UAB Magazine Online Features
The Connected Hospital
High-Tech Devices Enhance Patient Care
By Tara Hulen
Some of the most important medical treatment advances in recent years have been quiet ones—high-tech devices that transmit crucial information from patient bedsides, recording a wealth of data to improve care. Nurses spend less time entering data and more time with patients. The potential for errors is lower. Care-team members can see new records right away instead of tracking down paper charts. And patients enjoy peace of mind knowing that everyone treating them is on the same page—or accessing the same computer file.
Electronic medical records (EMRs) are becoming commonplace in physicians’ offices and hospitals around the country, in part because new federal rules require their adoption. UAB adopted electronic records technology early, beginning in 2008; since then, the medical center has rolled out sophisticated systems that can quickly enter patients’ vital signs directly into their EMRs, monitor drug delivery, and instantly notify health-care teams of important changes in patients’ conditions, among other tasks.
“The goal is to create a complete and fully integrated EMR with immediate electronic synching of all patient data, available to everyone on the health-care teams at the same time,” says Joan Hicks, UAB Health System chief information officer. The benefits from systems already in place, Hicks says, are a return on investment that is “more than compelling.”
Take a closer look at a few of the new technologies connecting patients, caregivers, and treatments:
Undead Discovery
Zombies Inspire Student’s Disease Research
By Charles Buchanan
UAB graduate student Virginia Chu is using her braaiiiins, demonstrating how a game of "Humans vs. Zombies" can reveal the spread of infectious disease through a population. Virginia Chu admits that she was a bad zombie.
During her undergraduate years at Georgia Tech, the Atlanta native participated in the campuswide “Humans vs. Zombies” game. Players begin as humans, except for one student zombie with a mission to “infect” the others by touching them. Once tagged, the new zombies seek their own prey, setting in motion a weeklong race to survive the apocalypse.
Players wear bandanas identifying them as human or zombie, so “it’s hard to be sneaky and infect somebody”—always her downfall, recalls Chu, now an epidemiology student in the UAB School of Public Health. But her attempts to hunt human victims helped her to discover the science within the game—and translate it into a tool for modeling the spread of infectious diseases.
Back-of-the-Envelope Idea
“The textbook case for disease modeling is cruise ships—figuring out how fast a disease can spread depending on the size of the ship, and whether quarantine or treatment is the best solution,” explains Chu, who has had a longstanding interest in infectious diseases. The zombie game, however, provides a living, breathing case study that researchers can follow as it progresses in a real-world setting.
Lines of Communication
How Human Interaction Impacts Evolution
By Tara Hulen
Eduardo NeivaLiterature tells us that no man—or woman—is an island. Over millennia, humans have formed an interconnected web that spans the planet.
In fact, that interaction may play a key role in human survival. Eduardo Neiva, Ph.D., professor in the UAB Department of Communication Studies, and James Lull, Ph.D., emeritus professor at San Jose State University, have written The Language of Life: How Communication Drives Human Evolution (2012: Prometheus Books), which revolves around “the idea that communication is central to all biological development,” Neiva explains. In other words, survival goes to the most communicative as well as to the fittest. And since communication involves cooperation, the one who offers the helping hand usually has the advantage over the backstabber.
UAB Magazine: As a humanities professor, what brought you to write about what is usually a topic for biologists?
Neiva: The humanities have operated with the strict notion that what matters are differences: of cultures, of the sexes, in everything. The idea in this book is that everything is unified. Life is actually a great chain of interaction; all living forms interact with one another, and that creates change.
UAB Magazine: People usually think of that interaction in evolution in a negative way—survival of the fittest—but you don’t seem to see it like that.
Neiva: One reason we wrote the book is that we were very frustrated with some general notions that were attached to evolution—one of them is it’s all about survival of the fittest. Evolutionary theory has always favored that phrase, which has, in the popular mind, been considered the dominant factor. But that notion forgets many other things that are absolutely key to evolution, such as cooperation.
The idea is not a new one. Prince [Pyotr Alexeyevich] Kropotkin wrote a brilliant book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, in 1902 about how mutual aid drives evolution. Oral traditions, passing on skills, the existence of societies—all of these advance evolution and require mutual aid.
Communication and social life are not just human traits, either, despite what people often think of as the rule. Social life is everywhere. Bees, for instance, are a marvel of elaborate social division.
Mr. Excitement
What Glutamate Can Teach Us About Depression, Schizophrenia, Cancer, and More
By Kathleen Yount
Glutamate is the incredible, edible neurotransmitter. This amino acid is found in chips, yogurt, and ice cream, as well as the much-maligned MSG. It is also the key ingredient that helps neurons communicate, learn, make memories, and perform other essential functions.
For years, scientists have kept an eye on glutamate, suspecting that it plays a role in several debilitating diseases. But only recently have they discovered how to do anything about it. UAB researchers are leading the way in studies that could bring new treatments and new hope for people suffering from depression, schizophrenia, and even brain cancer.
All Hail the King
Glutamate and GABA are the king and queen of neurotransmitters. Glutamate stimulates neurons and GABA inhibits them in a delicate balancing act. Diseases such as depression, schizophrenia, and brain cancer are all associated with glutamate imbalances. Glutamate is the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter, which means its job is to stimulate neurons. It works in tandem with GABA, the main inhibitory neurotransmitter, to maintain balance in the brain.
Glutamate and GABA are the king and queen of neurotransmitters. All others—including the more-famous serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine—have important functions of their own, but ultimately they serve to modulate the glutamate and GABA systems.
The brain’s glutamate balancing act revolves around a highly evolved system of molecules called receptors to which glutamate binds to produce actions in the brain’s cells. Another family of molecules called transporters mops up unused glutamate after it has been released. Much of the current research on glutamate dysfunction centers on these processes of give, take, and transport, to see if understanding the exchange can shed light on what happens when the glutamate system goes wrong, and how we might make it right again.
