If you have trouble reading this email, you can also view the newsletter on our website.
Volume
6, Issue 1
December 2011
Sponsored by: The John A. Hartford Foundation, MetLife Foundation, The National Institute on Aging, and the Lillian R. Gleitsman Foundation.
Administered by: The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) and the National Institute on Aging (NIA)
____________________________________
This online newsletter provides news and information about the Medical Student Research Training in Aging (MSTAR) Program to current and former student scholars, program directors, mentors, and others involved in the program.
PLEASE HELP US DISSEMINATE THIS NEWSLETTER to medical students and others in your institution. It is one of the best ways to promote this valuable program to potential applicants. Thank you!
____________________________________ 1. 2011 Application Deadline is January 31 ____________________________________________
2011 Application Deadline is January 31 _____________________________________________ MetLife Foundation Renews its Commitment to MSTAR Last year, the MSTAR Program acquired a new sponsor: MetLife Foundation. The Foundation’s $200,000 grant funded research for 50 additional students in 2010, increasing MSTAR’s training capacity by about 40 percent. AFAR is thrilled to announce that MetLife Foundation has committed $220,000 to the 2011 program.
“We are very pleased to participate in and provide funding for this very worthwhile program,” says Dennis White, president and CEO of MetLife Foundation. “The program ensures that physicians, in their early years of medical education, receive superior mentoring in the important field of geriatric medicine. We enthusiastically support AFAR’s effort to attract more physicians to the field at a time when the need for age-related health practitioners is reaching a critical phase.”
MetLife established MetLife Foundation in 1976 to carry on its long-standing tradition of corporate contributions and community involvement. The Foundation has been involved in a variety of aging-related initiatives addressing issues of caregiving, intergenerational activities, mental fitness, health and wellness programs, and civic involvement. For more than 20 years, MetLife and MetLife Foundation have invested millions of dollars for Alzheimer’s research and public information programs.
To learn more about MetLife Foundation, go to www.metlife.org.
AFAR would like to thank MetLife Foundation for its renewed commitment to the MSTAR program!
_____________________________________________ Q&A with UNC’s Jan Busby-Whitehead, MD This year, the MSTAR program will have a new National Training Center: the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. Though UNC has hosted MSTAR Scholars in the past as a partner site, a 2010 NIH T35 award will now enable the school to host eight MSTAR students each year.
Jan Busby-Whitehead, MD—Chief of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Director of the Center for Aging and Health—is co-director of the MSTAR program at UNC. (Philip Sloane, MD, MPH, and Ned Sharpless, MD, are her co-directors.) Dr. Busby-Whitehead answered a few questions about the MSTAR program at UNC.
Why did you want to bring the MSTAR program to UNC?
Tell me about the MSTAR mentors.
What else does UNC have to offer MSTAR Scholars?
Our infrastructure is strong, with hundreds of centers and institutes. These include the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, the Center for Aging and Health, the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Carolina Population Center, and many more.
What are some things MSTAR Scholars can expect to do at UNC in addition to their regular research projects?
Why is it important for students to study geriatric medicine?
Thank you to Dr. Busby-Whitehead for taking the time to speak with us!
_____________________________________________ Katherine Garlo
When she was in high school, Katherine Garlo saw firsthand the toll that chronic disease can take not only on patients, but on caregivers as well: She helped her family care for her ill grandfather. So when it came time to choose an MSTAR project in 2009, Garlo says, “I knew I wanted to work with caregivers and the things that influence caregiver stress.”
She found the perfect fit with Dr. Terri Fried at Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Fried was researching caregiver burden—the psychosocial stress on caregivers—and Garlo joined the project. She and Dr. Fried studied 179 caregivers of older patients with cancer, heart disease, or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) over a one-year period.
The results surprised them. While it was common in all of the caregivers, caregiver burden did not vary between diseases—nor did it increase over time. In fact, burden stayed the same, or even trended downward, as the year progressed. “This possibly shows that as caregivers adapt to the diseased state of their loved one—and to their new role in caring for them—they’re better able to cope with and manage their caregiving responsibilities,” Garlo says.
