Department News

Family medicine providers gathered for UAMS’ virtual 2025 Family Medicine Spring Review April 23 -25 and learned that the colorectal cancer death rate in people younger than 55 is climbing one percent each year since the mid-2000s, but that this group is more open to a yearly stool-based screening test such as the fecal immunochemical test (FIT) or Cologuard than other age groups.

The colorectal cancer screenings updates from Whitney Jones, M.D., a gastroenterologist from Kentucky, and Francis Colangelo, M.D., a primary care physician with Allegheny Health Care in Pittsburgh, were part of the first day of the three-day conference.

“Around 41 percent of these (younger patients) had symptoms for at least six months before visiting a provider,” said Colangelo. “And if you see rectal bleeding, always assume it is colorectal cancer in the younger patient.”

The conference was presented by the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine’s Community Health and Education division, which has produced continuing medical education for 47 years.

Amanda Deel, D.O., associate dean of the New York Institute of Technology’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, spoke on compassion in healthcare.

“Following a compassion-centered script with patients may feel artificial, but in a study, patients didn’t sense that. Physicians miss opportunities to practice compassion 70 percent of the time and interrupt patients on average in the first 11 seconds,” said Deel.

Angela Driskill, M.D., is a wound care specialist practicing at Baptist Health. She said there must be a distinction between pressure injuries and skin that fails because pressure injuries imply failure of care or harm.

“If you don’t document a wound 12 to 24 hours after admission, it will throw up a red flag to CMS. Say it’s been 24 hours before anyone does a skin assessment, they are classified as ‘unwounded’ when they came in. Then we document there’s a stage 3 or 4 wound of the sacrum, and CMS begins to recoup the cost of that care, which can be $50,000 to $70,000,” said Driskill.

Sleep medicine physician Caris Fitzgerald, M.D., offered trouble-shooting tips for patients who wear a CPAP, a machine that treats sleep apnea with continuous positive airway pressure. CPAP manufacturers estimate that more than eight million people wear a CPAP each night. One common complaint is dry mouth.

“A leak makes or breaks the experience with a CPAP,” said Fitzgerald, who sees patients at the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System. “If a patient complains of dryness, fix the leak, don’t just increase the humidity. The nose is a humidifier. If your pressure system is sealed well and the patient is nasal breathing, they will not need a humidifier.”

In his talk on metabolic issues, James Tucker, M.D., bariatric surgeon with Arkansas Heart Hospital, said bariatric surgery is not a cure for disease of obesity but a treatment. Sleeve gastrectomy is the more common surgery where 50 to 70 percent of the stomach is removed.

“With insulin-dependent patients who’ve had the surgery, 60 percent to 80 percent experience remission from the disease,” said Tucker.

On the third day of the conference, Amy Grooms, M.D., with the UAMS Department of Psychiatry, spoke about using transcranial magnetic stimulation for patients with treatment-resistant depression. She said transcranial magnetic stimulation uses a magnetic pulse that stimulates the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and rebalances it with the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex. Around 30 percent of patients who use this treatment have a standard response, but 18 percent of patients report that their depression is gone.

Bill Fantegrossi, Ph.D, who works in the UAMS Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, ended the conference with a talk on emerging drugs of abuse. He said new synthetic opioids grip more tightly to the opioid receptors in the brain. With such a strong bond, reversing an overdose is difficult with standard treatments such as naloxone (Narcan). Naloxone knocks opioids from brain receptors, but it struggles to unbind new synthetic opioids from receptors. This means it can only partially reverse an overdose or may fail.

Other conference topics included an update on the HPV vaccine with Portia Knowlton, who works with St. Jude’s HPV prevention program, renal cysts and masses with UAMS’ Marcelo Bigarella, M.D., and long-term effects after curative cancer treatments with Viriginia Laliberte, APRN. Ashley Acheson, Ph.D., and Jami Jones, who work with the National Center for Opioid Research & Clinical Effectiveness at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, spoke on the research they are conducting on children and adolescents who have been affected by the opioid crisis and other drug addictions.