Brought to you by UTHealth Houston
The COVID-19 pandemic has created countless excuses to drink: disturbing headlines, shuttered businesses, and isolation from friends and family, to name a few. Sales of alcoholic beverages in the United States rose 55% in the week ending March 21, just as stay-at-home orders locked down swaths of our nation. But for people pursuing sobriety, the outbreak and its challenges have become tests of resilience.
What we know about COVID-19 makes it a formidable threat to physical health. But what we don’t know may prove just as dangerous. As we face new uncertainties such as fear of infection, working from home, temporary unemployment, home schooling of children, and restricted contact with friends and loved ones, we must safeguard mental health as well as physical health.
In summer 2019, UTHealth broke ground on a 264-bed center for acute and subacute treatment. UTHealth Behavioral Sciences Center, a joint project between UTHealth and the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, is being built adjacent to the existing 274-bed UTHealth Harris County Psychiatric Center.
Melody DiPasca gets up early to start working from home before her two children, Juan and Giovanni, wake up. An executive assistant, she suddenly saw her life change when the COVID-19 pandemic caused schools, day care facilities, and businesses to close. Working from home now means Melody has overlapping roles as professional and parent, day care provider and guardian, and teacher and mother.
Imagine living in a world of daily struggles with conversations, encounters, and relationships— where expressing feelings and exchanging information results in overwhelming anxiety. This is the world for tens of millions of individuals suffering from social dysfunctions associated with autism, schizophrenia, and other neuropsychiatric disorders.
More than 795,000 individuals suffer a stroke each year in the United States. Even though post-stroke depression affects about one-third of these patients, significant gaps exist in the identification and management of the psychological effects of stroke, such as post-stroke anxiety.
When you have a stroke, experts say time is brain. The longer you wait for treatment, the more brain cells you lose, and the worse the outcomes will be. But what happens when the closest hospital is hours away, or in the case of astronauts on the Space Station, two full days away?
The symptoms of Parkinson’s disease begin slowly. Movement changes like tremors and stiffness can develop over years, often accompanied by subtle signs like difficulty sleeping and loss of smell.
It only takes a little at first—a few short-term memories. But over time, Alzheimer’s disease takes them all, robbing a person of their identity. This is the reality for more than 5.8 million people living in the United States today. To help preserve their memories and identities, researchers across UTHealth are working together to transform how we understand and treat Alzheimer’s disease.
Marcus Weaver had an immediate question after his diagnosis of a brain tumor: When could he get back to jiu jitsu, the hobby he is so passionate about?
Learning you have a spinal cord injury can elicit a particular sense of dread, evoking thoughts of potentially irretrievable loss of function, feeling, and independence. In recent years, however, researchers at UTHealth have begun to explore the tantalizing possibility that patients with a spinal cord injury can regain what they lost.