Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Community, Featured
FDNY EMT Lieutenant Raymond Wang, center, returned to The Mount Sinai Hospital on Wednesday, November 27, when his colleague FDNY EMT Liam Glinane, second from right, was discharged.
In a press conference held on Thursday, October 17, New York City Fire Department (FDNY) Commissioner Daniel Nigro stood with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and shared the details of what he called “an extremely tragic coincidence.” Two emergency medical technicians (EMT), he said, had just suffered unrelated life-threatening medical emergencies at the same location, within minutes of each other.
On that fateful day, Liam Glinane, a 28-year FDNY veteran, was driving an ambulance to the Fire Academy on Randall’s Island when he had a stroke on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and veered off the road, hitting another car. Lieutenant Raymond Wang was dispatched to the scene of the accident, but before he could tend to his colleague, Lt. Wang had an aortic dissection. “This is a tough day for our city and for the FDNY,” said Mayor de Blasio. Lt. Wang was described to be in critical condition; Mr. Glinane was in critical but stable condition.
It was fortunate that when Lt. Wang, a 19-year veteran of the FDNY, took ill, he was on a ride-along with a physician from Elmhurst Hospital. That physician was able to immediately treat the two unconscious paramedics while waiting for backup help. Soon after, Mr. Glinane was rushed to Mount Sinai Queens, which recently had opened its world-class Cerebrovascular Stroke Center featuring specially designed equipment that allows for improved speed and efficiency in stroke diagnosis and treatment. Lt. Wang, who was first taken to Elmhurst Hospital, was transferred to The Mount Sinai Hospital.
Stephen D. Waterford, MD, MS, left, led a team that included Percy Boateng, MD, Assistant Professor of Cardiovascular Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in performing life-saving surgery on FDNY EMT Lieutenant Raymond Wang.
After life-saving procedures, Lt. Wang would be released from Mount Sinai 13 days later, surrounded by a cheering crowd of FDNY officials and paramedics, family, friends, and staff who treated him. However, it was not until Wednesday, November 27, that Mr. Glinane would be discharged. Again, the FDNY family, including Lt. Wang, would turn out in force. “I am very happy to come to the hospital and be able to walk with Liam out of the hospital,” said a smiling Lt. Wang—who, himself, also had much reason to rejoice.
Lt. Wang, 47, it turned out, had survived a particularly severe form of aortic dissection—a tear in the aorta next to his heart that had caused a life-threatening decrease in his blood pressure, necessitating emergency heart surgery. Stephen D. Waterford, MD, MS, Assistant Professor of Cardiovascular Surgery, and Director of the Surgical Arrhythmia Program, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, led the team that performed surgery on Lt. Wang. “His lungs and heart were not working, and he had no blood flow to his right leg,” said Dr. Waterford.
Meanwhile, Reade De Leacy, MD, Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery, and Radiology, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Director of Cerebrovascular Services at Mount Sinai Queens, removed the blood clot blocking an artery in Mr. Glinane’s brain. “He presented with paralysis of the left side of his body, inability to speak properly, and poor awareness of where he was in space and his location. It was an incredibly serious illness,” Dr. De Leacy recalled.
Mr. Glinane, 63, was later transported to The Mount Sinai Hospital, where he continued his recovery and rehabilitation at the Brain Injury Unit at the Mount Sinai Rehabilitation Center. Under the care of Richard Frieden, MD, Assistant Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, and a team of therapists—Kristen Eggers, PT; Aura Weltman, OT; and Carly Traiman, SLP—Mr. Glinane recovered physically and cognitively. Finally, on the day before Thanksgiving—41 days after his stroke—Mr. Glinane, serenaded by bagpipes and cheers, and with Lt. Wang at his side, was discharged from Mount Sinai.
As the two FDNY veterans walked out together, Lillian Bonsignore, Chief of FDNY Emergency Medical Services, said, “I would consider this our new FDNY Thanksgiving. We certainly have so much to be thankful for. We almost lost two of our heroes, people who have dedicated their lives to saving other people. Today, we can see that that was given back to them.”
“You’re looking at two of the luckiest New Yorkers in the city right now,” Mr. Glinane told the large crowd of well-wishers standing outside The Mount Sinai Hospital. “This is a total success story, thanks to the staff of the building behind me. They’ve literally made a total difference in my outcome—to the hospital, to how I came in here, to how I’m leaving on my own power with 100 percent functionality.”
