LAKEPORT, Calif. – The Sutter Lakeside Hospital Foundation announced that donors met the Sutter Health matching grant challenge and raised over $50,000 in 2012 to purchase medical equipment for the Women’s Imaging Department.
“I am constantly amazed at the level of giving in our community,” said Foundation Chair Dr. Mark Buehnerkemper. “This new medical technology will allow patients to remain close-to-home, instead of having to travel outside of our community for breast cancer and bone loss testing. This is a tremendous benefit for all women in our community.”
Sutter Health’s matching grant program allows each affiliate to choose a program or a piece of technology to fund through philanthropy.
If the hospital can raise funds through charity for half the cost of the program or medical equipment within a year, Sutter Health will match these donations dollar-for-dollar.
In 2012, Lake County donors decided to fund a Mammatome Breast Biopsy System and a GE Lunar Prodigy DexaScanner for the Women’s Imaging Department at Sutter Lakeside Hospital.
The Mammatome allows clinicians to conduct breast biopsies as an outpatient procedure under either X-ray, MRI or ultrasound technology, increasing test result accuracy.
The DexaScanner assesses bone loss caused by osteoporosis, chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
Both pieces of equipment are slated to arrive by mid-summer and should be available for patients by early fall.
“We pride ourselves on providing the absolute best patient care possible and having state-of-the-art technology is an important piece of the puzzle,” said Imaging Director Jose Aponte. “The fact that donors made this all possible makes this even more of a blessing.”
“Sutter Health’s matching grant program has given our donors a powerful partner over the past several years,” said Sutter Lakeside Development Officer Rebecca Southwick. “Through their matching grant program, our donors have been able to purchase the Mobile Health Services Unit, the stroke telemedicine equipment in our emergency department, and we’ve been able to underwrite the creation of the mobility park. Donors continue to allow us to do great things for our community.”
Siri Nelson, Sutter Lakeside chief administrative officer, agreesd. “We’ve received terrific support from our donors over the past several years and the Women’s Imaging Campaign is one more sign that charitable giving is strong in Lake County. Our 2013 matching grant focus is the Heart Health Campaign. Our county has a high incidence of heart disease and we’d like to purchase a new echocardiogram for the hospital. Our goal is $85,000 in cash and pledges by this December.”
To learn more about the 2013 Heart Health Matching Grant Campaign, contact Rebecca Southwick at 707-262-5121 or by sending an email to
Clumps of proteins that accumulate in brain cells are a hallmark of neurological diseases such as dementia, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
Over the past several years, there has been much controversy over the structure of one of those proteins, known as alpha synuclein.
MIT computational scientists have now modeled the structure of that protein, most commonly associated with Parkinson’s, and found that it can take on either of two proposed states – floppy or rigid.
The findings suggest that forcing the protein to switch to the rigid structure, which does not aggregate, could offer a new way to treat Parkinson’s, said Collin Stultz, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.
“If alpha synuclein can really adopt this ordered structure that does not aggregate, you could imagine a drug-design strategy that stabilizes these ordered structures to prevent them from aggregating,” said Stultz, who is the senior author of a paper describing the findings in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
For decades, scientists have believed that alpha synuclein, which forms clumps known as Lewy bodies in brain cells and other neurons, is inherently disordered and floppy. However, in 2011 Harvard University neurologist Dennis Selkoe and colleagues reported that after carefully extracting alpha synuclein from cells, they found it to have a very well-defined, folded structure.
That surprising finding set off a scientific controversy. Some tried and failed to replicate the finding, but scientists at Brandeis University, led by Thomas Pochapsky and Gregory Petsko, also found folded (or ordered) structures in the alpha synuclein protein.
Stultz and his group decided to jump into the fray, working with Pochapsky’s lab, and developed a computer-modeling approach to predict what kind of structures the protein might take.
Working with the structural data obtained by the Brandeis researchers, Stultz created a model that calculates the probabilities of many different possible structures, to determine what set of structures would best explain the experimental data.
The calculations suggest that the protein can rapidly switch among many different conformations. At any given time, about 70 percent of individual proteins will be in one of the many possible disordered states, which exist as single molecules of the alpha synuclein protein.
When three or four of the proteins join together, they can assume a mix of possible rigid structures, including helices and beta strands (protein chains that can link together to form sheets).
“On the one hand, the people who say it’s disordered are right, because a majority of the protein is disordered,” Stultz said. “And the people who would say that it’s ordered are not wrong; it’s just a very small fraction of the protein that is ordered.”
The MIT researchers also found that when alpha synuclein adopts an ordered structure, similar to that described by Selkoe and co-workers, the portions of the protein that tend to aggregate with other molecules are buried deep within the structure, explaining why those ordered forms do not clump together.
Stultz is now working to figure out what controls the protein’s configuration. There is some evidence that other molecules in the cell can modify alpha synuclein, forcing it to assume one conformation or another.
“If this structure really does exist, we have a new way now of potentially designing drugs that will prevent aggregation of alpha synuclein,” he said.
The costs of caring for people with dementia in the United States in 2010 were between $159 billion to $215 billion, and those costs could rise dramatically with the increase in the numbers of older people in coming decades, according to estimates by researchers at RAND Corp. and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
The researchers found these costs of care comparable to, if not greater than, those for heart disease and cancer.
The study, supported by the National Institutes of Health and published April 4 in The New England Journal of Medicine, totaled direct medical expenditures and costs attributable to the vast network of informal, unpaid care that supports people with dementia.
Depending on how informal care is calculated, national expenditures in 2010 for dementia among people aged 71 and older were found to be $159 billion to $215 billion.
Dementia is a loss of brain function that affects memory, thinking, language, judgment, and behavior; the most common form is Alzheimer’s.
