You're back?!

Oh yes, should probably explain. Jackie and I came back, with great support from NYU and the International Health Project office, to complete our research from last year. Jackie also had her boyfriend Carlos to visit and live with, and I just came along for the ride for 2 months. I am staying in the apartment of our bosses, which is pretty nice and central. They live in the US, but keep this apt as an office and for their four -70C freezers full of placental samples infected with congenital Chagas. I live alone now, but next week another 3-4 researchers will come for a few weeks so it'll get tight.

While we are here, we've been sorting and analyzing data. Each of our 425 patients we collected last year has 350 unique data points (questionnaire, bloods, EKGs, echoes, etc). It's hours with Stata, which is pretty user-friendly. We'll use a few weeks for follow-ups on ~100 of our participants who are most at risk for having Chagas disease progression, as the disease takes 10-30 years to develop fulminant heart failure and we want to catch what is changing. We'll do another EKG, echo, and take blood samples to culture for the parasite and other assays. Oh, and chat up a storm when we can (I really miss working with the patients). Yay!

And great news: our awesome bosses earned an R01, the biggest NIH research grant, to run a long-term Chagas cardiomyopathy project! So basically it will be our study expanded exponentially, with a goal of 3,000 people over 5 years with follow-up.  So anyone in medical research looking for a project to help out on, let me tell you about Chagas...