Today, Mr. Glinane is close to being fully recovered and, despite a long road of outpatient stroke rehabilitation ahead of him, he says he has every intention of going back to work. “I’ve got the greatest job in the world,” he said. “I’m self-sufficient, I’m not a burden, I’m back in the game. I’ve got another shot at life.”
Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Community, Featured
The Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center honored six individuals for their commitment to New York City’s young people at its 16th Annual Breakfast of Legends benefit at the Ziegfeld Ballroom on Thursday, November 14. The Center provides free, comprehensive, and confidential health and wellness services to more than 12,000 young people annually and is a national leader in adolescent health research and training.
“Today, in its 51st year, the Center remains true to its original vision and mission—the care of New York City’s adolescents and young adults,” James S. Tisch, Co-Chairman, Boards of Trustees, Mount Sinai Health System, said in a warm welcome to guests.
Angela Diaz, MD, PhD, MPH, Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor in Adolescent Health, Professor of Pediatrics, and Environmental Medicine and Public Health, and Director of the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center, recognized the volunteers, benefactors, leadership, and staff who made the event—and the Center’s work—possible: “Thank you for helping us give young people a place of healing, and a place of hope.”
Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System, emphasized the importance of innovation in the care of adolescents, who face constantly evolving challenges. “At the Center, innovations are ongoing—including its groundbreaking work with HIV-infected youth and transgender adolescents,” Dr. Charney said.
Three patients—Moza, Richard, and Anisa—recounted how the Center had transformed their lives. “It is not just a health center, but a chance for a fulfilled life,” Moza said.
The honorees were:
Jerry Bruno, Strategic Project Manager, City of New York Department of Homeless Services
Rachel L. Colon, LCSW, Primary Care Social Work Coordinator, Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center, who received the Center’s Staff Award
Yasmeen Mock, Head of Client Relations and Chief Operating Officer, Kimelman & Baird, LLC
Lisa M. Satlin, MD, Herbert H. Lehman Professor and Chair, Jack and Lucy Clark Department of Pediatrics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Patricia Wang, President and Chief Executive Officer, Healthfirst
Raja M. Flores, MD, Steven and Ann Ames Professor and Chair of the Department of Thoracic Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who was presented with the Dr. Joan E. Morgenthau Lifetime Advocate for Youth Award by Dr. Morgenthau’s daughters Ellie Hirschhorn and Joan Bright for his kindness, warmth, and clinical skill in treating adolescent patients.
Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, MSBI
Honorees were joined by Mount Sinai Trustee Susan R. Cullman, second row, far left; Vicki LoPachin, MD, second row, far right, and other members of Mount Sinai Health System leadership.
For the past four years, the Cullman Family Award for Excellence in Physician Communication has honored Mount Sinai Health System physicians and advanced practice providers who demonstrate exceptional communication in clinical practice. Recipients of this year’s award were ranked in the top 1 percent nationally in provider communication for 2018 as measured by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Clinician and Group Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems patient experience survey.
In a ceremony on Tuesday, October 15, at the Corporate Services Center, 51 awardees were recognized for their outstanding achievements. Nineteen were previous recipients.
The presentations were made by Vicki LoPachin, MD, Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of the Mount Sinai Health System; along with David L. Reich, MD, President of The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Queens; Burton P. Drayer, MD, Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Sinai Doctors Faculty Practice; and Mount Sinai Trustee Susan R. Cullman. “Thank you for putting our patients at the center of everything you do,” Dr. LoPachin said. “You truly exemplify the values and the mission of Mount Sinai.”
Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Community, Featured, MSBI
Honorees for their support of music and music therapy, from left: Christian McBride, Julia Justo, Deborah Korzenik, and David Amram.
The 2019 “What a Wonderful World” gala, a benefit for the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine, was a festive evening of music, dance, and expressions of gratitude to four honorees for their support of music and music therapy. The recent event, held at Space 54 in Manhattan, was hosted by the nonprofit Wonderful World: Friends of Music Therapy Inc.
This year’s honorees were Deborah Korzenik, Senior Associate General Counsel of the Mount Sinai Health System, for her work in patient care and medical ethics; Christian McBride, a Grammy Award-winning bassist and composer and the host of the NPR program Jazz Night in America, who received the Phoebe Jacobs Award, presented by the jazz guitarist Pat Metheny; David Amram, the prolific composer, conductor, and musician, who received the Lifetime Achievement Award; and Julia Justo, a photographer and painter who was honored for her resilience as a music therapy patient.
