Expanding Services and Pushing the Field Forward

The year 2024 saw more robust growth across Mount Sinai’s Catherine and Henry J. Gaisman Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine. From an expanding lung transplantation service to a new pulmonary rehabilitation program and increased asthma research, the Division propelled the full range of pulmonary medicine forward.

That pulmonary rehabilitation program leads off this Specialty Report. It launched in July 2024 to serve patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pulmonary hypertension, interstitial lung disease, pulmonary fibrosis, and sarcoidosis, among other conditions. It offers patients 8 to 12 weeks of muscle strengthening, helpful breathing techniques, education, nutritional support, and lifestyle changes.

Mount Sinai has also become one of a handful of centers in the country to offer integrated pulmonary hypertension services, joining pulmonology and cardiology into a multidisciplinary whole. This integration is key for the implementation of recent advances in treatment, diagnostics, and monitoring.

We advanced the field in several areas of pulmonary-related cancer, developing a new staging system for pleural mesothelioma, a program to address the high rates of never-smoking lung cancer in Asian women, and an enhanced program to address incidental lung nodules.

Our sleep apnea expertise now includes a new artificial intelligence model for analyzing sleep study data to provide not only an automated approach to diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), but also a robust profile of patient risk for cardiovascular outcomes, all-cause mortality, and daytime sleepiness. We also launched a sleep obesity program that takes a holistic, multidisciplinary approach to treating OSA in patients with obesity.

A Mount Sinai researcher has founded a regional research consortium to pool the work of some of the top labs in the field to promote a better understanding of CFTR, a protein implicated in cystic fibrosis, and how it could lead to new therapies for lung infections.

I hope you find this report illuminating and helpful in your own clinical and research endeavors. As always, I welcome your feedback at charles.powell@mssm.edu.