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Birmingham Hospitalist in Iraq By
laura FreeMan
Ronald Roan, MD in Iraq.
The 20-year mark is when most military personnel think of retiring to civilian life. After 21 years in the Air Force, Ronald Roan, MD returned to the Army with the goal of completing another 20 years where his dual careers in medicine and the military began as a medic in 1990. As chief of staff at the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center’s Level I Trauma Center, Roan’s latest deployment was in Iraq.
Dogs are heroes too.
“We cared for both American and coalition forces serving in the region. In addition to patients from Iraq, we saw cases flown in from Syria and Jordan. After the war, most of the cases we see have been either medical or non-combat trauma,” Roan said. “In addition to patients from the U.S., many (CONTINUED ON PAGE 4)
CARDIOLOGY
UAB Cardiogenomics Clinic Helps Patients with Inherited Heart Disease By SteVe SPenCer Back in the early 2000s when Pankaj Arora, MD was training in population genomics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Broad Institute, he got his first inkling of the possibilities that genetic testing could do for medicine. “Those were the early days of genome-wide association studies, where we realized that we could scan through the genomes of individuals in an unbiased fashion to look at genetic variations contributing to a disease,” he said. Years later, he put his vision to work with the founding of the UAB Cardioge-
nomics Clinic in 2021. The clinic, which is just one of two in the southeast, provides patients with a cardiovascular assessment that includes genetic testing, genomic counseling, and a personalized treatment plan for patients who are at risk of inherited cardiovascular diseases. “Inherited cardiovascular conditions include abnormally high cholesterol, cardiomyopathy and arrhythmias. Many of these conditions can be managed through screenings, follow-ups, prevention and other treatment options,” said Arora, who serves as director of the Cardiogenomics Clinic. The clinic sees referral patients from
Pankaj Arora, MD confers with a patient.
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