Each year thousands of teens and children in Manhattan require emergency medical services for psychiatric crises. Many have made a suicide attempt or are at immediate risk of suicide. These children and adolescents are evaluated and held in non-psychiatric pediatric emergency rooms, which lack the necessary psychiatric staffing and facilities, or in an adult psychiatric emergency setting -- a scenario that is often frightening for children. In response to this problem, New York's first comprehensive program dedicated to responding to child and adolescent psychiatric emergencies, the Child and Adolescent Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program (C-CPEP), has opened at the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian.

A new study from Columbia University Medical Center researchers at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia of more than 38,000 pregnant women at 15 U.S. centers demonstrates the high accuracy of non-invasive screening for Down syndrome (also known as trisomy 21) in the first trimester of pregnancy, at 11 weeks. The findings are a significant advantage over the current standard screening, a blood test performed in the second trimester of pregnancy.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is one of four hospitals nationwide, and the only hospital in the New York metropolitan area, recognized today by the American Hospital Association (AHA) for leadership and innovation in quality, safety, and commitment to patient care. The 2005 McKesson Quest for Quality Prize was awarded today at the 13th annual Health Forum and American Hospital Association Leadership Summit in San Diego.

The Patient Self-Determination Act, passed by Congress in 1990, upholds the rights of patients to grant power-of-attorney or "proxy" status to a loved one when it comes to tough decisions on end-of-life care.In most cases, patients leave explicit instructions as to their wishes, should they become incapable of making these decisions themselves. But how tightly do patients really expect proxies to adhere to these instructions, given changes in prognosis?

An interdisciplinary team led by Columbia University Medical Center received a $10 million grant from the Department of Defense to assess why breast cancer remains under-treated among black women and to better understand the disparities in survival rates.

New research is expanding what we know about the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of infertility in men. In one recent paper, a team from NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City demonstrated the effectiveness of microsurgical sperm extraction and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) -- techniques developed by Weill Cornell scientists -- in restoring fertility to men previously considered sterile due to Klinefelter syndrome. And in a commentary published in the October issue of Fertility and Sterility, NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Urologist-in-Chief and Weill Cornell Urology Chair Dr. Peter N. Schlegel compared the ease and efficacy of available sperm DNA tests.

Physician-scientists at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center are beginning a Phase III Clinical Trial of Ranirestat, a promising new investigational drug. Ranirestat is the first drug to address the underlying cause of diabetic sensorimotor polyneuropathy (DSP), also known as diabetic neuropathy, which is the most serious and common complication facing diabetics.

A new anesthetic technique for vasectomy that does not involve the use of needles has been shown to be safe and effective, according to a recent study presented by Dr. Marc Goldstein of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center's Department of Urology. NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell is the first and only site in the Northeast to offer the new technique. Among the 1,391 patients anesthetized using the no-needle technique, the average visual analogue scale (VAS) pain score for the injection was 1.65 of a maximum 10. The average VAS score during the surgical procedure was 0.67. No adverse effects were associated with the technique, reported the study, which was authored by Dr. Ronald Weiss of the University of Ottawa School of Medicine, along with NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell's Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Philip Shihua Li.