Week 5 & 6: Slowing Down…
Jana E -
Good afternoon, all! Not much has happened since my last post, but that’s all part of research! Last week, I got to work on creating the draft of the abstract for my research medical paper on this special moyamoya syndrome. Of course, I’m not doing it without help — both my on site mentor and his senior fellow have been communicating with me on how to go about this paper. I’ve written research papers before, but never an official medical research one, so this is a valuable learning experience for me.
As most research projects do, my research paper is going to have to go back and forth and undergo countless revisions before it’s ready. It’s a grueling and meticulous task, but that’s research, and I want the best end result possible. If I’m planning to do lots of biological research in the future, which I am, I’m going to have to get used to it.
Since there really isn’t much to say about the first draft that I sent them, I’m going to continue last post’s conversations about variables. Last week, I focused on the demographics aspect of it, but this week I’ll share some other variables that are recorded during or after the hospital visit, not on admission like the demographics are. Two of the variables are what side the stenosis is on and what location the stenosis specifically is. As I mentioned before, stenosis is the narrowing of a vessel to the point where blood flow decreases/gets blocked. Wherever the stenosis is is a good indicator of where the moyamoya is, since the vessels are so small and tangled that flow decreases. The specific phenomenon we’ve recognized in our Hispanic female population is a bilateral moyamoya-type in the supraclinoid section of the ICA. That means the stenosis would be on both the right and the left side, and a good amount of the patients we’ve selected have that.
That’s all for now, talk more next week!
Note: The week number was changed to week 6, since week 5 was off for spring break.
Jana El-Gengaihy
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