News

Tuesday, May 28th, 2013

Every pregnant woman needs special care, but the increasing number of pregnant women who are also obese, a condition called maternal obesity, is of great concern to physicians like Dr. Clarence Blea, a specialist at St. Luke’s Maternal Fetal Medicine. This is because obese women’s pregnancies often come with a lot of complications.

The issue is growing – today, nearly half of Dr. Blea’s patients are obese. And the problems go well beyond the womb. Research has shown that obesity contributes to a number of health conditions in mom, from high blood pressure to diabetes to early delivery of the baby. This can mean time away from home and family due to doctor visits or hospitalization, added health care costs, and even birth defects.

Dr. Blea explains some of the complications in the video below.

Working Together for Healthier Moms and Babies

Along with the possibility of birth defects, babies born to obese moms can have other complications. That’s why Dr. Blea and his partners work with the specialists at St. Luke’s Neonatology and the staff at St. Luke’s...

BY: KATHLEEN TUCK   PUBLISHED 8:43 AM / JUNE 4, 2013

Flight suits? Check. Experiment loaded? Check. Cell plates prepped? Check.

Boise State’s 2013 Microgravity University team is ready to fly their bone cell signaling experiment today and tomorrow aboard a Zero-G aircraft at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The plane produces periods of weightlessness for up to 25 seconds at a time by executing a series of approximately 30 roller coaster-like parabolas over the Gulf of Mexico. During the free falls, students gather data in the unique environment that mimics space.

The interdisciplinary research team represents several departments in the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, Education and Engineering. They will study how gravitational forces affect calcium molecules in bone cells. This can provide insight that will help astronauts who endure long periods of weightlessness, as well as bed-ridden patients and people afflicted with osteoporosis here on Earth.

This is the fifth consecutive year Boise State teams have participated in Microgravity University or its sister program SEED (Systems Engineering Educational Discovery), and the sixth Boise State team to go to NASA to fly a reduced-gravity experiment on the zero-G aircraft. The team was selected based on scientific merit and educational outreach potential from more than 30 proposals.

Team members are Nic Baughmann (...

April 22, 2013

Statement Highlights:

• Alternative therapies such as aerobic exercise, resistance or strength training and isometric hand grip exercises could help people reduce blood pressure.
• Biofeedback and device-guided slow breathing reduced blood pressure a small amount.
• Due to their modest effects, alternative therapies can be used with — not as a replacement for — standard treatment.

EMBARGOED UNTIL 3 p.m. CT/4 p.m. ET, Monday, April 22, 2013 ...

by Tom Mortell

Beginning in 2014, the ACA will require individuals and families to obtain health insurance coverage, or face ACA-mandated penalties. As initially passed by Congress, the ACA was intended to provide access to health insurance for low-income individuals and families by requiring the states to expand Medicaid coverage to those individuals and families who make less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level ($31,810 for a family of four). States that failed to expand Medicaid faced the penalty of losing all federal Medicaid funding (approximately 70 percent of all Medicaid funding). However, the ACA’s mandatory expansion of Medicaid was short-lived. In June 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that the federal government could not penalize states for not expanding Medicaid programs. As a result, expanding Medicaid is now optional for states.Each year at...