Flu season is approaching again, and parents should know that fall is the time to have your children immunized. This is especially important for children with asthma and other high-risk medical problems.

Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian has made such a dramatic impact on the life of 14-year-old Katherine Urena that her family is traveling to Washington, DC today to share their story with representatives from the offices of Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer as well as other members of Congress. For the second year in a row, the National Association of Children's Hospitals and Related Institutions (NACHRI) Family Advocacy Day is bringing in dozens of families from across the country to speak about the children's hospitals that have saved their lives and have served them so well. Thirty families from 17 different states will be at this year's conference on June 13 and 14.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center physician-scientists are presenting exciting new research at the 2007 American Transplant Congress 7th Joint Meeting of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons (ASTS) and the American Society of Transplantation (AST) in San Francisco, May 5-May 9.

The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies has awarded the 2006 to Jack David Barchas, Barklie McKee Henry Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and Psychiatrist-in-Chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Consisting of a medal and $20,000, the prize was presented at the IOM's annual meeting.

For infants with a common and potentially serious viral lower respiratory infection called bronchiolitis, a widely used steroid treatment is not effective. A new study co-authored by Dr. Joan Bregstein of the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia University Medical Center found that steroid treatment did not prevent hospitalization or improve respiratory symptoms for bronchiolitis, the most common cause of infant hospitalization. Bronchiolitis symptoms frequently include fever, runny nose, coughing and wheezing.

The most frequently performed weight-loss surgery, the gastric bypass, may not be the most effective in producing weight loss, according to a preliminary study by physician-scientists at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. The study finds that a more complex procedure, the duodenal switch, was more effective at promoting loss of body weight and body fat than gastric bypass. The study followed 13 patients who underwent duodenal switch and 33 patients who underwent gastric bypass, all with comparable pre-surgery body mass index (BMI) and body composition. One to two years after surgery, duodenal-switch patients lost 50 percent more weight than gastric-bypass patients (22.3 BMI units lost vs. 15.1 BMI units lost). Furthermore, duodenal-switch patients reduced their body fat to 25.7 percent, compared to 34.0 percent for gastric bypass patients (25 percent body fat is within the normal range for most people). These findings will be presented at the 2005 North American Association for the Study of Obesity (NAASO) meeting in Vancouver on October 16.

A small, open-label study conducted by physicians at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center suggests that there may be a new application for the novel antibiotic rifaximin in treating patients who suffer from severe Crohn's disease and who have not responded to other available medications for the disease.

As part of an ongoing Phase I NIH-funded study, brain tumor patients at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia are being treated with a novel chemotherapy treatment, in which the drug topotecan is administered directly into the brain tumor through catheters. Traditional intravenous chemotherapy cannot treat brain tumors due to limitations caused by the blood-brain barrier, which prevents drugs from entering the brain. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center is the only medical center worldwide where this topotecan treatment is available.