Medicine & Health

Washington University in St. Louis is launching a bold $25 million initiative over the next five years to develop innovative technologies aimed at improving science and medicine worldwide. The Imaging Sciences Initiative – a partnership between the School of Engineering & Applied Science and the School of Medicine – will support the development of new imaging technologies to diagnose and treat disease as well as study intricate biological structures, metabolism and physiology, and critical molecular and cellular processes.

A national clinical trial involving Washington University physicians at St. Louis Children’s Hospital will compare three commonly used anti-seizure medications used to treat seizures that last over five minutes and don’t respond to initial treatment. Such seizures can strike anyone but are most common in people already diagnosed with epilepsy.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are launching a new clinical trial to assess the safety of a drug treatment for patients with the rare disease Wolfram syndrome.

If adults are feeling anxious, depressed or angry about the presidential election results, their children might be feeling the same. Joan Luby, MD, the Samuel and Mae S. Ludwig Professor of Child Psychiatry at the School of Medicine, offers advice to parents on what they can say to their children who are expressing anxiety or sadness.

At a transformative moment in our nation’s history, when America’s “Brexit vote” came to pass, where better than Washington University to bring together the thought leaders and experts from disparate fields covering the littered landscape that was, is and forever will be Election 2016?

Researchers at the School of Medicine have developed a new technique to cheaply and rapidly create myriad sets of DNA fragments that detail all possible genetic variants in a particular stretch of DNA. By studying such DNA fragments, scientists can more easily distinguish between genetic variants linked to disease and those that are innocuous.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine have identified a human antibody that prevents — in pregnant mice — the fetus from becoming infected with the Zika virus. The antibody also protects adult mice from Zika disease.

Throughout our lives, our brains are always changing. To capture that transformation, scientists will scan the brains of people from kindergarten through their later years to build maps of the brain as it develops and changes over the decades. The endeavor, led by researchers at Washington University, is funded by two grants totaling $34 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Inflammation is one of the main reasons why people with diabetes experience heart attacks, strokes, kidney problems and other, related complications. Now, in a surprise finding, researchers at the School of Medicine have identified a possible trigger of chronic inflammation.

Researchers at the School of Medicine have developed a chemical compound, named Fluselenamyl, that detects amyloid clumps in Alzheimer’s patients better than current FDA-approved compounds.