8.1 million gift from members of the Chao family to expand research on genetics and cancer. The gift will expand current studies on the role of genes in melanoma and cancers of the pancreas and colon.
Also, researchers will study cancers that are more likely to affect Asian Americans, as well as establish a community education program to help detect those cancers early. UCI is expected to create a new program to look at the genetics of stomach, liver and nose and throat cancers, which are more common among Asian Americans.
Part of the gift will be used to complete construction of the Robert R. Sprague Family Foundation Hall (a.k.a. Sprague Hall) part of the UCI Biomedical Research Center.
Because of his personal experience with stomach cancer, Allen Chao, CEO of Watson Pharmaceuticals in Corona, and his family decided to make the gift to UCI. The Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the UCI Medical Center is the only cancer center in Orange County to receive the National Cancer Institute’s highest designation as a comprehensive cancer center.
Bits and pieces:
Imagyn Medical Technologies Inc., Irvine, has announced its SiteSelect breast biopsy device has been approved by the FDA for expanded indications. It previously was approved only for removal of a piece of the abnormal tissue to be tested, but now the SiteSelect can be used for partial or complete removal of the lesions for examination Physiciansite.com, Newport Beach, a physician portal site, has entered an agreement with emedquote.com to make emedquote’s insurance products, such as professional liability insurance and workers’ compensation, available through the Physiciansite.com web site Health Care Property Investors Inc., a Newport Beach real estate investment trust, has launched a company website: www.hcpi.com. HCPI invests in healthcare facilities throughout the U.S.
