Jessica Liu McMullin earns Travel Award, will present at IAES Congress
JUNE 2022
The 2022 Travel Award from the International Association of Endocrine Surgeon (IAES) will allow Jessica Liu McMullin, MD, MS, to attend the IAES Congress at International Surgical Week (ISW) 2022 in Vienna, August 15-18, 2022. There she will present her abstract "Environmental chemicals and their association with hyperparathyroidism," which includes her mentors and distinguished Emory general and endocrine surgeons Snehal Patel, MD, Neil Saunders, MD, Joe Sharma, MD, and Collin Weber, MD, as coauthors.
Dr. Liu McMullin was a PGY-5 general surgery resident when selected for the award. In July 2022, she will graduate from the residency and begin an endocrine surgery fellowship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Her study builds on previous Emory-based research that detected such environmental chemicals as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) and pesticides within hyperplastic parathyroid tumors, which have become gradually more prevalent over the past few decades in the United States.
Dr. Liu McMullin and her team queried the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), an annual program of studies conducted by the CDC that assesses the health and nutritional status of the U.S. population, to determine if any environmental chemicals associated with elevated parathyroid hormone (PTH) levels had been measured in laboratory serum specimens.
Upon analysis of this data, Dr. McMullin and her co-investigators found that 34 chemicals were associated with elevated PTH levels and calcium levels, including 29 different PCBs and several pesticides. These observations led the team to conclude that there appeared to be a causal link between environmental factors and the development of hyperparathyroidism, and that future studies should continue to focus on measuring chemical levels within specimens.
