When 43-year-old Dana Agamalian learned she was pregnant, she felt elated. When, at 18 weeks, she felt her twins’ first kicks, she thought she was having a heaven-sent pregnancy. Those kicks turned out to be early contractions. Agamalian soon found herself confined to 24-hour bed rest at a Newport Beach…
All too often, many of the nearly 8,000 Orange County residents who have a stroke each year experience warning signs that go unrecognized. This results in delaying measures that can save lives and greatly reduce long-term disability. "Studies show that immediate treatment in the early stages of a stroke can…
Bariatric surgery is an increasingly popular way to treat morbid obesity. More than 170,000 Americans undergo the surgery each year, 10 times more than in the mid-1990s. Two recent studies by UC Irvine Medical Center surgeons compared the outcome, quality of life and cost of the two most performed procedures…
Nearly 600,000 hysterectomies are performed each year in the United States—a rate unchanged since World War II. Uterine fibroids, benign tumors in and around the uterine walls, account for half these procedures. UCI Health radiologist Dr. Scott Goodwin wants to change that. "The interventional radiologist has a tool that may…
Citing UC Irvine's award-winning Program in Geriatrics, the U.S. Administration on Aging has designated UC Irvine as the National Center on Elder Abuse, a clearinghouse for practical information supporting federal, state and local efforts to prevent, identify and effectively respond to elder abuse. The agency will provide funding of $561,000…
In a brief period of only 280 days, a baby can be conceived and born. During the first three weeks of pregnancy, the fetus grows from a zygote—a one-celled structure—into a blastocyst consisting of about 500 cells. By the fifth week, it’s called an embryo and is about one-seventeenth of…
In 2003, oncologist Dr. Rita Mehta had "the kind of moment everyone lives for" — everyone, that is, who's working to find a cure for cancer. Mehta, a health sciences associate professor of medicine at the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, was one of the first researchers to use chemotherapy…
At 49 years old, Trevor Mackay was the picture of health—participating in Pilates, jogging several times a week and training for a triathlon. So when the results of his annual PSA test revealed a slight increase over his previous test, he wasn’t the least bit concerned. But his doctor referred…
When Debra Giesy began experiencing lower back pain, she thought it was sciatica, a condition caused by compression of the lumbar or sciatic nerves in the spine. She took ibuprofen and hoped the pain would go away. She never imagined it would lead her to UC Irvine Medical Center. Giesy…
The physicians at the UCI Health Melanoma Center specialize in the most advanced methods for determining the spread of this aggressive skin cancer beyond the initial site. One of the best predictors of the spread of melanoma is determining whether the disease involves lymph nodes, says Dr. James G. Jakowatz…
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