Medicine & Health

McKelvey School of Engineering student Zach Eisner traveled to Sierra Leone, a nation with no emergency medicine, to teach 1,000 residents how to stop bleeding, conduct CPR, splint a broken bone and transport an injury victim on a motorcycle. “The taxi driver, the teacher, the person on the street — these are the people who, with the right training and support, can save lives,” Eisner said.

School of Medicine scientists have found a way to spur heart immune cells to promote healing after a heart attack or other cardiac injury. Such a strategy could help prevent the usual inflammation that follows a heart attack and is a common driver of heart failure.

Nephrologist Benjamin Humphreys, MD, PhD, director of the Division of Nephrology at the School of Medicine, is a leading innovator in kidney research. Humphreys seeks to find better treatments to prevent kidney failure, a potentially fatal condition affecting 37 million Americans.

Jonathan Silva, a biomedical engineer in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has developed the first computational model that shows the molecular groundwork of a popular drug’s effectiveness in a variety of ways.

Contrary to the belief that drinking can literally shrink one’s brain, a new study that includes researchers from Arts & Sciences suggests that a small brain might be a risk factor for heavier alcohol consumption.

Medical scientists at the Taylor Family Institute for Innovative Psychiatric Research have pioneered the use of neurosteroid drugs to treat psychiatric illness.

Mothers in low-income neighborhoods report more physical and social barriers that discourage them from allowing their children to play outside, according to new research from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

A human antibody that protects mice against a wide range of lethal flu viruses could be the key to a universal vaccine and better treatments for severe flu disease, according to a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif.

Textured breast implants have been linked to a rare and sometimes fatal cancer. Terence M. Myckatyn, MD, who wrote about the issue in a commentary published Oct. 23 in JAMA Surgery, answers questions about the implants.