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Student research triumph

Third-year medical student Rana Abualsaud presenting the team’s research at the Western Regional Meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine.
Third-year medical student Rana Abualsaud presenting the team’s research at the Western Regional Meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine.

Third-year medical student Rana Abualsaud presented research on heat-related illness at the Western Regional Meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM), a leading professional body for academic Emergency Physicians.

Rana presented a research project about the varying susceptibility to heat-related illness of different population groups in California, which she worked on with WCM-Q faculty Dr. Grigory Ostrovskiy, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Dr. Ziyad Mahfoud, Associate Professor of Healthcare Policy and Research.

Explaining her interest in the project, Rana said: “We were interested in studying heat-related illness in Qatar and how some populations can be more vulnerable than others. We think this research is important given the increasing attention to climate change and with extreme weather events becoming more frequent in different parts of the world.

“We were fortunate in that we found public data in California that enabled us to study the impact of heat-related illness on different ethnicities through measuring heat-related Emergency Department visits. This allowed us to make some inferences that may be relevant to the pattern of heat-related illness in Qatar.”

Dr. Ostrovskiy, who graduated from WCM-Q in 2011, returned to the college as a professor in 2016. He has a keen interest in heat-related illness and research, and currently provides mentorship to a number of students, including Rana.

Dr. Ostrovskiy said: “We submitted our research abstract to a conference and were extremely pleased to be invited to present our research. We felt this would be a great opportunity for Rana to gain some early experience presenting research at an important conference and she was eager to step up and embrace the challenge, which, as her mentor, was very gratifying to see. Furthermore, her presentation was professional and compelling – she did an amazing job.”

The research project, entitled ‘Ethnicity-based Inequality in Heat-Related Illness is on the Rise in California’, was concerned with the relationship between ethnicity and visits to the Emergency Room with problems like heatstroke. The study found that minorities were far more likely to visit the ER with problems like heatstroke than the white population, particularly during hotter years. The study also revealed that this inequality has increased in recent years. In short, ethnic minorities were found to be at an increasingly higher risk of suffering from heat-related illness.

Rana has also been invited to present the research at the annual national meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine in Indianapolis in May.

Rana added: “My love for medicine actually started when I was shadowing in the Emergency Room in high school. I love managing acute illness and being open to the surprises that can walk through the door. The variety in patient populations and presentation is also something I love. I am lucky that Dr. Ostrovskiy joined the WCM-Q faculty because since then we have been working on a number of different emergency medicine-related projects.”