Medicine & Health

Faculty experts from across Washington University in St. Louis draw upon their research, their instruction, their experience and their thought leadership to proffer insight and ideas for the new administration, the new beginning.

Dr. Karen Joynt Maddox expects the new Biden/Kamala Harris administration to retool and reinforce Obamacare, rather than the previous administration’s failed attempts to repeal and replace. She offers areas ripe for both quick and gradual change: reinstating health discrimination protection, investing in insurance enrollment, creating the “public option,” and broadening competition in insurance markets.

School of Medicine researchers have received an NIH grant to study factors that prevent pregnant women from getting tested for COVID-19; to evaluate the importance of testing regularly during pregnancy; and to see whether pregnant women with COVID-19 need specialized care.

A new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that measuring mitochondrial DNA in the blood of patients with COVID-19 can help predict which patients are at highest risk of severe disease, requiring more intensive care.

New School of Medicine research indicates that allergens in the environment often are to blame for episodes of acute itch in eczema patients. Researchers found the itch signals are being carried to the brain along a previously unrecognized pathway that current drugs don’t target.

Five faculty members at the School of Medicine have been elected fellows of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). They are Ernie-Paul Barrette, MD, Jeffrey Henderson, MD, PhD, David Hunstad, MD, Stephen Liang, MD, and Hilary Reno, MD, PhD. 

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have found that there is no benefit in providing supplemental oxygen to mothers during labor and delivery, a decades-long and common practice. Infants born to women who received supplemental oxygen fared no better or no worse than those born to women who had similar labor experiences but breathed room air.

Lindsay Stark, associate professor at the Brown School, has received a one-year $290,017 grant from UNICEF to assess gender-based violence during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have shown that Chiari 1 malformation can be caused by variations in two genes linked to brain development and that children with large heads are at increased risk of developing the condition.

How will this year’s celebrations be remembered? The answer will be “differently than normal” for some individuals, but collective memory for the pandemic itself is likely to fade quickly for most people.