It’s important for physicians and clinicians to understand caregiver burden, says Garlo, because caregivers are crucial to seniors’ health and well-being. A patient’s relationships with caregivers can affect his or her disease state and symptoms.
“I really hope the study raises awareness in physicians—especially geriatricians—of the need to consider the caregiver,” Garlo says. “We need to ask about that relationship and determine if it’s supportive, or if the patient or caregiver need other forms of social support.”
Garlo plans to one day ask those questions herself. A third-year medical student at Rush University, she serves on the leadership committee of the Geriatric Interest Group. She plans to apply for residency in internal medicine next year, then hopes to land a geriatrics fellowship. She says participating in the MSTAR program increased her interest in the field.
Garlo was able to get the most out of her experience by being proactive. She traveled to Harvard University to attend a workshop and lectures with the MSTAR students there. She went on her own to grand rounds for internal medicine and geriatrics, and tagged along with the geriatrics fellows for their lectures.
The MSTAR experience paid off for Garlo: Her paper, “Burden in Caregivers of Older Adults with Advanced Illness”—for which she did much of the writing—was published in the December 2010 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. It was her first published paper. “When I typed my name into PubMed, I couldn’t believe it came up!” Garlo says. “I am really excited. It’s the climax of my MSTAR experience.”
In 2001, a simplified calculator based on that original model was created. The calculator, which assigns a certain number of points to each risk factor, eliminated the need to use a computer to assess heart attack risk. Many physicians, drug companies, and health organizations such as the American Heart Association and the Mayo Clinic switched to this point-based model.
According to a study published in the November 2010 Journal of General Internal Medicine, perhaps they should have stuck to the original model. The study found that the point-based model misclassified the heart attack risk of 15 percent of patients—nearly 6 million Americans.
“Although mathematically the two models are very similar, clinically there are differences which lead to different treatment strategies for individual patients,” says William Gordon, who worked on the study at UC San Francisco as a 2008 MSTAR Scholar.
Ten percent of the patients were misclassified into a higher-risk group and may have been overmedicated. The other 5 percent were classified into a lower-risk group and were potentially undertreated.
Gordon worked with mentor Dr. Michael Steinman and three other doctors on the study, which yielded him his first published paper. The team’s aim, he says, is for physicians to become more aware of the point-based model’s differences and that treatment guidelines recognize the differences. Also, Gordon points out, “Most people now have access to a computer and can use the original model.”
A September 20, 2010 New York Times article about the study certainly brought it a lot of attention. “I feel very fortunate,” says Gordon. “To see a paper and research I’ve done actually being recognized and potentially affecting change is very special.”
Gordon says he is thrilled just to have participated in the MSTAR program. “One of the great things about MSTAR is that it has a very strong curriculum,” he explains. “It was a great exposure to both the research and the clinical side of medicine, as well as the different approaches to medical care for the elderly.”
Gordon, currently a fourth-year student at Weill-Cornell Medical College, is now applying for residency in internal medicine. He says his MSTAR experience has better prepared him for the many elderly patients he’ll undoubtedly treat as an internist.
“There are a lot of social and medical aspects of geriatrics that are really important,” he says. “Bridging those two and understanding as much as I can about the elderly population is something I began to appreciate [as an MSTAR Scholar], and something I’m still appreciating.”
So, when students ask him what they should do between their first and second years of medical school, “I immediately tell them to do MSTAR,” Gordon says. “I had a fantastic experience!”
_____________________________________________ UCSF Geriatrics Scholarship Award Summit UC San Francisco’s Division of Geriatrics will hold its first annual Geriatrics Scholarship Award Summit on April 14 and 15, 2011. UCSF is accepting applications from Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) interns and residents in Internal Medicine or Family Medicine who would like to present at the summit.
The goal of the award is to stimulate interest in a career in academic geriatrics by recognizing residents’ scholarly or research achievements in aging or geriatrics. Each awardee will receive $500, as well as plane fare and lodging in San Francisco for two nights. The summit will include an awardees’ dinner with the faculty and fellows, presentations by awardees, and discussions by faculty and fellows highlighting the diversity of interests and career paths in geriatric medicine.
