Top-Quality Treatment and Research Side by Side
Each year, the title of Professor is awarded to several academics on the Meilahti campus. Among those is Juha Sinisalo, who was appointed to a professorship in cardiology in 2017 and who studies, among other topics, coronary artery disease. Together with his team of researchers, Sinisalo, who works as the Chief Physician of HUS Heart and Lung Center, investigates the role of genetics in the development of inflammation in coronary arteries, among other aspects. In the future, physicians might be able to use a gene test to see if their patient is susceptible to blockages in coronary arteries.
In addition to his professorship, Sinisalo is also the Chief Physician of the Congenital Heart Diseases Clinic in Meilahti. The clinic treats adult patients who have been born with heart defects that require surgery. Many of the clinic’s patients are monitored throughout their lives to make sure they do not develop further complications. Sinisalo says that he spends a couple of days a week on teaching and research. After this, he continues his working day as a researcher.
Research Shows that Amount of Burns Has Halved in 30 Years
An article about the amount of hospitalized burn victims published by HUS in January 2018 gained wide media attention in Finland. The study, which was carried out at HUS, looked into changes in the hospital treatment of burn victims in Finland. The research team based their results on data on 36,305 burn patients stored in the Hospital Discharge Register between 1980 and 2010. The study’s key finding is that improvements in fire safety have halved the number of severe burns between 1980 and 2010. Men were overrepresented in the statistics throughout the 30-year timeframe with one-year-old boys at the highest risk of sustaining burns.
“Centralizing the treatment of burn victims and training multidisciplinary teams for burn centers have played an important role,” Jyrki Vuola, the Chief Physician of HUS Burn Center, a part of the HUS Department of Musculoskeletal and Plastic Surgery, says.
Clinical Research Is a Productive Part of Operations of HUS Abdominal Center
The HUS Abdominal Center is an active research community and the research done by its clinical researchers has yielded results that have changed the evidence-based diagnostics, treatment, and monitoring of several diseases – in some cases all over the world. Scientific studies which have gained a lot of attention recently and which have been done at the Abdominal Center or involve the Center’s researchers concern topics such as treatment of diverticulitis, the development of inflamed pockets in the walls of the large intestine, without antibiotics, more accurate diagnostics of prostate cancer using magnetic resonance imaging, and the classification of diabetes into five rather than two subtypes. Staff members of the Abdominal Center conduct long-term university-level research also on diseases such as primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) which is difficult to monitor and which is mainly treated at the HUS Gastroenterology Clinic in Finland.