The American College of Physicians selected a trio of Wayne State University School of Medicine students as finalists to present their research at the Medical Student National Abstract Competition as part of the organization’s Internal Medicine Meeting 2023: Mastering Medicine Together, held April 27-29 in San Diego, Calif.
The finalists were the Class of 2024’s Trish Gupte and Noor Suleiman, and the Class of 2023’s Michelle Malik. Malik was named one of five winners in the clinical vignette category of competition for “Challenges and Considerations in Clinical Diagnosis of Leflunomide-related Skin Necrosis.”
“The ACP Internal Medicine Meeting is considered the premier scientific meeting in Internal Medicine, and it is a great accomplishment to represent the Wayne State University School of Medicine in this abstract competition. I am especially proud of being named a poster winner,” Malik said.
Her abstract was a clinical case study of a patient who had started Leflunomide, a medication to treat rheumatoid arthritis, about three weeks before presenting to the emergency department with a severe rash.
“The clinical investigation and diagnosis of this rash eventually revealed her medication to be the culprit,” Malik said. “It was especially interesting because there exist only seven case descriptions of this rash in the literature ‘Leflunomide-related skin necrosis.’”
Her presentation illustrated the innocuous initial stages of the rash and its evolution into severity over a period of three weeks.
“Because this rash was psychologically and physically damaging to our patient, I also wanted to illustrate that the complaint of ‘rash,’ and in particular those with temporal association of recent drug initiation, should not be taken lightly and given its due attention and care,” she said.
Malik will begin her Internal Medicine residency in the WSU/Detroit Medical Center program after graduating from the School of Medicine on June 6.
Suleiman presented the poster and abstract “Concomitant Lymphocytic Colitis in the Setting of Recurrent Clostridium Dificile Infection.” Her classmate, Gupte, presented “A Rare Complication of Poor Nutrition: Superior Mesenteric Artery Syndrome in a Patient with Pancreatic Cancer.”
“My abstract was about a patient with pancreatic cancer who developed Superior Mesenteric Artery Syndrome, which is a rare form of small bowel obstruction, due to both her rapidly progressive malignancy and food insecurity,” Gupte said. “This case was a reminder that we must consider SMA syndrome in any of our patients who lose weight rapidly, as it is a deadly but preventable complication of malnutrition.”
The American College of Physicians is the largest medical specialty organization in the United States, with members in more than 145 countries worldwide. ACP membership includes 160,000 internal medicine physicians, related subspecialists and medical students.