Fay Horak, Ph.D., is quoted in a Brain & Life story highlighting the importance of exercise in helping older adults with neurologic challenges including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. She says balance is complex: “If you’re walking on a soft sand beach, for example, it’s harder to use proprioception to know where the center mass of your body is, because the surface is unpredictable. You have to rely more on vision and vestibular function to stay upright and walking.”

OHSU starts first family practice residency program in Jefferson County, boosting medical care in rural central Oregon.

In an Oregon biotech company gearing up to deliver the first U.S. hMPXV treatment, and Mark Slifka, Ph.D., says the disease remains rare and isn’t easily transmissible, though it “has the potential to become more common and difficult to treat."

An OregonLive article notes the declining number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are in line with the recent OHSU forecast, which predicted a continuing decline that would bottom out in September.

Linda Peng, M.D., is quoted in a story by Fatherly revealing that studies don’t support the idea that hangovers get worse as people get older despite people’s feeling that they do. She says, “Older adults tend to absorb alcohol a little bit more quickly.”

A new national study, co-led by Sancy Leachman, M.D., Ph.D., finds the COVID-19 shutdowns caused delays in melanoma diagnoses. Leachman says: “As someone who is dedicated to treating and preventing melanoma, the results of the study were sobering. It appears that some patients with melanoma couldn’t be seen as readily due to COVID-related restrictions, leading to worse, and potentially more life-threatening, cases of melanoma."

Former OHSU School of Dentistry student Alayna Schoblaske, D.M.D., discusses her passion for public health dentistry and recalls when she and other students started a free clinic and volunteered with the Health Equity Circle, an organization that seeks to address inequities in health care.

The OHSU Knight Cancer Institute’s participation in the Pathfinder study — designed to study a novel blood test that can detect up to 50 different cancers from a single blood draw.

OHSU scientists have received $4 million in philanthropic support to advance a first-of-its-kind method to turn an individual’s skin cell into an egg, with the potential to produce viable embryos. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, Ph.D., says, “It will take probably a decade before we can say we’re ready. The science behind it is complex, but we think we’re on the right path."

David Spencer, M.D., is interviewed in a story by United Press International highlighting the risk of overdose deaths associated with gabapentin, an anti-convulsive medication also approved for treatment of pain associated with shingles. He says gabapentin is generally perceived as relatively benign, however, “Emerging information about the association with opioid-related deaths runs counter to this perception, and it may not be intuitive to many clinicians to consider that there may be important safety issues with its use.”