Bruce Sabath, the star of Fiddler on the Roof, sang “If I Were a Rich Man.”
The gala was hosted by its Chair, Edwin Sirlin, and featured performances by artists including Bruce Sabath, the star of Fiddler on the Roof; the salsa band of Tito Rodriguez Jr.; the Garry Dial Trio; Erik Lawrence; and Mr. McBride. The emcees were Mercedes Ellington and Bill Daughtry.
“We are proud of the breadth and scope of patients we serve and our research projects with doctors and nurses, from neonatal care to oncology, Alzheimer’s and stroke,” said Joanne V. Loewy, DA, LCAT, MT-BC, Founder and Director of the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine, based at Mount Sinai Beth Israel.
The Department of Music Therapy, with support from the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, serves the Mount Sinai Health System, providing a range of clinical services for adults and children, both in-house and within the community. Its music therapists are licensed and board certified to provide care that complements medical treatment, assisting with sedation, pain management, and neurologic and respiratory function.
Nov 25, 2019 | Artificial Intelligence, Featured, Research
Keynote speaker Michael Snyder, PhD
What is the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine, and how is it changing the practice of health care as we know it? That was the subject of the eighth annual SinaInnovations Conference, held Tuesday, October 15, and Wednesday, October 16, in Stern Auditorium. The event featured leading physicians and scientists from academia and industry who spoke about their work in deploying AI—the most powerful technology under development—to augment discovery and clinical use.
Experts shared their experiences in using AI in a variety of ways, from medical imaging, to predicting disease, to keeping people healthy, and highlighted the massive transformation taking place in health care and medicine, where software is driving innovation.
Michael Snyder, PhD, Chair of the Department of Genetics, and Director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University, a keynote speaker, discussed the role of AI in advancing personalized medicine. “I see a world where, with genome sequencing and continuous monitoring using wearable devices, we can better manage people’s health and hopefully do this at an individual level, and have personal machine-learning algorithms that follow people and their health state,” Dr. Snyder said. “We’re very capable of measuring more things, and here’s an area where AI can make a big impact.”
Melissa A. Haendel, PhD, Director of Translational Data Science at Oregon State University, spoke about her work in leading the federally funded Monarch Initiative, which is building sophisticated algorithms that integrate a multitude of data about rare diseases in order to improve research and clinical care. “No one group is actually annotating a disease model that has all the same attributes,” Dr. Haendel said. “We can’t even count the number of rare diseases.” Her team’s goal, she said, is to pull all of the data together and use it to build models that help physicians make earlier diagnoses, identify biomarkers of disease, and find better treatments.
Conference participants Heather J. Lynch, PhD, Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, left, and Georgia D. Tourassi, PhD, Director, Health Data Sciences Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
David Sontag, PhD, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discussed how AI can be used to redesign electronic medical records so they can yield more reliable information on the patient’s risk for various diseases. In one case, he said, his team developed a machine-learning algorithm to help an infectious disease clinician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital reduce the number of unnecessary prescriptions for antibiotics.
AI is already playing a role in augmenting radiology. Keith J. Dreyer, DO, PhD, Vice Chairman, Radiology, at Massachusetts General Hospital and Chief Science Officer of the American College of Radiology, told the audience that “AI has huge value” and will be increasingly useful over time as the field matures.
In his keynote address, Pieter Abbeel, PhD, an entrepreneur and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, showed how deep machine learning takes place through constant repetition. In one example, he illustrated how a robot learns to run. After 2,000 iterations, it will become proficient. By comparison, a healthy human child would learn to run proficiently after roughly two weeks of practice. In many cases, he said, machines have achieved human-level error rates.
Among the many algorithms Stanford University is working on is one that recognizes the photo of a radiological image taken with a mobile phone, according to Curtis Langlotz, MD, PhD, Director of Stanford’s Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging. This technology would allow general practitioners and other health care professionals in remote areas to use their mobile phones to access an algorithm that would assist them in making medical decisions when a radiologist is not available. For example, they would be able to determine whether a patient with, say, tuberculosis, should be discharged from the hospital.
