2025 News Feed
It All Starts in the Lab
Each day when Dr. Jason Collier arrives at his office, he sees a poster of a child with hundreds of needles across their arms and legs. The image represents how many insulin shots that child would need over a several-month period to control their blood glucose. “That’s a very big motivating factor to solve the problems that are in front of us,” he says.
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Global Launch of the Lancet Commission on Definition and Diagnostic Criteria of Clinical Obesity Recording Available Online
The Commission’s report made headlines in thousands major media outlets around the world. Watch the video recording of the launch event where members of the Commission present the key findings and discuss their implications for practice and policy with guest experts gathering at the Royal College of Physicians in London and at Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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Pennington Biomedical Researchers Assemble Comprehensive History of Electronic Health Records and their Role in Medical Research
Dr. Yun Shen and Dr. Gang Hu of Pennington Biomedical Research Center have recently published a piece in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, or JMIR. The study titled “Twenty-Five Years of Evolution and Hurdles in Electronic Health Records and Interoperability in Medical Research: Comprehensive Review,” explores how electronic health records’ use in medical research has evolved over the past 25 years. Dr. Shen and Dr. Hu have extensive experience in working with electronic health records to study chronic diseases, population health trends, and predictive analytics.
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Pennington Biomedical’s Dr. Kaja Falkenhain Awarded Postdoctoral Fellowship from the American Heart Association
Dr. Kaja Falkenhain, postdoctoral researcher at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Heart Association. The fellowship comes with a grant of over $150,000 to be used over two years to support Dr. Falkenhain's research project, titled “Craving Control: Rewiring the Reward Circuitry of the Human Brain in the Modern Food Environment,” which will study the brain’s reward circuitry and ingestive behavior at the intersection of obesity medication and modern food environment.
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Pennington Biomedical Research Foundation’s Annual Fundraiser ‘The Answer’ Celebrates 10th Anniversary
Pennington Biomedical Research Foundation, the fundraising support partner for Pennington Biomedical Research Center, is hosting its annual signature fundraising event “The Answer” on Friday, March 21, at 5:30 p.m. at the C.B. Pennington Conference Center on the campus of Pennington Biomedical. To celebrate The Answer’s 10th anniversary of generating support for the research center’s biomedical breakthroughs, the night’s theme will be “Decades of Discovery.”
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Pennington Biomedical Contributes to Study Advancing Medical Imaging on Body Fat and Muscle Distribution
A recent study introduces an innovative method for analyzing body composition using advanced 3D imaging and deep learning techniques. This approach aims to provide more accurate assessments of body fat and muscle distribution, which are crucial for understanding health risks associated with various conditions. The study, “3D Convolutional Deep Learning for Nonlinear Estimation of Body Composition from Whole Body Morphology,” authored by researchers from Pennington Biomedical Research Center, University of Washington, University of Hawaii and University of California-San Francisco was recently published in NPJ Digital Medicine, a journal of the Nature portfolio.
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Opportunities to Contribute to Science
To date, more than 65,000 people have been screened to participate in a clinical trial at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. Kytara Gaudin Christophe and her daughter, Chloe, share their experiences as Pennington Biomedical trial participants.
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Pennington Biomedical’s Pediatric Obesity and Health Behavior Laboratory Authors Childhood Obesity’s Most Downloaded Paper of 2024
"Closing the Gap Between Evidence and Practice for Childhood Obesity Treatment," authored by Pennington Biomedical’s Pediatric Obesity and Health Behavior Laboratory’s Dr. Amanda Staiano and Dr. Alyssa Button, was the most downloaded paper in 2024 from Childhood Obesity, a leading peer-reviewed journal dedicated to strategies for obesity prevention and weight management in children and adolescents.
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Pennington Biomedical Researchers Serve on Global Commission on Clinical Obesity that Goes Beyond BMI in Defining Obesity as a Disease
Three researchers from Pennington Biomedical Research Center served on the Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity, a global group that generated a new approach to diagnosing clinical obesity. The diagnosis is based on evaluations in addition to body mass index, or BMI, such as measures of excess body fat and objective signs and symptoms of ill health at the individual level.
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The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology: Global Commission Proposes Major Overhaul of Obesity Diagnosis
A global Commission, published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology and endorsed by more than 75 medical organisations around the world, presents a novel, nuanced approach to diagnose obesity, based on other measures of excess body fat in addition to body mass index (BMI), and objective signs and symptoms of ill health at the individual level.
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