Prashanth Francis, MD, PhD

Love this idea. Especially for patients who don’t get transfused during the admission.

If endoscopists were paid by number of polyps removed instead of by number of procedures (with/without one polyp removed), would colon cancer rates go up or down (or be unchanged) ?

Recommendation from me: Check iron levels in patients following up in your clinic after admissions for GI bleeding or where significant anemia is noted. It’s easy to have all the focus go to the decompensations or questions of TIPS and transplant, but iron repletion is a pretty easy win for patients

Bejan Saeedi, MD PhD received the Sunder J. Mehta, MD Memorial Lectureship Mehta-Makhijani Fellow Award for commitment to excellence in education, participation & contribution to Grand Rounds, clinical enthusiasm, & research potential! @prashanthfrancis.bsky.social @jchristiemd.bsky.social 💪🏆🥳

This may be the paper that changes my worldview the most this year.

One set of implications is how we approach clinical vs research training. Had never considered that what clinical reps under stress induce can be called habits…and how/why that’s the opposite setup needed for research ideation.

The court ordered that NIH grant funding be unfrozen, so The Regime found a way around it. For NIH grants to be funded, a review panel must rank them. In order for a review panel to meet, they must post it on the Federal Register. Submissions to the Federal Register are now on hold “indefinitely”.

My only critique is in this part. My guess is that pretreatment antibiotics are likely always going to be needed/superior, so a better future study would be to have a comparison of FMT with bacteria producing beneficial compounds vs ones that don’t/just take up space.

I’m especially intrigued by this part as it opens the door to a new target/mechanism for those designing the FMT strains - namely, improving a patient’s stool through boosting what they already have. That seems more durable to me given high rates of recolonization/return to baseline.

Love this! It addresses so many of my frequent questions of FMT studies: Was it the abx or the FMT? Was there engraftment? What’s the mechanism? How long does it last?

Really looking forward to seeing this with a larger n and new approaches/refinement to engraftment.

I suppose it’s better to replace a huge number of referrals for incidentally found low risk hepatic steatosis with a smaller number of referrals for elevated liver stiffness in setting of very elevated liver enzymes, but this still seems like an area we can improve upon.

DNA electrophoresis and agar plate cookies

When the lab brings cookies

The CU Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology celebrates the holiday season at Punch Bowl Social Denver.

The CU Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology celebrates the holiday season at Punch Bowl Social Denver.

The CU Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology celebrates the holiday season at Punch Bowl Social Denver.

The CU Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology celebrates the holiday season at Punch Bowl Social Denver.

All is merry and bright🌟 at CU Gastro Hep! We spent a festive 🎅evening together for fun 🎶, friends🎳 & fellowship🥂 to celebrate our hard work & accomplishments. Happy Holidays! 💩@swatipatelmd.bsky.social @bilalmohammadmd.bsky.social @frankiscottmd.bsky.social @prashanthfrancis.bsky.social

Did a chalk talk on (how we arrived at) carvedilol for cirrhosis with portal HTN with the (Fellow/Resident) team and it's really surprising to me how quickly we were able to get MASLD/MASH/MetALD disseminated relative to this change in diagnosis and medical treatment of a large group of patients.

Ecstatic for this class! Congrats to all who matched today!

Happy to see more and more of my #livertwitter friends making the transition to #liversky! Let’s try to rebuild/improve upon the wonderful education/information sharing community here!

I think part of it is that our main academic site had a quality initiative around it a few years ago. Between the procedure teams and eager residents, it usually gets taken care of within 12 hours.

Ride of the Valkyries Richard Wagner, London Symphony Orchestra, Yondani Butt · Wagner: Works for Orchestra · Song · 2011

When it’s time to write the conclusions, impact and future directions section of the grant

open.spotify.com/track/2A7qdr...

In general, I find that our centers are pretty good at accomplishing this and the main reminder that our team has to recommend is to repeat a paracentesis at 48 hours to ensure adequate treatment.

I haven't seen any data for gaining back more weight after stopping. In general, the effects wear off over time, like they do for most medications. The long that patients are on it/the more weight they lose, the longer the benefit lasts.

It's a strange time where the indications for GLP1 medications are like to keep expanding (hello MASLD/MASH) but access to the medication and staying on the therapy long term remains poor - only ~20% at 2 years by one estimate.

If a new medication can't actually be taken, are lives really saved?

Yeah, we would notice a large rise in myocarditis. Weird (and tired) take.

With apologies to Bradley Cooper and Jason Isbell, maybe it’s NOT time to let the old ways die.

open.spotify.com/track/6jMbPs...

Like the radioactive spider, but more targeted/limited in scope.

Maybe one way to think about the size or activity of a field is to think about how often a podcast about the field would release an episode.

Saw iron dosed incorrectly so much that I made a SmartText to be able to quickly add it to my notes as a GI Fellow. Stop torturing patients with multiple times a day iron! Hepcidin is smarter than this and is often torturing the bowels as payback.

This argument always bugs me a little because these types of insulin are functionally and clinically distinct. This ingenuity (and the risk/trials/approval process taken on by Pharma) does deserve to be rewarded

But the most important thing is for patients to get the meds they badly need, so whatev

For my hepatologists wondering why I'm posting about children's cancers: The senior author, Dr. Crystal Mackall, was the primary mentor to my mentor, Dr. Terry Fry here at CU. And our lab neighbors are working on a different CAR for DIPG. =)

DIPG is a brain tumor that is uniformly fatal in the children in whom it occurs with a median survival of 11 months. In a Phase 1 study of this CAR T cell therapy, they hit 20 months with 2 of 11 patients still alive 30 months later with resolved neurologic symptoms. Just truly remarkable results.

Are you telling me I as a Hepatologist have to close my distillery ?