The magazine’s yearly awards are compiled by Consumer’s Checkbook, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research organization that surveys Orlando area physicians, and DataJoe Research, a software and research company specializing in data collection and verification.

Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Health Faculty Physician Practice is the clinic of the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ College of Medicine, with locations in East Orlando and Lake Nona’s Medical City. The clinic specializes in primary and specialty care under one roof. In addition to caring for patients across the community, all Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Health doctors are faculty members at the College of Medicine, where they educate medical students, residents and fellows, and also conduct research.

Here are the physicians recognized by Orlando Magazine and their specialties:

• , Nephrology
• , Rheumatology
• Rheumatology
• , Geriatrics
• , Internal Medicine

To learn more information on the practice or to schedule an appointment, visit visit the .

The magazine has two yearly recognition lists. Top Doctors honorees are determined by Consumers’ CHECKBOOK, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization. The Premier Doctors List is a peer reviewed study done by an independent research company.

In addition to caring for patients at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Health’s two locations — in East Orlando and Lake Nona — the College of Medicine faculty honorees also educate medical students, residents and fellows. To request an appointment at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Health or to learn more about the practice, please visit .

Here are this year’s honorees and their specialty:

Top Doctors List Recognition

Mariana Dangiolo, family medicine, geriatrics

Premier Doctors List Recognition

Abdo Asmar, nephrology

Vladimir Neychev, endocrine and general surgery

Naveed Sami, dermatology

Top & Premier Doctors List Recognition

Shazia Beg, rheumatology

Neha Bhanusali, rheumatology

Joyce Paulson, internal medicine

Also honored was Diane Davey, who retired from the College of Medicine and continues to care for patients as a pathologist at the Orlando VA Medical Center.

This year’s honorees are:

• , Nephrology
• , Rheumatology
• , Rheumatology
• , Family Medicine and Geriatrics
• , Cardiology
• , General and Endocrine Surgery
• , Ophthalmology
• , Internal Medicine
• , Internal and Lifestyle Medicine

Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Health is the College of Medicine’s clinical practice and offers primary and specialty care to patients across the community. It has two locations — in East Orlando, just blocks from the main Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ campus, and also in Lake Nona. For more information, please visit .

The publication contains two lists — Top Doctors, compiled by Consumers’ CHECKBOOK, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., and Premier Doctors, a peer-review study conducted exclusively for the magazine by an independent research company.

Seven awardees are faculty physicians at , the College of Medicine’s clinical practice, with locations in East Orlando and Lake Nona. Here are the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Health honorees:

Top & Premier Doctors List Recognition

, rheumatology

, rheumatology

, internal medicine

Top Doctors List Recognition

, family medicine and geriatrics

Premier Doctors List Recognition

, nephrology

, general and endocrine surgery

, dermatology

Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Diane Davey also received Top Doctors recognition. A pathologist who cares for patients at the Orlando VA Medical Center, Davey is a frequent Orlando Magazine honoree and also serves as the College of Medicine’s associate dean for graduate medical education.

Veronica Sikka was named to the Premier Doctor list. She is a College of Medicine faculty member who cares for patients at the Orlando VA’s Emergency Department.

Douglas Meuser, a sports medicine specialist at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Student Health Services, also received Top Doctors recognition.

“The university is honored by these recognitions,” says Deborah German, vice president for Health Affairs and Dean of the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ College of Medicine. “Our physicians went into medicine to provide extraordinary care to our patients and the community through their own practice and by teaching the next generation of doctors.”

The physicians are all Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ College of Medicine faculty and provide care at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Health, the medical school’s academic practice. The practice offers primary and specialty care to patients across the community at two locations — in East Orlando just blocks from the main Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ campus and in Lake Nona.

The monthly magazine has a circulation of more than 100,000, is distributed to 1,000 local professional offices, and is available at Publix and CVS Pharmacies. It’s 2022 Top Physicians list includes 249 of Central Florida’s leading doctors.

Deborah German, vice president for health affairs and dean of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s College of Medicine, says the medical school and its practice are honored by the recognition. “Thank you to our community for recognizing these outstanding faculty physicians who exemplify excellent, patient-centered care,” she says.

Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Honorees

 is board certified in internal medicine and nephrology.

is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology.

 is a board-certified family physician with subspecialty certification in geriatric medicine.

 is a board-certified cardiologist with an emphasis in echocardiography.

 is a board-certified general surgeon and an expert in endocrine and endocrine cancer surgery.

 is a board-certified ophthalmologist and refractive cataract surgeon who evaluates and manages eye diseases both medically and surgically.

 is board certified in internal medicine and lifestyle medicine.

łŐľ±˛őľ±łŮĚý for more information or to make an appointment.

This year’s medical school physician awardees and their respective honors are:

• , nephrology, Premier
• , rheumatology, Top and Premier
• , rheumatology, Top and Premier
• Diane Davey, pathology, Top
• , general surgery, Premier
• , internal medicine, Top and Premier
• , dermatology, Premier
• , dermatology, Premier

Douglas Meuser, a sports medicine specialist at , was also honored as a Top Doc.

Awardees are nominated by their peers. The Top Doctors list is compiled by Consumers’ CHECKBOOK, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C. The Premier Doctors list is a peer review study, conducted exclusively for Orlando Magazine by an independent research company.

“We are grateful to the community for this honor,” says Deborah German, Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ vice president for Health Affairs and dean of the College of Medicine. “Providing extraordinary patient care to the community while we train the next generation of healthcare leaders and create scientific discoveries to improve health is the core of our mission.”

The magazine featured two lists this year – a “Top Doctors List” compiled by Consumers’ CHECKBOOK, a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC, and a “Premier Doctors List” a peer-review study, conducted exclusively for Orlando Magazine by an independent research company.

“We are thrilled and honored to have so many of our outstanding physicians recognized this year for the extraordinary, patient-centered care they provide to people across our community,” said Dr. Deborah German, Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s vice president for health affairs and founding dean of the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ College of Medicine.

Here are the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ doctors named as Orlando Magazine’s top physicians:

•  – Nephrology
•  – Rheumatology
•  – Rheumatology
•  – Family Medicine/Geriatrics
• Diane Davey – Pathology (practices at Orlando VA Medical Center)
•  – Family Medicine
• Marcia Katz – Pulmonology
• Douglas Meuser – Sports Medicine (practices at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Student Health Services)
• Vladimir Neychev – General Surgery
•  – Internal Medicine
•  – Dermatology
• Judith Simms-Cendan – OB/GYN (practices at Orlando Health’s Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children)
•  – Psychiatry
• David Weinstein – Dermatology

“COVID has had a tremendous impact not only on population health, but on our economy, our healthcare, our schools and many different parts of society,” says  Griff Parks, associate dean of research. “And it raises a number of research opportunities for our faculty to address some of these problems.”

The funds are designed to help researchers generate preliminary data for projects that are competitive for larger grants.

Parks invited research ideas from faculty across the medical school. An internal review group selected five projects from a pool of 18 applications.

“COVID-19 is still here. There are no cures, no vaccines and still so many problems in the medical field that the pandemic has presented to us,” Parks says. “So, it’s important that we support researchers who are trying to address those very important problems.”

Here are the research projects:

Researchers: Saleh Naser (Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences) and Shazia Beg (Internal Medicine)

The majority of COVID-19 fatalities are in people who have underlying autoimmune inflammatory conditions like Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis. This study will investigate how underlying inflammatory diseases, as well as anti-inflammatory medications, affect the susceptibility of patients to the COVID-19 virus and the persistence of the infection.

Researchers: Ratna Chakabarti and Debopam Chakrabarti, Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences

Natural products including fungi have been used to develop drugs for many diseases. As there are no effective drugs for COVID-19, this study will examine the use of fungal extracts to find new treatment options for COVID-19. It hopes to identify new chemotypes that interfere with the virus-host cell recognition mechanism.

