Florida - May 2012 Archives

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — May 24, 2012.   The Jacksonville campus of Mayo Clinic will invest about $97 million in two new major construction projects scheduled to begin this summer. The projects include the addition of two floors and 90 beds to its hospital, and the construction of an off-site primary care center that will be built near the intersection of Interstate 295 East Beltway (formerly 9A) and Gate Parkway. The expansion projects will add about 400 new jobs at Mayo and 250 construction jobs, says William Rupp, M.D., chief executive officer of Mayo Clinic in Florida. Mayo Clinic currently has about 4,900 employees and generates $1.6 billion annually to the northeast Florida economy. "Our hospital has been operating at or near capacity almost since it first opened four years ago," Dr. Rupp says. "The additional beds and other improvements to the hospital will help us continue to offer the highest quality of care and meet the needs of our patients." This marks the first expansion of the Mayo Clinic hospital since it opened in April 2008. Currently, the hospital has 214 beds. After the $80 million expansion, the hospital will have 304 private rooms and eight floors. The two-story, 40,000-square-foot primary care center will be designed to support 20 physicians and providers and offer X-ray, mammography, ultrasound and laboratory services. The high-performance and environmentally friendly building design will allow Mayo to seek LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification when construction is completed.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — May 18, 2012.  Recent studies have shown that palliative care interventions aimed at addressing patients' emotional, spiritual and social needs have a significant impact on cancer patients' quality of life and may even improve cancer patients' overall survival. Despite this, most cancer patients being cared for in their communities do not have access to these services. VIDEO ALERT: Additional audio and video resources, including comments by Dr. Colon-Otero, are available on YouTube. Most cancer patients also do not have advance directives addressed and are not aware of the benefits of hospice services. In order to address this issue, researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida decided to test whether a nurse practitioner-driven consultation that used quality-of-life assessment tools and advance directives tools resulted in improvement in the cancer patients' quality of life. The researchers, who published their findings online in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, say their study suggests that a consultative visit between a nurse practitioner and a metastatic cancer patient goes a long way to improving that patient's emotional and mental well-being. The study results were strongly positive despite the fact that only 26 patients were enrolled. A total of 100 had been planned but accrual to the study was halted when other recently completed randomized studies had shown the benefit of similar nurse driven palliative interventions. Patients also frequently refused to enroll if they were randomized to the "control" arm, which did not include a discussion with an oncology advanced registered nurse practitioner about advance directives and how their symptoms could best be managed. The 12 patients who did receive intervention from a nurse had a significant improvement in their emotional health, compared to the 14 patients in the control arm. "The findings should be extremely helpful to oncologists in both community and academic medical practices concerned about how to incorporate palliative care, including discussions about advance directives in the outpatient management of their cancer patients," says the study's senior investigator, Gerardo Colon-Otero, M.D., an oncologist in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Mayo Clinic in Florida. The study also demonstrates that oncology clinics are not doing enough to help improve their patients' quality of life because they are so focused on treating the cancer. As a result, there are missed opportunities to provide additional support and many patients end up enrolling in hospice care much too late and do not have advance directives completed in a timely fashion. "This study suggests that we shouldn't be afraid of these discussions, and that many of our patients actually welcome having advance directives and hearing about hospice services," Dr. Colon-Otero says. "This relatively simple strategy of having a nurse practitioner trained in palliative care and embedded within the oncology clinic to provide these consultation services is helpful, all the way around."

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — May 17, 2012.  By simply shining a tiny light within the small intestine, close to that organ's junction with the pancreas, physicians at Mayo Clinic's campus in Florida have been able to detect pancreatic cancer 100 percent of the time in a small study. The light, attached to a probe, measures changes in cells and blood vessels in the small intestine produced by a growing cancer in the adjoining pancreas. VIDEO ALERT: Video of Dr. Michael Wallace discussing the study is available on the Mayo Clinic News Network, our new method for delivering embargoed media content. The network requires a username and password, which can be obtained at http://NewsNetwork.MayoClinic.org. Learn about this new network by watching this short video. This minimally invasive technique, called Polarization Gating Spectroscopy, will now be tested in a much larger international clinical trial led by the Mayo Clinic researchers. The preliminary study suggests it may be possible, one day, to use a less invasive endoscope to screen patients for early development of pancreatic cancer. The findings are being highlighted in a special address by Mayo Clinic gastroenterologist Michael Wallace, M.D., at the international Digestive Disease Week 2012, the world's largest gathering of physicians and researchers who treat, and study, disorders of the gastrointestinal tract. The pancreas is notoriously hard to reach and see due to its very deep location in the abdomen, surrounded by intestines. The study investigators theorized that there may be changes in the nearby "normal appearing" tissue of the small intestine which is much more accessible. "No one ever thought you could detect pancreatic cancer in an area that is somewhat remote from the pancreas, but this study suggests it may be possible," says Dr. Wallace, the chairman of the Division of Gastroenterology at Mayo Clinic in Florida. "Although results are still preliminary, the concept of detection field effects of nearby cancers holds great promise for possible early detection of pancreatic cancer." Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly of human tumors. It is only curable in 5 percent of cases, and even when it is surgically removed, 70 percent of patients have a recurrence that is fatal, Dr. Wallace says. There are no ways currently to detect the cancer early enough to cure a substantial number of patients, he says. Pancreatic cancer is now usually detected through an imaging scan, followed by an invasive biopsy. Tumors found in this way are usually at an advanced stage. In this study, the Mayo Clinic physicians tested a light probe developed by their long-time collaborators at Northwestern University.