Martel senior publishes research on injuries from lawn mowers

Martel senior publishes research on injuries from lawn mowers

BY LINDSEY FIELDER
Rice News staff

Martel College senior Vanessa Costilla has been fascinated with hospitals since she was 6 years old. She was jumping on the bed of her father’s pickup truck when she slipped and fell onto the concrete driveway.

Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Martel College senior Vanessa Costilla conducted a study on lawn mower-related injuries that was published in the April issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

With no visible signs of trouble, Costilla was sent home from the emergency room. “The next day, I couldn’t eat and the room was spinning, so my mom started to worry,” she said. “The hospital ran more tests and found a blood clot in my brain and I had to have surgery.”

The hospital stay would change Costilla’s life forever. “I just remember that something was always happening [in the hospital],” she said. “I loved the hustle and bustle.

And I was amazed that the doctor could actually make me better.”
While in high school, Costilla volunteered at a local hospital and found she was still enamored with medicine. After coming to Rice University as an economics and managerial studies major, Costilla decided to take the science classes required for medical school. “I think knowledge in the areas of my majors will carry over into the hospital when I get out of medical school,” she said.

With no previous research experience, Costilla recently received national attention for research she conducted as an intern at Johns Hopkins University last summer.

Using survey data, Costilla and her adviser David Bishai from Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health found that nearly 80,000 Americans a year go to the hospital for lawn mower-related injuries. The study was published in the April edition of the Annals of Emergency Medicine. She is the first author on the paper.
Costilla worked closely with Bishai to conduct the research last summer, but she continued to work on the research paper throughout her senior year at Rice.

“We performed some additional analysis during the fall semester, and I did most of the revising for publication during winter break,” she said. “Needless to say, this paper has kept me busy well past the summer I spent at Johns Hopkins.”

Bishai suggested the subject of lawn mower-related injuries after seeing them firsthand as a doctor in the emergency room. “I’m interested in rural health care so this topictied in perfectly,” Costilla said.

She said research will be part of her career after medical school. Costilla has even taken on a new interest in health-care policy.

“There are lots of important issues in health care that need to be dealt with,” she said. “I definitely want to have a practice in West Texas because I feel the population there needs it, but I want to make larger contributions too.”

Costilla will be attending Texas Tech University’s School of Medicine in the fall. “I can’t imagine doing anything else,” she said.