New Research Series

My very clever husband, and creator of the website Charlottology, has inspired me to add a new dimension to this blog – one where I search for medical studies relating to lymphatic malformations and create summaries based on what I find.  This will hopefully serve as a resource for people to quickly learn about the latest research concerning lymphatic malformations without having to actually read the lengthy medical journal articles.

I do not have any formal medical training, however, once you have a child with any type of medical condition, you tend to, over time, become an untrained expert in that area.  As I learn more about lymphatic malformation, I become fascinated with it, and want to learn more – especially about treatment options and the research that has been done on various treatments.  What has worked?  What hasn’t?  Which treatment options have the best success rates for the different types of vascular anomalies?  These are all things that I have researched.  I have found some really good articles from medical journals, and I want to share what I have found out with all of you.  I would also like to continue learning about LM and stay up-to-date with the latest research.

This new series will also feed my love of research, data, statistics, and my new love of the medical field.  I am a research/data analyst by training, and nowadays most of my work consists of SAS programming to analyze community college data (which I love!) but I do miss reading peer-reviewed research.  Throughout graduate school, my research area focused on perfectionism, life stress, and sociocultural influences on body dissatisfaction – and that was fun – but my interests have certainly shifted since graduate school.

My professional interests currently consist of data analysis in higher education to inform decision-making (aka Institutional Research), which I really love, but lately I am also interested in medical data analysis.  This series will also feed this budding interest of mine and seek to inform my readers about what is going on in the research world of lymphatic malformation.

I am excited to get this started…more to come soon!