UAB Magazine Online Features
Family Practice
UAB Psychiatrist Reaches Out to Mothers, Children in Africa
By Matt Windsor
UAB psychiatrist Tolu Aduroja maintains a close connection to his native Nigeria. Since 2011, he has returned to his hometown of Ibadan each fall to provide free health care through an organization he founded called Maternal Cords.As a boy, Tolu Aduroja, M.D., M.P.H., longed for the days when he got to go to work with his mother, an obstetric nurse at the hospital in Ibadan, Nigeria. "I saw patients give birth and the joy on their faces, and I just loved it," says Aduroja, an associate professor in the UAB Department of Psychiatry who specializes in child and adolescent psychiatry at UAB and Children's Hospital of Alabama. "I wanted to do that."
Aduroja graduated from medical school at the University of Ibadan and began work as a general practitioner, but love brought him to the United States in 1997. His wife, a pharmacist who was born in the U.S. and moved to Nigeria as a high schooler, had a great job offer in Atlanta. Aduroja took the opportunity to expand his horizons. "When I came to the U.S., my mind was made up that I wanted to work with people," he says.
He began a medical residency in psychiatry in Atlanta while starting a master's degree in public health at UAB. "The courses were offered on the weekend, so I would shuttle back and forth between Atlanta and Birmingham," Aduroja says. He eventually moved to Birmingham to complete a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at UAB, joining the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry in 2005, the same year he received his master's degree in public health.
Home Again
Joy drew Aduroja to the medical profession, but pain brings him back to Nigeria. "You have to have money to get health care in Nigeria," he says. "People know something is wrong, but they don't do anything about it until it is too late."
Health Begins Here
A Strong Start for At-Risk Moms and Babies
By Christina Crowe and Matt Windsor
UAB is participating in the Strong Start for Mothers and Newborns initiative to find the best ways to eliminate long-term health problems for at-risk women and their children.From the moment they are born, most babies in the United States have their health care looked after in some fashion. The health of the mothers who carry them for nine months, however, is often overlooked—especially by the mothers themselves, says Mario Drummonds, executive director and CEO of the Northern Manhattan Perinatal Partnership (NMPP).
Drummonds recently visited UAB to deliver the 2013 Ann Dial McMillan Endowed Lecture in Family and Child Health in the UAB School of Public Health. He shared lessons from his group's successful efforts to improve the health of mothers and infants in central Harlem. (Learn more about the NMPP's success and Drummond's call to action at UAB in this related article.) "Mom's health," Drummonds says, is "always secondary. Part of our job is to make her health, as well as the overall health of the household, primary."
Maternal and child health is a major challenge in Alabama. "High rates of premature birth, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and substance abuse plague our state," says Joseph Biggio, M.D., professor of medicine and director of the UAB Division of Maternal and Fetal Medicine But thanks to a major grant from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, UAB can now offer intensive help to mothers and babies with the greatest needs.
Enhancing Care
The goal of the Strong Start for Mothers and Newborns initiative is to identify the best ways to prevent significant, long-term health problems for high-risk pregnant women and newborns enrolled in Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program. In addition to UAB, 26 organizations across the United States are taking part in the Strong Start initiative.
Alabama's Medicaid Maternity Care Program currently does not provide non-medical social services to promote healthy living and reduce poor pregnancy outcomes. UAB's four-year, $730,000 Strong Start grant will address that gap by enhancing services offered at UAB clinics in and around Jefferson County. It includes enhanced screening for substance abuse, including illicit drugs as well as tobacco; social support for women with domestic issues such as income or domestic violence; screening for depression; and nutrition and dietary counseling.
Phase Shift
New Research Unit Expands Access to Cutting-Edge Treatments at UAB
By Matt Windsor
Lynn Holt (above, with his wife, Suzy) is receiving a new treatment for brain cancer as part of a phase 1 clinical trial at UAB. Phase 1 trials are the first studies of new treatments conducted in humans. UAB's new Phase 1 Clinical Trials Unit, which opened in February 2013, will allow more patients to take part in these potentially lifesaving trials, and increase the number of phase 1 trials available at UAB.In one six-month stretch last year, Lynn and Suzy Holt got enough bad news to last a lifetime. Suzy found out she had breast cancer in June 2012, just after Lynn had left a longtime job as a food distributor to start his own business. Then, as Suzy was in the middle of treatment in early October, Lynn was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive form of brain tumor. "I was a stage 4," he says, which means the tumor was spreading quickly. "My doctor said, 'You need to go to UAB. This needs to be handled by the experts.'"
Lynn, who describes himself as a "real online kind of guy," had done his research and knew what he was up against. Glioblastoma multiforme is the deadliest type of brain cancer, with an average survival rate of less than 15 months from diagnosis. "I wanted every hope I could get," he says.
A Movement in Music
"A More Convenient Season" Shares Birmingham's Story
By Matt Windsor
Yotam Haber's "A More Convenient Season" will have its world premiere on September 21, 2013, at the Alys Stephens Center.On September 21, Birmingham's past will engage its present in a unique conversation. For 75 minutes, the words of civil rights legends and footsoldiers, FBI agents and Klansmen, will echo through UAB's Alys Stephens Center (ASC) in the world premiere of composer Yotam Haber's "A More Convenient Season."
The three-movement musical work, commissioned by philanthropist Tom Blount and produced by the ASC, caps Birmingham's commemoration of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in September 1963.
Speeches, oral history transcripts, and FBI interviews supply the text of a multi-faceted work that combines the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, a chorus from dozens of local choirs, electronic music, and a documentary film. (The work's title comes from a line in Martin Luther King's famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail.") The ambitious project might best be described as an opera, says Haber. "There are no sets or costumes, but in every other respect, this is an opera."
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Book Now "A More Convenient Season," Saturday, September 21 - 8 p.m. Jemison Concert Hall, Alys Stephens Center Book online or call (205) 975-2787. Tickets: $10 with promo code "positivepeace" |
"A More Convenient Season" is the first world premiere in the ASC's 17-year history—a dramatic gesture that is "UAB's gift to Birmingham," says Theresa Bruno, chair of the ASC's corporate board. For Haber, a project that began as a 15-minute string quartet has been his constant companion for two years, evolving into what he says is "the most meaningful work I have ever made."
