American Educational Institute

09/26/2026

The scan ordered for pain is often the one that finds the tumor. In pediatric GU, there's no screening program for gonadal malignancy. The ultrasound you ordered for torsion or pelvic pain might be the only chance to catch it early.

Four things every radiologist reading pediatric GU imaging should know. 👉
Summer Kaplan, MD covers pediatric GU emergencies in AEI Seminars' Radiology Update. Accredited CME, 55+ destinations.

09/24/2026

Most kids with cancer are diagnosed by a clinician who wasn't looking for cancer.

It's not the oncologist who finds it first. It's the EM doc seeing an undifferentiated kid with fatigue. The pediatrician on the third visit for the same vague complaint. The urgent care PA who orders labs because something just doesn't add up.

A UK population study of nearly 2,000 children diagnosed with cancer found a median total diagnostic interval of 4.6 weeks from first symptom to diagnosis. Some took months. And the interval wasn't about the disease hiding. The presentation looked like everything else: a virus, growing pains, a bruise that won't heal.

A separate study looking at pediatric CNS tumors in the ED found that the kids with delayed diagnoses had something in common: they'd already been to the emergency department. They'd already been seen. They'd already been sent home.

The skill isn't memorizing red flags, though that helps. It's building a habit of asking what you might not be considering when a kid's story doesn't quite fit, and being willing to let the answer be something serious even when the odds say it probably isn't.

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. If you see kids in the ED or in primary care, you're closer to that first diagnostic moment than most specialists will ever be.

Emily Rose, MD covers recognizing the subtle in pediatric patients in AEI Seminars' Emergency Medicine & Acute Care Update. Accredited CME across 55+ destinations.

Link: https://aeiseminars.com/emergency-medicine-and-acute-care-update-cmece

09/23/2026

FASD is as common as autism. It's diagnosed a fraction as often. And who gets the diagnosis has less to do with who's actually affected than with who clinicians are primed to suspect.

A 2023 Harvard-affiliated study found racial and ethnic disparities in the association between alcohol intake during pregnancy and fetal alcohol syndrome diagnosis. Same exposure, different diagnostic outcomes depending on the patient's background. A 2024 Frontiers review went further, documenting how those disparities run through the entire care pathway, from prevention to assessment to intervention, and found that the diagnostic tools themselves have normative facial references for only a handful of racial and ethnic groups.

So the question becomes: if your screening tools weren't built to recognize this condition across the full population, and your clinical assumptions about who drinks during pregnancy carry implicit bias, how many kids are you missing?

FASD affects an estimated 1 to 5% of US children. It's the leading preventable cause of developmental disabilities. And it looks like ADHD, like a behavioral problem, like a learning disability, like a dozen other things a clinician might reach for before considering prenatal alcohol exposure. Especially if the child in front of them doesn't match the profile they're unconsciously expecting.

September is FASD Awareness Month. Implicit bias isn't a compliance checkbox. It's a diagnostic variable. It changes what you see, what you screen for, and what you document. And in a condition this under-recognized, that variable has consequences.

Rachel Godsil, JD covers implicit bias in clinical encounters in AEI Seminars' State Requirements Course. Accredited continuing medical education across 55+ destinations.

09/22/2026

The imaging order says rotator cuff. But the findings that change the clinical plan are in the synovium.

MRI detects synovitis, bone marrow edema, and marginal erosions before radiographs show structural damage and before the window for treatment escalation closes. Swipe for what to look for and why it matters. 👉

Steven Soliman, MD breaks down shoulder MRI anatomy for inflammatory joint disease detection in AEI Seminars’ Musculoskeletal Imaging Update. Accredited CME, 55+ destinations.

🔗 https://aeiseminars.com/musculoskeletal-imaging-update-cmece

09/21/2026

09/17/2026

A patient comes into your ED with alcohol withdrawal. You stabilize them. But there's a good chance nobody screened for the thing that's more likely to kill them long-term.

Alcohol use disorder carries roughly a fivefold increase in su***de mortality. That's not a secondary concern. That's a co-occurring condition that walks into most EDs wearing the mask of a withdrawal presentation and walks out without being assessed.

Over a third of patients entering substance use treatment endorse suicidal ideation at intake. Many of them are also carrying depression, PTSD, or both. And the pattern that keeps showing up in the literature is that these conditions don't just coexist. They compound each other's risk. One study found that people with AUD and even low-level depression had su***de attempt histories comparable to people with severe depression alone.

The ED is often the only clinical touchpoint these patients have. If the protocol stops at CIWA scoring and benzodiazepine taper, you've managed the acute problem. You haven't touched the thing underneath it.

An AAEM white paper on ED management of alcohol-related presentations laid out the case for integrating AUD treatment initiation into the emergency visit itself. Not referring out. Starting in the room. That same logic applies to mental health screening - and it changes what a "complete" alcohol withdrawal workup actually looks like.