Researcher: Saleh Rahman, Medical Education

The effects of COVID-19 on the health of racial and ethnic minority groups are still emerging. However, current data suggest a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups. This study will try to understand how social determinants of health and health disparities impact diagnostic and clinical outcomes throughout Florida, particularly in the Hispanic population.

Researchers: Annette Khaled (Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences) and Le Zhang (Nano-Engineering)

This project will examine how the coronavirus causes the immune system to overreact, leading to life threatening lung damage. The team will create coronavirus “surrogates,” using nanoparticles coated with proteins from the coronavirus. Using these viral surrogates, they will study how proteins from the coronavirus activate the cells of our immune system, disrupting the function of those cells responsible for protecting us from viral infections.

Researchers:  Hung Nguyen and Justine Tigno-Aranjuez, Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences

During COVID-19 infection, important cells in our immune system, T cells and antigen presenting cells, are trying to respond to control and eliminate the virus. Antigen presenting cells (APCs) “present” portions of the virus to T cells which helps to activate them. T cells have direct cytotoxic activity against the virally infected cells and can secrete molecules to enhance the response by other immune cells. During COVID-19, APCs become dysfunctional and T cells exhausted which prevents them from carrying out their proper functions. The researchers believe that changes in the metabolism of these immune cells is key to this dysfunction/exhaustion and will try to manipulate or target metabolism to improve the response against SARS-CoV-2.

McLees and five other patients with rare autoimmune and skin diseases – such as lupus, scleroderma and psoriasis — spoke  during the skin and musculoskeletal module directed by Shazia BĂ©g, a rheumatologist at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Health and assistant professor of internal medicine.

“When my patients hear that I teach, they immediately ask about helping me with my classes as they want to educate others about these rare diseases,” says Bég, who treats five of the six volunteers.

“I am hoping when the students leave here today they will be able to diagnose this disease early.” – Roy Louden, Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Health patient

“The diseases that I cover in my module are pretty rare, so my students get to talk to the patients and see these diseases that they may not ever see again.  Just to hear the patients’ stories, see their symptoms and how they present with these illnesses really resonates better, as they can literally put a face to the disease.”

For Roy Louden, teaching others has become a way for him to cope with his illness. Louden suffers from scleroderma, an autoimmune rheumatic disease that affects approximately 300,000 Americans. He has been assisting Bég with her classes since 2012 and has a YouTube channel where he educates others about living with scleroderma. Now in the advanced stages of the disease, Louden’s symptoms are visible — skin tightening and muscle wasting in his limbs has caused his hands and wrists to bend inward. But in its early stages, the disease is difficult to diagnose. Louden says he volunteers to speak at the medical school because he wants to help future doctors recognize his disease’s early symptoms.

“A lot of scleroderma patients I’ve met online say they went undiagnosed for years because some doctors can’t recognize it or they don’t remember it from med school if they even learn about it,” Louden says. “So this is my way of helping, it’s my way of staying positive and making impact. I am hoping when the students leave here today they will be able to diagnose this disease early.”

During the exercise, organized by Bég and Jeff Greenwald, assistant professor of dermatology, students rotated through small roundtable sessions where they engaged with each patient. They did not know their patient’s disease but had about 15 minutes to review the patient’s history and see current symptoms to reach a diagnosis.  They asked questions about symptoms, when they first appeared, and had patients show them photographs of previous skin lesions.

McLees, who served as a New York Police Department sergeant, says he finds fulfillment in helping medical students learn. “When I heard that Dr. Bég was a teacher, I volunteered to help her with her students in whatever way she needed,” McLees says. “It’s really rewarding for me knowing that I am helping to train the next generation of doctors, showing them a real life patient with these health issues which is beyond a textbook with pictures. And it’s more than just teaching them about the diseases, they are also learning to interview and engage with patients in a compassionate way.”

“It’s very easy to remember when you’re engaging with an actual patient and seeing the visible symptoms of diseases.” – Courtney Bell, Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ medical student

First and second-year students usually develop their interviewing and diagnosing skills by working with “standardized patients” – actors who pretend to have a medical condition. So for some, Bég’s session was their first experience interviewing a real patient with a disease.

