One hundred six poster presentations and four oral presentations capped off new research that was conducted by students at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and featured at Mount Sinai’s Fourth Annual Karen Zier, PhD, Medical Student Research Day, held over Zoom in March.
Participating in Research Day fulfills one of the medical school’s graduation requirements. Eighty percent of the presenters each year are in their second year of medical school.
“Medical Student Research Day is a showcase and an opportunity for students to share the research and scholarship they have done with their mentors with the Mount Sinai community,” says Mary Rojas, PhD, Director of Icahn Mount Sinai’s Medical Student Research Office, and Associate Professor of Medical Education. “It is an early snapshot of the students’ accomplishments.”
Dr. Rojas says that by the time they graduate, more than half of Mount Sinai’s students will have published in peer-reviewed journals. The Class of 2021 has already published more than 400 peer-reviewed articles.
The event exemplifies Mount Sinai’s commitment to fostering biomedical research and introduces students to the intellectual rigors, skills, and collaboration that lead to incremental findings and life-changing discoveries.
Under the mentorship of Tanvir Choudhri, MD, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery, at Icahn Mount Sinai, second-year student Zachary Spiera found that the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs), which diminish inflammation, does not make users more susceptible to concussions and does not worsen their outcomes. This was a subject he had wondered about because he and his teammates had plied themselves with NSAIDs while playing basketball and soccer in high school and middle school.
Before launching his own research, Mr. Spiera searched through medical literature, but could not find an answer. “As a student you look up to the medical community and think there are going to be answers to your questions,” he says. “Then you see something that hasn’t been figured out yet.” He is first author on a study about this subject that was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics.
This spring, Jordyn Feingold will receive a joint MD and Master of Science in Clinical Research, before continuing at Mount Sinai for her residency in Psychiatry. At Research Day, she presented her work on the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on 2,579 front-line health care workers at The Mount Sinai Hospital. She and her mentor, Jonathan Ripp, MD, MPH, Dean for Well-being and Resilience and Professor of Medicine (General Internal Medicine, and Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine) recently published their findings in the journal Chronic Stress.
One of the study’s key takeaways, Ms. Feingold says, was the high prevalence—39 percent—of COVID-19-related post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder that existed among the hospital’s front-line health care workers at the peak of the pandemic last year. The “greatest driver of those symptoms was being burned out, which is significant,” she says, “because it was happening well before COVID-19 and it is something that can be addressed.” Her research also found “the greatest modifiable protective factor was feeling supported by hospital leadership.”
The COVID-19 pandemic provided a springboard for student research by others, including second-year students Cynthia Luo, Alexander Kalicki, and Kate Moody, who also presented abstracts of their studies on Research Day.
Ms. Luo studied resilience among her fellow medical students during the pandemic under the mentorship of Craig Katz, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Global Health, and Medical Education, at Icahn Mount Sinai. She divided students into two groups: those who responded to a survey by saying the COVID-19 pandemic had been their most traumatic life event, and those who responded by saying they had experienced earlier life traumas, such as the loss or illness of a loved one. Ms. Luo then measured their responses on a resilience scale that was created at Mount Sinai. “Students who indicated a non-COVID-19 impactful life event had significantly higher resilience than those who indicated COVID-19,” says Ms. Luo. “To me that demonstrates that having prior stressful life experiences was, in some ways, protective for managing COVID stress. Potentially, these experiences helped students grow and develop their resilience behaviors before COVID-19.” Ms. Luo plans to finish compiling her research and submitting it for publication in the coming months.
Mr. Kalicki and Ms. Moody are co-authors on a study that was just accepted by the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS), which examined the barriers to video-based telehealth access that older homebound adults faced during the pandemic. Mr. Kalicki worked as a software engineer before entering medical school and says his passion for using technology to improve health care delivery led him to pursue the project under the mentorship of Peter Gliatto, MD, Professor of Medicine (General Internal Medicine), Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, and Medical Education at Icahn Mount Sinai. Katherine Ornstein, PhD, MPH, Associate Professor, Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, also served as the students’ mentor.
Ms. Moody says she was drawn to the subjects of process improvement and providing a high level of health care to a population that is difficult to access. Both students helped design a survey that was completed by physicians in the Mount Sinai Visiting Doctors Program and conducted the data analysis for the study. They also created a data collection sheet for Mount Sinai’s Epic electronic health record system to systematically record information about patients’ previous telehealth use, as well as structural barriers patients may face, such as access to the internet or the capacity to pay for cellular data. The students hope that a better understanding of these barriers will help inform future interventions that are designed to reach patients with limited access to care.