Medicine & Health

Today’s freshmen students have a 50 percent chance of living to see their 100th birthdays. They are in the middle of a demographic revolution that will shape every aspect of their lives. A new interdisciplinary course for freshmen introduced this fall, “When I’m Sixty-Four: Transforming Your Future,” aims to prepare students for this aging revolution and to encourage them to examine their present and future lives in more detail.

A new center at the School of Medicine aims to tackle the challenges of feeding the world’s rapidly expanding population and improving global health by linking efforts to develop more nutritious foods with discoveries gleaned from the gut microbiome.

Efforts at Washington University and Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals to safely coordinate a response to the Ebola virus have been underway for several months. Among those efforts are suggested steps for faculty, staff and students traveling to and from Ebola-stricken countries.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has boosted funding for the first large-scale clinical trial aimed at identifying drugs to stop or slow Alzheimer’s disease in people who are destined to get it. The trial is led by Randall Bateman, MD.

Improved communication among health-care providers during shift changes reduced injuries due to medical errors by 30 percent, according to a multicenter study. The research involved St. Louis Children’s Hospital and eight other academic medical centers. Pictured is study co-author F. Sessions Cole, MD, and attending physician Amanda Emke, MD.

John N. Constantino, MD, the Blanche F. Ittelson Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the School of Medicine, has received the 2014 Irving Phillips Award for Prevention from the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Beau Ances, MD, PhD, is using the latest brain scanning techniques to better understand how long-term HIV infection impairs memory and other mental functions. He’s also applying his expertise in neuroimaging to Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative disorders.

Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the School of Engineering & Applied Science is applying a novel time-reversal technology that allows researchers to better focus light in tissue, such as muscles and organs. ​

Turns out your mom was right: scratching an itch only makes it worse. New research from scientists at the Center for the Study of Itch at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis reveals that scratching causes the brain to release serotonin, which intensifies the itch sensation.

Patients with tinnitus hear phantom noise and are sometimes so bothered by the perceived ringing in their ears they have difficulty concentrating. A new therapy does not lessen perception of the noise but appears to help patients cope better with it in their daily lives, according to new research led by Jay Piccirillo, MD.