Sleeve Gastrectomy—a minimally invasive surgery to reduce the size of the stomach--is now the most popular weight loss surgery at our Center and in the world. Columbia surgeon Dr. Abraham Krikhely tells how it can help patients achieve their desired goals—improving both their health and quality of life.

When it comes to gut health, there’s so much information regarding what you should or should not be eating or supplementing with. There is also a lot of hype surrounding both probiotics and prebiotics. Let’s take a look at the facts.

NYP/Columbia is one of the leading centers in the world for patients with end-stage heart disease, and one of the first to allow those with end-stage heart failure to benefit from Heartmate 3. This new left ventricle assist device (LVAD) takes over the pumping action of the heart, moving oxygen-rich blood throughout the body.

New antiviral therapies for Hep C are eliminating complications and producing better than 90 percent cure rates, says Lorna Dove, MD, MPH, a hepatologist at Columbia’s Center for Liver Disease and Transplantation. In the past clinicians used to “watch and wait” carefully monitoring the patients to see if they would fall into the 25% who develop fibrosis, and the smaller percentage who progress to liver cancer. “In the past, drugs for this virus were hard to take and we weren’t sure how well they would work in different populations. As a result, many individuals felt they were living with time bomb and in the meantime, worried that they might transmit Hep C to their loved ones.

Cancer that spreads to the lining of the abdominal wall is typically lethal within six months. However many patients with this diagnosis are living longer with advanced treatments available at NYP/Columbia — one of the few programs in the nation to perform complex, extensive cytoreduction operations paired with hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC).

The Adult Small Bowel Program at NYP/Columbia University is making advances in managing patients with intestinal and multivisceral transplants.

As a digestive disease dietitian, I have been getting a lot of questions surrounding the alkaline diet. Google alone provides over three million results on this topic! The problem is, almost everything you read and hear has zero scientific evidence. People think that an array of digestive diseases, including cancer and reflux, can be prevented or cured if the body is made more alkaline. So, it is time to set the record straight and separate fact from fiction.

NYP/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital has one of the top programs in the nation for the diagnosis and treatment of pediatric vascular anomalies. The Vascular Anomalies Group evaluates patients with a variety of vascular tumors, malformations, and associated syndromes including the newly categorized PIK3CA-related overgrowth spectrum (PROS), formerly labeled overgrowth syndromes.

New data on potential effects of anesthesia on fetal and infant brain development raised concerns at the October Clinical Congress of the American College of Clinical Surgeons. Steven Stylianos, MD, Chief of the Division of Pediatric Surgery at Columbia University Medical Center and Surgeon-in-Chief at NYP/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital interprets the new studies, along with Lena S. Sun, MD, Chief, Division of Pediatric Anesthesiology at NYP/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and a leading authority in this field.

NYP/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital has one of the most advanced pediatric intestinal transplantation and rehabilitation programs in the country. “We have developed new protocols using induction therapy and in last four years, have achieved 100 percent one-year patient survival,” reports Mercedes Martinez, MD, Director of the Intestinal Transplant Program at the Center for Liver Disease. “We also are developing new research studying mechanisms of rejection in these patients. We also have one of the most comprehensive programs in the nation for pediatric liver transplantation with better than expected outcomes for patients and graft survival, at one month, three years and five years.”