Study looks into hospital smoking bans and the effect it can have on mental health patients

Hospitals which impose a ban on smoking often make it difficult for health professionals to deal with mental health patients in the emergency department. Hospital emergency departments are challenged by increasing numbers of people with mental health problems presenting with complex suicide or psychiatric risk.

When in doubt, cut it out - treating malignant melanomas

A CCS study that looks into the difficulty of diagnosing malignant melanomas has found that in the event of uncertain diagnosis or failed treatment of a lesion, an appropriate standard of care is full excisional biopsy if not previously performed, or referral of the case to an appropriate specialist or melanoma centre. The study is co-authored by the Director of the Victorian Melanoma Service, Alfred Health, Clinical Associate Professor John Kelly.

CCS awards 'Near Miss' funding to Kate Hoy, Catriona Bradshaw and Margaret Hibbs

Dr Kate Hoy

Dr Margaret Hibbs

Dr Catriona Bradshaw

The CCS has expanded its near miss funding program this year to provide additional support to investigators affected by the tightening of NHMRC purse strings. Three grants that all scored Category 5 quartile 4 and participated in the CCS review process will be awarded $100,000 each. Congratulations to our awardees this year, Dr Kate Hoy (MAPRc), Dr Catriona Bradshaw (Melbourne Sexual Health) and Dr Margaret Hibbs (Immunology).

19 Nov CCS Annual Postgraduate Research Symposium: All welcome

Marina Iacovou presenting
at the 2013 CCS symposium

Central Clinical School invites you to attend the 2014 Annual Postgraduate Research Symposium.

• Date: Wednesday 19 November 2014 
• Time: 10 am-3.30 pm 
• Venue: Lecture Theatre, level 5, Alfred Centre for oral presentations and hallway for poster presentations and refreshments.
• Enquiries: Laisa Tigarea, hdr.ccs@monash.edu.
• RSVP link

Many and varied talents will be on display. Students will explain their research, supervisors will explain difficult ideas in lay terms for the 'No-Bell' prize, and senior staff nominated by students from Burnet, BakerIDI, ACBD and Medicine will explain randomly allocated graphs for the 'Explain my graph' section. CCS PhD students will be running the program, including chairing the presentations: Ms Jodie Abramovitch (chair), Ms Kai Sin Lee, Ms Sara Mohktar, Mr Timothy Colgan and Mr Man Kit Lee, assisted by Ms Dussy Kuttner. Participants will be judged by a panel of senior academics and postdocs. Attractive monetary prizes will be given for outstanding work. For more information, please visit: http://www.med.monash.edu.au/cecs/education/hdr-symposium.html

NTRI Forum report: Optimising support for informal carers of the long-term disabled

The National Trauma Research Institute Forum has released a report on how to help the helpers:

• What challenges are currently faced by informal (unpaid) carers of people with a long-term disability, and how are these challenges being met?
• How can knowledge of optimal strategies be applied locally to address these challenges over the lifetime of a person with a long-term disability?

See Executive summary or the full report

Perimenopausal depression may look different compared to depression in childbearing years

MAPrc researchers have published a study which found that symptoms of depression during perimenopause were found to present as subtly different to that seen during the childbearing years, with milder symptoms of depression, increased anger, reduced sleep quality, and increased fatigue that was independent of sleep quality.

Lung transplantation as rescue therapy in patients too sick to be discharged from acute care

A recent CCS study has looked at an increasing demand for lung transplantation in patients in advanced respiratory failure. Although many of these patients do not require mechanical ventilation or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, an increasing number are critically ill.

The study analyses lung transplantation in subjects who were inpatients at the time of their transplant and not expected to survive to discharge.

Study looks at small intestinal bacterial overgrowth in patients with Parkinson's disease

Source: shakeitup.org

CCS researchers conducted a study this year which looked at small intestinal bacterial overgrowth in Parkinson's disease, and a possible association with gastrointestinal symptoms and worse motor function.

Dr Eric Chow wins Burnet Prize for Infectious Diseases Research

Congratulations to Dr Eric Chow, whose poster won the Burnet Prize for Infectious Diseases Research from  those submitted for the Alfred Research Week. The poster was entitled ‘Ongoing decline in genital warts among young heterosexuals seven years after the Australian Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination programme’. Eric is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre. See more:

• about the research at BMJ publication of the same title
• More 2014 Alfred Research Week prizes.