“We learn about these diseases in class, but I felt way more engaged meeting the patients, and interviewing them to try to figure out what was wrong,” says medical student Daralys Lopez. “I feel like this was a nice change of pace to classes.  I was also impacted by how positive and upbeat the patients were despite their illness.”

Second-year med student Courtney Bell says the interview sessions have made a lasting impression and have helped to cement the concepts she learned in class.

“You can teach us a hundred diseases in three weeks, we won’t remember everything.  But it’s very easy to remember when you’re engaging with an actual patient and seeing the visible symptoms of diseases,” Bell says. “I’m not going to forget the time I met Mr. Louden or the 9-11 first responder with lupus. And this will definitely help us to remember these concepts years from now when patients come to us with these diseases.”

A team of researchers has discovered a link between rheumatoid arthritis and Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis, known as MAP, a bacteria found in about half the cows in the United States. The bacteria can be spread to humans through the consumption of infected milk, beef and produce fertilized by cow manure.

The Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ researchers are the first to report this connection between MAP and rheumatoid arthritis in a study published in the Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology journal this week. The study, funded in part by a $500,000 grant from the Florida Legislative, was a collaboration between Saleh Naser, Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ infectious disease specialist, Dr. Shazia BĂ©g, rheumatologist at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s physician practice, and Robert Sharp, a biomedical sciences doctoral candidate at the medical school.

Naser had previously discovered a connection between MAP and Crohn’s disease and is involved in the first ever phase III-FDA approved clinical trial to treat Crohn’s patients with antibiotics. Crohn’s and rheumatoid arthritis share the same genetic predispositions and both are often treated using the same types of immunosuppressive drugs.  Those similarities led the team to investigate whether MAP could also be linked to rheumatoid arthritis.

“Here you have two inflammatory diseases, one affects the intestine and the other affects the joints, and both share the same genetic defect and treated with the same drugs. Do they have a common trigger? That was the question we raised and set out to investigate,” Naser said.

For the study, Bég recruited 100 of her patients who volunteered clinical samples for testing.  Seventy-eight percent of the patients with rheumatoid arthritis were found to have a mutation in the PTPN2/22 gene, the same genetic mutation found in Crohn’s patients, and 40 percent of that number tested positive for MAP.

“We believe that individuals born with this genetic mutation and who are later exposed to MAP through consuming contaminated milk or meat from infected cattle are at a higher risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis,” Naser said.

About 1.3 million adults in the U.S. have rheumatoid arthritis – an autoimmune and inflammatory disease that causes the immune system to attack a person’s joints, muscles, bones and organs. Patients suffer from pain and deformities mostly in the hands and feet. It can occur at any age but the most common onset is between 40 and 60 years old and is three times more prevalent in women.

Although case studies have reported that some RA patients suffer from Crohn’s disease and vice versa, the researchers say a national study needs to investigate the incidence of the two diseases in the same patients.

“We don’t know the cause of rheumatoid arthritis, so we’re excited that we have found this association,” BĂ©g said. “But there is still a long way to go.  We need to find out why MAP is more predominant in these patients – whether it’s present because they have RA, or whether it caused RA in these patients. If we find that out, then we can target treatment toward the MAP bacteria.”

The team is conducting further studies to confirm findings and plan to study patients from different geographical and ethnic backgrounds.

“Understanding the role of MAP in rheumatoid arthritis means the disease could be treated more effectively,” Naser said.  “Ultimately, we may be able to administer a combined treatment to target both inflammation and bacterial infection.”

Naser holds a Ph.D in Medical Microbiology from New Mexico State University. He joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ in 1995. He has been investigating Crohn’s disease and other auto-immune diseases for more than 30 years. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and has presented his work at numerous conferences.  He has several patents including a licensed DNA technology for detecting MAP.

BĂ©g, a board-certified rheumatologist, has been with Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ since 2011 after completing her fellowship in rheumatology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. In addition to practicing medicine at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Health, she is a full-time faculty member at the college. Her research and clinical interests include conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, lupus and osteoporosis.