The researchers first looked at care purchased in the health care market – formal costs for nursing homes, Medicare, and out-of-pocket expenses. The direct costs of dementia care purchased in the market were estimated to be $109 billion in 2010, exceeding direct health costs for heart disease ($102 billion) and cancer ($77 billion) that same year.
Adding informal, unpaid care to the equation as much as doubled the estimated total national costs for dementia care.
The study estimated full costs per case of dementia in 2010 at $41,000 to $56,000. The lower number accounts for foregone wages among caregivers, while the higher figure valued hours of informal care as the equivalent of formal paid care.
The range of national expenditures was tallied based on an estimated prevalence of dementia of 14.7 percent in the U.S. population older than 70.
The researchers also project skyrocketing costs as the baby boom grows older; the Bureau of the Census estimates that the population age 65 and older will double to about 72 million over the next 20 years.
Rates of dementia increase with age, and unless new ways are found to treat and effectively prevent it, national health expenditures for dementia could come close to doubling by 2040, as the aging population increases and assuming the rate of dementia remains the same.
“These findings reveal that the enormous emotional and physical demands of caring for people with dementia are accompanied by the similarly imposing financial burdens of dementia care,” said Richard J. Hodes, M.D., director of the NIH’s National Institute on Aging (NIA), which funded the analysis. “The national costs further compel us to do all we can to find effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias as soon as possible.”
The complex analysis is one of the most comprehensive yet to determine health care costs for dementia. It is based on a nationally representative sample from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a survey of people 51 years and older that is funded by the NIA with contributions from the Social Security Administration.
Interest in national health expenditures for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias has intensified with the January 2011 signing of the National Alzheimer’s Project Act (NAPA) External Web Site Policy,which calls for stepped up efforts to find new treatments and to improve care and services.
Under NAPA, the Administration is leading development and implementation of a National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease, under which new research studies, the new web portal www.alzheimers.gov External Web Site Policy, and new clinical training initiatives have moved forward.
“We are just entering the second year of our national plan to fight Alzheimer’s disease,” said NIH Director Francis Collins, M.D. “It is a dedicated battle on many fronts, including capitalizing on research opportunities now before us. The new BRAIN initiative announced by the President just this week, for example, will use a new generation of tools to help us learn the secrets to many neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease.”
Identifying costs of dementia has been challenging. People with Alzheimer’s and other dementias are typically older and often have multiple medical conditions, such as stroke and depression, diseases commonly co-occurring with dementia. It is also difficult to capture the national costs of family-provided or other informal care.
To overcome such barriers, the researchers focused on dementia rates and costs among volunteers aged 71 and older participating in a sub-study of the HRS, the Aging, Demographics, and Memory Study (ADAMS). For this analysis:
“Dementia costs currently rival those of cancer and heart disease. But, within 30 years, dementia may be in a league of its own,” said Richard M. Suzman, Ph. D., director of NIA’s Division of Social and Behavioral Research. “Unless effective interventions are found to treat Alzheimer’s, formal long-term dementia care costs will escalate for the baby boom generation, as they have fewer children available to provide unpaid, informal care.”
The NIA leads the federal government effort in conducting and supporting research on aging and the health and well-being of older people. It provides information on age-related cognitive change and neurodegenerative disease specifically at its Alzheimer’s Disease Education and Referral (ADEAR) Center at http://www.nia.nih.gov/Alzheimers . For expanded information on Alzheimer’s care and resources, please visit the federal government’s portal Web site http://www.Alzheimers.gov .
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA – Continuing its tradition of leadership in cardiovascular care, Adventist Heart Institute at St. Helena Hospital, cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Andreas Sakopoulos and cardiologist Dr. Stewart Allen performed the first procedure in the North Bay using the recently FDA cleared Ocelot system by Avinger.
The procedure helps patients facing Peripheral Arterial Disease (PAD), an unrecognized epidemic that affects between eight and 12 million adults in the U.S. and 30 million people globally. PAD is caused by a buildup of plaque in the arteries that blocks blood flow to legs and feet.
The Ocelot catheter, supported by the Lightbox console, allows physicians to see from inside an artery during the actual procedure, using optical coherence tomography, or OCT.
In the past, operators have had to rely solely on x-ray as well as touch and/or feel to guide catheters through complicated blockages. With Ocelot, physicians can more accurately navigate through blocked arteries thanks to the images from inside the artery.
Each year, more than 200,000 amputations occur due to PAD and this technology has the potential to offer patients an alternative treatment.
Because some blockages can become so severe and difficult to penetrate with traditional catheters, patients (unaware of advanced treatment options like Ocelot) often undergo invasive bypass surgeries that result in even higher health risks and lengthy, painful recoveries.
“The patient we treated presented at our sister hospital, Ukiah Valley Medical Center, this past autumn having sustained a stroke,” said Dr. Sakopoulos. “He recovered completely and subsequently complained of severe pain in his calves when walking. Simple ultrasound studies revealed complete blockages of the arteries that ran down his legs. He came to our center for this treatment, he was our first patient, and had a superlative result. We were able to cross this complete blockage and restore blood supply to his limbs.”
Ocelot is the first-ever chronic total occlusion (CTO) crossing catheter that uses optical coherence tomography (OCT) technology to access exact regions of the peripheral vasculature where the blockages occur, while simultaneously providing St. Helena Hospital physicians with visualization for real-time navigation during an intervention.
“This new technology gives us better visualization to get across completely blocked arteries. It is the most advanced tool available today for the treatment of some of the most severe forms of PAD,” said Dr. Allen.
It is a minimally invasive treatment designed to allow patients to leave the hospital within hours, and return to normal activities within a few days.
Dr. Sakopoulos encourages those that are experiencing any of the above symptoms to ask their doctor about their risks for PAD, as early detection is the key to saving limbs.