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…
Kerby Mellott enjoyed being physically active all his life. When he was younger, Kerby loved to play sports. Tall, lean and athletic in his youth, Kerby was a high school state basketball team champion and played for his college’s championship football team. After college, he began steadily gaining weight. A…
John G. Lee, MD, is director of Pancreaticobiliary Services at the H.H. Chao Comprehensive Digestive Disease Center. He is an expert in diagnosis and treatment of disorders of the pancreas and biliary tract using minimally invasive techniques. These include ERCP (endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography, which employs a thin flexible tube called…
Surgery without large, open incisions is a proven advancement offered at UC Irvine, where women may have many treatment options when they face gynecologic conditions such as uterine fibroids, endometriosis and ovarian cysts. The term for such procedures is “minimally invasive surgery,” or MIS. It includes a variety of techniques…
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…
When Tiffany Chancheya was born in October 2005, she had a quarter-inch reddish mark on one cheek. Tiffany's parents, Tim and Samay Chancheya, grew worried several months later because the small splotch, later diagnosed as a hemangioma, had darkened and was mushrooming in size. Hemangiomas are birthmarks caused by the…
Timing. It often determines whether a stroke victim will resume a normal life, suffer disabilities – or even survive. “From the onset of symptoms until treatment begins, there are only four and half hours in which intravenous clot-busting drugs are effective,” says neurologist Dr. Steven Cramer of the UCI Health…
Carey Moyer was 31 and still a newlywed when she felt a lump in her right breast in January 2010. "It felt like a rock, but it didn’t hurt when I touched it," Moyer recalls. "So, of course I went online." She found little reassurance. When her gynecologist felt the…
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…
To many people, the term heart failure conjures up an image of an out-of-the-blue emergency, a heart that has suddenly stopped beating. In reality, heart failure is a process in which the heart muscle becomes so weakened over time that it no longer pumps enough blood to meet the body's…
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