Hospital Groundbreaking Heralds New Era in Health Care

From a tent overlooking the construction site, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) officials, employees and supporters heralded a new era in Arkansas health care with a groundbreaking ceremony for a 500,000-square-foot expansion to UAMS Medical Center.

Construction actually started earlier this year on the hospital expansion and adjacent Psychiatric Research Institute and 1,000-space parking deck after the February implosion of the old student dormitory that stood at the site. But UAMS Chancellor I. Dodd Wilson said this was a better time to mark the expansion with a groundbreaking ceremony.

“Now you think it’s a little peculiar because we’ve already removed 17,000 truckloads of dirt out of here,” Wilson told a crowd estimated at around 275. “This is the time to have [the ceremony] because you can actually see what’s starting to happen now.”

Wilson said the expansion, opening in 2008, would boost every part of the UAMS mission: patient care, education, research and service.

The 10-level hospital expansion will include 174 adult beds, with space for growth that would bring the total capacity to 390 private adult patient rooms and 64 neonatal beds between the new facility and the hospital’s existing Ward Tower. The expansion will include a new emergency department, clinical lab and radiology department along with room to expand other services.

The more than $165 million hospital expansion, part of a more than $330 million slate of campus construction projects under way or planned, is expected to open in fall 2008. The expansion also will allow UAMS to begin phasing out use of patient rooms in the original hospital building, opened in 1955.


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UAMS Chancellor I. Dodd Wilson leads the Oct. 11 ceremonial groundbreaking for the hospital expansion.

Statins Extend Life for Elderly at Risk of Dying

In the largest study of its kind, J.L. Mehta, M.D., Ph.D., at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) has found that cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins increased the life expectancy of elderly patients by an average of two years compared to non-statin users.

Mehta, director of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at UAMS and the affiliated Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Little Rock, tracked nearly 1.5 million patients who sought treatment in 10 medical centers of the South Central Veterans Affairs Healthcare Network of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The network includes the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System on the UAMS campus.

The study’s results, which are particularly noteworthy because the statin users were at higher risk of death than the non-statin users, are published in the Oct. 1, 2006, issue of the American Journal of Cardiology.

About 350,000 patients, almost half over age 70, were prescribed statins, while 1.2 million patients were not. Statins were prescribed more often to elderly patients with a history of coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes, current smoking, and use of cardiovascular drugs.

When we performed an extensive data analysis on survival, we were surprised to find that statin users actually lived an average two years longer despite the patients having more health risk factors and being older than non-statin users,” said Mehta, who is also the Stebbins Chair in Cardiology and professor of internal medicine and physiology and biophysics. “We did not expect that statin therapy would have such a profound impact on patients’ lives.”



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