Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): For family caregivers, the lack of knowledge and understanding of how to handle the disabilities that seniors are now experiencing results in inadequate care. Due to the fragmentation of the current health care system and lack of funding, no one single entity is responsible for providing or coordinating training and support for family caregivers. Family caregi ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Lung cancer kills over 1.3 million per year worldwide. Conventional oral and i.v. chemotherapies used today have toxic effects in many organs besides the lungs. Consequently, doses are limited when treating lung cancer to an extent that it is often not effective. Drug resistance also reduces the impact of chemotherapy on the lungs. Animal studies demonstrate th ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We will develop a modern, computer-controlled electrical stimulator for performing functional mapping by cortical stimulation. The primary application is for use with patients who are candidates for surgery to control or eliminate occurrence of epileptic seizures. Other applications will include functional mapping to plan surgery for other brain diseases such a ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) has been identified as a key mediator of tumor angiogenesis and has emerged as the single most commonly upregulated angiogenic factor in both grafted and naturally occurring tumors. VEGF exerts its biological activity by binding to its tyrosine kinase receptors, VEGF-R1 (Flt-1) and VEGF-R2 (Flk-1/KDR). Preclinical studi ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Type 1 diabetes mellitus (DM) is an autoimmune disease that destroys insulin-producing cells of the pancreas. Type 1 DM affects an estimated one million Americans and usually finds its onset in the young. It is one of the leading causes of kidney disease, peripheral neurological diseases and also blindness. It shortens the lifespan primarily through prematur ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Conventional pulse oximetry has significant limitations because it works on the assumption that there are only two species of hemoglobin present in arterial blood, oxygenated hemoglobin (O2Hb) and reduced hemoglobin (RHb). In reality, two other hemoglobin species -- carboxyhemoglobin (COHb) and methemoglobin (metHb), collectively termed dyshemoglobins -- are pr ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): New approaches are needed to help college students develop lifelong health behaviors to decrease their risk of cancer. College students use the Internet more than any other population in the U.S., making interactive web technology a promising source for delivering health education to this target group. The purpose of this Phase II project is to produce and eval ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We propose to apply item response theory (IRT) and computerized adaptive testing (CAT) to achieve major advances in the standardization of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) health-related quality of life (HRQOL) metrics, in the efficiency of data collection and processing technologies, and in the usefulness of clinician and patient reports. In contrast to static ins ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We propose a tool for evaluating the functional impact of headaches that uses computerized adaptive testing (CAT) to achieve more practical and more precise assessments by matching the questions to each patient's headache severity level. In previous work, we developed a headache impact item bank that improved score precision and validity and provided measuremen ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Although injection and aspiration of soft tissues and joints is a mainstay in the therapy of rheumatic diseases, surveys of training programs have continually shown that medical trainees are not able to practice these procedures with sufficient repetition and supervision to become technically proficient. Most physicians, therefore, have to learn these important ...