Speakers and attendees at the conference agreed that AI is both promising and challenging. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, PhD, Professor of Computing at the University of Utah, cautioned that inherent bias in the data will create bias in the algorithms. “Models are fragile,” he said. “The Achilles heel is that the more sophisticated a system gets, especially with deep learning, the more sensitive it gets to small perturbations, and this could wreak havoc on the system.”
Greg Zaharchuk, MD, PhD, Professor of Radiology (Neuroimaging and Neurointervention) at Stanford University, concluded his talk with a nod to the future. “I think we’re only scratching the surface. This is a moment of extreme creativity, and it’s a very exciting time to be in the field.” Rather than replacing radiologists and other medical specialists, he added, AI “is really going to extend our abilities as physicians.”
New Gift Supports Young Entrepreneurs at Mount Sinai
This year, for the first time, a nonprofit biotech accelerator company founded by five former postdocs at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai presented the school with a five-year, $50,000 gift to support young entrepreneurs in the New York City area whose science is being used to create therapies, devices, and diagnostics that support human health. The gift from The Keystone for Incubating Innovation in Life Sciences (KiiLN) went to Raymond A. Alvarez, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who is working on a platform that identifies and studies the antibodies of individuals who are immune to hantaviruses, which are spread by rodents and have a 38 percent mortality rate. Currently, there are no vaccines or treatments for hantaviruses.
Nov 25, 2019 | Featured, Research
Rachel Yehuda, PhD
Rachel Yehuda, PhD, a world-renowned researcher whose pioneering discoveries have revolutionized the study and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Yehuda is Professor and Vice Chair for Veterans Affairs for the Department of Psychiatry, Professor of Neuroscience, and Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. This Division also includes the PTSD Clinical Research Program and the Neurochemistry, Neuroendocrinology, and Molecular Biology Lab at the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Bronx.
The National Academy of Medicine is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization that provides independent, objective analysis and advice on health issues. Its members are elected through a selective process, and election is considered one of the highest honors in health and medicine. With this election, Mount Sinai has 23 faculty members in the Academy.
Traumatic stress first interested Dr. Yehuda when she was a postdoctoral fellow in biological psychology at Yale Medical School in 1987. She and colleagues observed that Vietnam War combat veterans with PTSD had significantly lower levels of cortisol, a steroid hormone that helps regulate physiological responses to stress, compared to those without PTSD. It was a provocative discovery because elevated cortisol levels are typically associated with stress. The work led to a new understanding: In response to acute stress, ample cortisol levels are critical to mobilizing—and then containing—numerous stress-related mediators, such that those who have lower cortisol levels at the time of trauma exposure are at elevated risk for PTSD.
As Dr. Yehuda was concluding her fellowship and about to join the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 1991, she wondered if lower cortisol levels would also be present in other groups of trauma survivors, and initiated biological studies in Holocaust survivors. A pilot study of 100 survivors revealed that half had PTSD, and that they, too, had lower cortisol levels. To continue her work, she established a specialized treatment program for Holocaust survivors and their families at The Mount Sinai Hospital.
After years of study, Dr. Yehuda and her team of researchers had new revelations: that many Holocaust survivors and their adult offspring had epigenetic changes on the same region of a gene known as FKBP5 that is related to stress, demonstrating—for the first time in people—an epigenetic link between parental trauma and offspring effects.
Her current research interests include studying PTSD biomarkers, and other innovative PTSD prevention strategies and treatment, including the use of psychedelic medications. Today, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has one of the largest programs in the nation for the study of PTSD biomarkers.
In April, Dr. Yehuda was named principal investigator of a nearly $6 million grant from the United States Department of Defense through its U.S. Army Medical Research program to test whether a onetime dose of a drug—oral hydrocortisone—can prevent PTSD and related mental health disturbances in both civilians and military personnel.
Oral hydrocortisone is a synthetic glucocorticoid similar to the body’s own cortisol. The double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial will be conducted on 220 recently traumatized patients presenting to the Emergency Department of The Mount Sinai Hospital and Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Israel, an academic research center.
“It has been a privilege to learn from trauma survivors and lead a first-rate research team that is devoted to developing strategies for treating PTSD,” says Dr. Yehuda. “The Icahn School of Medicine has provided the very best possible environment for fostering innovation in psychiatry research.”
