Welcome to The Pulse, a weekly roundup of health-focused news. Each Thursday, we bring you updates on health policy, community surveys, new clinical studies, programs and services in Southwest and Southside Virginia.
Got a tip or story idea? Email me at emily@cardinalnews.org.
Free lung cancer screenings available
Ballad Health is offering free, noninvasive CT scans for people at risk of lung cancer.
Southwest Virginia faces significant gaps in lung cancer screening services despite high rates of respiratory disease linked to coal mining and smoking, according to a 2020 study published in the National Library of Medicine.
In the Appalachian Highlands, providers often diagnose lung cancer at later stages, making treatment more difficult, according to a press release from Ballad. Residents in the region are nearly three times more likely to die from chronic respiratory disease than people living elsewhere in the state.
Ballad Health will offer the free screenings through June 30 to individuals eligible for their first scan. In order to access the service for free, the scan must be completed by June 30.
The scan does not require needles, sedation or recovery time, according to the press release.
The service is available to anyone who meets the eligibility criteria with a doctor’s order and can travel to a lung cancer screening location, listed here: https://www.balladhealth.org/medical-services/screenings/low-dose-ct.
To qualify for a free low-dose CT screening, patients must:
- Be between the ages of 50 and 80, in accordance with clinical guidelines.
- Have no previous lung cancer diagnosis.
- Have a smoking history equivalent to smoking one pack of cigarettes per day for 20 years.
- Be a current smoker or have quit within the last 15 years.
- Have not had any prior low-dose CT scans.
- Have not had a chest CT scan within the last 12 months.
Eligible individuals should contact their physician’s office and ask for a low-dose CT imaging order, or visit www.balladhealth.org/medical-services/screenings/low-dose-ct or call 833-822-5523 (833-8-BALLAD).
Hormone levels may increase risk of cardiovascular disease
Increased risk of cardiovascular disease after menopause may be tied to gene activity following declining hormone levels, according to Virginia Tech scientists at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC in Roanoke.
Growing evidence suggests that declining estrogen levels can alter the systems in the body that control when genes turn on and off. These changes may help explain why rates of heart disease, diabetes and other metabolic conditions rise sharply in women after menopause.
“For years, we’ve focused on estrogen loss as the primary driver of increased heart disease risk after menopause,” Sumita Mishra, senior author of the study and an assistant professor at the biomedical research institute, said in a press release. “What’s becoming clear is that the story is more complex. By reframing menopause-related health risks around gene regulation, this work points to new directions for future treatments that may extend beyond hormone therapy to more directly target these regulatory pathways.”
Researchers say genetics and environmental influences, such as diet, exercise and metabolic conditions, also contribute to cardiovascular risk after menopause. But the results of this study offer a new way of understanding the problem by connecting hormone loss to longer-term changes in how the body regulates interconnected systems involved in cardiovascular and metabolic health, according to the press release.
The study also suggests that many treatments used to manage cardiometabolic disease, including cholesterol-lowering medications, diabetes drugs such as GLP-1 receptor agonists and SGLT2 inhibitors, may affect the same gene-regulating pathways influenced by estrogen.
New federal grants total $1.2 million for Virginia Tech
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded more than $1.2 million in research grants to Virginia Tech, according to a release from U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem.
The funding includes $818,500 for cardiovascular disease research and $393,082 for biomedical research and research training.
Griffith said the grants support scientific research and help drive economic activity in Virginia’s 9th Congressional District.