Applications for the summit are due by February 15, 2011. To learn more about the Geriatrics Scholarship Award Summit and to download an application, go to geriatrics.medicine.ucsf.edu/education/awardsummit.html.
_____________________________________________
2. MetLife Foundation Renews Its Commitment to MSTAR
3. Q&A with University of North Carolina’s Jan Busby-Whitehead, MD
4. MSTAR Scholar Success Stories: Katherine Garlo and William Gordon
5. UCSF Geriatrics Scholarship Award Summit
6. M-STREAM: For Students Interested in Geriatric Mental Health or Neuroscience
7. Helpful Links /
Geriatrics Recruitment and Student Opportunities
Our overall goal is to provide medical students with a meaningful aging research experience very early in their medical careers. UNC has a lot of great scientists who are wonderful mentors, and we think it’s a great opportunity to match students with these mentors and hopefully encourage them to pursue a career in aging research. We’re thrilled to bring the MSTAR program here!
We have 36 mentors from multiple disciplines. We recruit our mentors from the schools of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Public Health, Social Work, and Dentistry—all within a block of our campus. We’ve also included some junior mentors as well as senior mentors. We feel this will help the students get a broad experience and enhance their research experience.
We have an extremely strong research environment, including aging research. We’re very interdisciplinary. So we feel like it’s an optimal environment for students to have a great experience and to hopefully decide they want to pursue aging as a career.
They’ll attend a two-day orientation workshop. They’ll participate in a summer seminar series, during which they will present their research and get feedback. We have a special series on aging research within that summer seminar series. Students will be invited to present at our John B. Graham Student Research Day in January. They’re going to have a course in oral presentation skills. And we’ll encourage them to apply to present a poster at the American Geriatrics Society annual meeting in May.
The population has been aging across the world, and certainly in the United States. It’s sometimes called the “silver tsunami.” Many patients, regardless of what field you’re going into, are going to be elderly. So we feel that it’s very important for all students to have a strong experience, certainly clinically, in taking care of these folks. We also think there is such a shortage of people who are focusing on diseases in aging, and we want to be able to improve quality of life and address the multiple illnesses that seniors have.
William Gordon 
For decades, many physicians have used a complicated mathematical formula to assess heart attack risk. The Framingham model looks at seven pieces of information: age, sex, total cholesterol, “good” HDL cholesterol, smoking status, systolic blood pressure, and medication taken for hypertension.
M-STREAM: For Students Interested in Geriatric Mental Health or Neuroscience
_____________________________________________
Helpful Links /
Geriatrics Recruitment and Student Opportunities
Boston University Summer Institute in Geriatric
Medicine:
www.bmc.org/geriatrics/education/medicalstudents-summerinstitute.htm
AGS Local Geriatrics Mentoring Program:
www.americangeriatrics.org/health_care_professionals/trainees/find_a_mentor/
Profiles of careers in geriatrics:
www.americangeriatrics.org/health_care_professionals/profiles_in_geriatrics/
AGS student chapters and other information for medical students:
www.americangeriatrics.org/health_care_professionals/trainees/student_resident_chapters/
American Medical Student Association (AMSA)
Geriatrics Interest Group:
www.amsa.org/AMSA/Homepage/About/Committees/Geriatrics.aspx
American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC)
Organization of Student Representatives:
www.aamc.org/members/osr/
AAMC Careers in Medicine program helps students
select a specialty and apply to residency:
www.services.aamc.org/careersinmedicine/
MSTAR information and online application:
www.afar.org/research/funding/mstar
www.afar.org/mstar/index2010.html
MSTAR news:
www.afar.org/mstar_news.html
MSTAR Toolkit:
www.afar.org/toolkit.html
_____________________________________________
Please
Note
If you have received this message
in error or would like to be taken off the mailing list, please send an email
to info@afar.org.
If you have news or announcements you would like mentioned in our next newsletter, please forward them to grants@afar.org.