On September 19, Duke Eye Center welcomed Eye Care Associates as its new optical dispensary vendor at its main Duke Eye Center, located at 2351 Erwin Road in Durham. The opening of Eye Care Associates Optical Dispensary at the Duke Eye Center brings the expertise of Eye Care Associates licensed dispensing opticians (LDOs) to the patients of Duke Eye Center and the employees and students of Duke University.

Michael Cuffe, M.D., MBA, vice president of Ambulatory Services and chief medical officer of the Duke University Health System (DUHS), has named Adam Perlman, M.D., MPH, the executive director of Duke Integrative Medicine.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have discovered a way to block the damaging actions of chlamydia, the bacteria responsible for the largest number of sexually transmitted infections in the United States.

Alarming new data regarding high rates of high blood pressure in young adults suggests those with less education and lower income are at greatest risk, according to researchers at Duke University Medical Center.

Only one in 10 patients who experience a major heart attack are transferred to another hospital to get necessary treatment within the recommended 30 minutes. Failure to transfer these patients to a hospital that could clear their heart blockage in a timely fashion increased their death rate compared to patients who were moved within a half hour, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by researchers at the Duke Clinical Research Institute . The study is the first to show a significantly higher mortality risk associated with the time patients spend in a hospital before they are transferred to another hospital able to perform a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) to open blocked coronary arteries.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have found out how mouse basal cells that line airways “decide” to become one of two types of cells that assist in airway-clearing duties. The findings could help provide new therapies for either blocked or thinned airways.   “Our work has identified the Notch signaling pathway as a central regulatory ‘switch’ that controls the differentiation of airway basal stem cells,” said Jason Rock, Ph.D., lead author and postdoctoral researcher in Brigid Hogan’s cell biology laboratory.

Tiny tumor proteins circulating in blood may be used to identify which pancreatic cancer patients would benefit from the drug Avastin, researchers at Duke University Medical Center have found. The findings, reported Monday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, could explain why bevacizumab (marketed by Roche as Avastin) did not provide clinical benefit for pancreatic cancer patients during clinical trials. Those studies showed it failed to extend lives when prescribed randomly compared to placebo