Medicine & Health

Hundreds of thousands of American youth are following marijuana-related Twitter accounts and getting pro-pot messages several times each day, according to researchers at the School of Medicine. They said the tweets are cause for concern because young people are thought to be especially responsive to social media influences and because patterns of drug use tend to be established in a person’s late teens and early 20s.

Colin Nichols, PhD, the Carl F. Cori Endowed Professor and director of the Center for the Investigation of Membrane Excitability Diseases, has been elected to the Royal Society, an honorary English organization equivalent to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.

Matthew J. Matava, MD, has been recognized as one of the top knee surgeons in North America by Orthopedics This Week, a newsletter for professionals in the field.

Signals from the immune system that help repel a common parasite inadvertently can cause a dormant viral infection to become active again, a new study from the School of Medicine shows. Pictured is a helminth parasite.

The Shell Café in the McDonnell Sciences Building and the Farrell Café in the Farrell Learning and Teaching Center on the School of Medicine campus will be closed June 27 and 30. The cafes will reopen July 1 under new management.

New research from the School of Medicine raises the prospect that some cancer patients with aggressive tumors may benefit from a class of anti-inflammatory drugs currently in use against rheumatoid arthritis.

Studying mouth cancer in mice, researchers led by Ravindra Uppaluri, MD, PhD, have found a way to predict the aggressiveness of similar tumors in people, an early step toward a diagnostic test that could guide treatment.

Vision researchers from 38 clinical sites, including the School of Medicine, have found that the eyesight of patients with an unusual vision disorder linked to obesity improves twice as much if they take a glaucoma drug and lose a modest amount of weight than if they only lose weight. Neuro-ophthalmologist Gregory Van Stavern, MD, led the study in St. Louis.

Studying children with autism and their parents, researchers have found that when a child has autism, his or her parents are more likely to have autistic traits than parents who don’t have a child with an autism spectrum disorder, as measured by a survey used to identify such characteristics. Pictured is one of the study’s authors, John Constantino, MD.

One in three American adults has high blood pressure. Jessica Wagenseil, DSc, associate professor of mechanical engineering, is investigating how mechanical properties of the cardiovascular system contribute to this widespread disease.