Medicine & Health

Washington University researchers have found that immune cells called macrophages can trigger smooth muscle contractions in the intestinal tract, independent of nerve cells. The research in mice holds potential for treating chemotherapy-induced diarrhea.

Deanna Barch, chair of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences in Arts & Sciences and the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine, has been awarded a $3.5 million MERIT award from the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Tommy John surgery, or reconstruction of the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) in the elbow, has been dubbed an epidemic among Major League Baseball pitchers. A mechanical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis plans to develop a bioinspired imaging technique to study how damage accumulates in the UCL during loading, or the stress of activating the ligament. This could provide insight into what is progressively happening to these soft tissues when pitchers throw fastballs dozens of times during a game.

New School of Medicine research on childhood depression demonstrates that an interactive therapy involving parents and children can reduce rates of depression and lower the severity of a child’s symptoms.

Doctors sometimes prescribe antipsychotic drugs to treat behavior disorders in youths who don’t respond to traditional medications. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Florida Atlantic University have found that young people taking antipsychotics for as little as 12 weeks experience significant gains in body fat and also become less sensitive to insulin.

School of Medicine researchers have found that the pathways through which various types of brain cells are damaged by Alzheimer’s disease varies, depending on the genes involved. The findings are published in the journal Genome Medicine.

Scientists from the School of Medicine have zeroed in on a culprit that spurs damaging inflammation in the heart following a heart attack. The guilty party is a type of immune cell that tries to heal the injured heart but instead triggers inflammation that leads to even more damage.

Youth baseball leagues often have fairly strict limits on how many innings pitchers can pitch or how many pitches a player can throw. But for girls playing fast-pitch softball, such guidelines are rare. School of Medicine sports medicine specialists have found that many pitchers aren’t getting enough time to recover and are experiencing shoulder fatigue, pain, weakness and injury.

Recognition of a disconnect between what patients with serious mental illness want and what health providers think they want appears to be a crucial step in reducing smoking rates among such patients, School of Medicine researchers found.

Parkinson’s disease is caused by the injury or death of brain cells known as dopaminergic neurons. A new School of Medicine study shows that people who take drugs that suppress the immune system are less likely to develop the disease, which is characterized by difficulty with movement.