September 10 is World Su***de Prevention Day. For emergency clinicians, the takeaway is straightforward: the withdrawal brought them in. What you screen for before they leave might be what keeps them alive.

Brian Fuehrlein, MD, PhD covers alcohol withdrawal recognition and management in AEI Seminars' Emergency Medicine & Acute Care Update. Accredited CME across 55+ destinations.

🔗 https://aeiseminars.com/emergency-medicine-and-acute-care-update-cmece

09/17/2026

Alzheimer's pathology starts building 13 to 22 years before a patient notices anything wrong. Most annual physicals don't screen for it.

Think about that math for a second. A 58-year-old comes in for their executive health exam. You run cardiac imaging, metabolic panels, the usual. Their brain has been changing for a decade and nobody's looking.

We now have plasma biomarkers, including p-Tau217, that can flag
Alzheimer's pathology during the asymptomatic phase. Not ten years from now. Now. Validated cognitive risk markers and advanced neuroimaging are giving clinicians real tools to assess brain health early, the same way we've been assessing cardiovascular health for years.

A 2024 review in Brain Sciences put it plainly: dementia care has to move upstream. Waiting until a patient has measurable cognitive impairment means the preclinical window where intervention could actually change the trajectory has already started closing.

September 21 is World Alzheimer's Day. If your executive health protocol covers the heart but skips the brain, it's got a hole in it.

Joel K. Kahn, MD, FACC covers what a modern executive health physical actually looks like in AEI Seminars' Medical-Dental-Legal Update. Accredited CME across 55+ destinations.

🔗 https://aeiseminars.com/MEDL

09/16/2026

Opioid use disorder has three FDA-approved medications and a behavioral treatment with robust RCT support. It's still one of the most undertreated chronic diseases in medicine.

The gap isn't scientific. Contingency management, for example, stays underdeployed because of clinician unfamiliarity, cost, and anti-kickback constraints, not weak data.

Worth noting as overdose awareness week closes: most OUD treatment now happens against a fentanyl-dominant supply, and comparative effectiveness research is still catching up. Retention differences between agonists matter more when the illicit supply is high-potency.

Swipe for the framework. Dr. Brian Fuehrlein, MD, PhD teaches OUD treatment in AEI's State Requirements Course.

09/13/2026

The 30-Year-Old Patient With a 65-Year-Old Body

Nearly one in three women who survived childhood cancer are already showing signs of premature aging, at an average age of just 30.

A study of 3,322 childhood cancer survivors (published in Cancer) used a "Deficit Accumulation Index," a tally of 44 age related health problems, to measure biological aging. Results: 20% of survivors fell into the medium aging category, 8% into high. Among women specifically, 31% showed medium or high burden, versus 24% of men.

The diet connection
Diet quality across the group was poor (average Healthy Eating Index: 60/100). But better diet tracked with less accumulated aging: every 10 point improvement cut the odds of high aging by 20% overall, and by 26% in women specifically.

The surprising part
The protective effect of good diet was strongest in survivors who'd had the most aggressive treatment. Those who received chest radiation or anthracycline chemotherapy saw diet cut their odds of high aging by 35 to 37%. In survivors without that treatment history, diet showed almost no measurable effect.

Why it matters
This is cross sectional data, not proof of cause and effect, but it hands physicians something actionable: the aging index can be built from existing chart data, and diet is a conversation, not a referral. Survivors with the heaviest treatment histories may be the ones who benefit most from that conversation.

Stay current with the latest research. AEI Seminars publishes a research summary twice monthly, translating new clinical literature into what it means for the patient in front of you. Subscribe to our newsletter and explore our accredited CME, CLE & CE courses at destinations worldwide.

09/11/2026

Up to a third of ovarian masses classified as suspicious on ultrasound turn out to be benign at surgery. Every one of those cases is a patient who underwent an operation she may not have needed.

That's the problem O-RADS MRI was designed to solve.

When ultrasound can't tell you whether an adnexal mass is malignant, MRI can. The ACR's O-RADS MRI risk stratification system uses a 1-to-5 scoring framework to characterize what ultrasound left indeterminate. A systematic review and meta-analysis of its diagnostic performance found pooled sensitivity above 93% and specificity above 90% for distinguishing benign from malignant lesions.

In practice, that means fewer unnecessary surgeries for patients with benign masses. Faster referral to gynecologic oncology for patients with malignant ones. And for the referring OB/GYN or primary care physician, a structured report that actually tells them what to do next.

September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month. The conversation usually centers on screening, and it should. But the diagnostic accuracy of what happens after an adnexal mass is found determines whether the patient gets the right surgery, by the right surgeon, at the right time.

That's an imaging literacy problem. And it's solvable.

Robert M. Marks, MD, FSAR covers GYN cancer imaging and O-RADS in AEI Seminars' Radiology Update. Accredited continuing medical education across 55+ destinations.