Medicine & Health

A five-year, $3.7 million clinical trial will investigate how to balance the benefits and risks of warfarin, a drug that helps prevent potentially deadly blood clots. The multicenter study, led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, will evaluate customized warfarin dosage based on patient genetics and will test which range of blood clotting is optimal in orthopedic patients.

A team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has identified a pair of proteins excreted in the urine that could lead to earlier and more accurate diagnosis of kidney cancer. The research is the first to identify proteins in urine that appear to accurately reveal the presence of about 90 percent of all kidney cancers. 

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have received a five-year, $3.8 million grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to renew a center that helps researchers collect and use data on the brain and central nervous system.

Michael M. Awad, MD, Joan Rosenbaum, MD, and Gladys Tse, MD, have been chosen for the 2010-12 Carol B. and Jerome T. Loeb Teaching Fellowships at the School of Medicine.

Parents, schools and communities need to be involved in combating the epidemic of childhood obesity, Debra Haire-Joshu, PhD, says.

I Jerome Flance, an emeritus clinical professor of medicine at the Washington University School of Medicine who spearheaded the University’s development of the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood, died Friday (April 2, 2010) of infirmities of age at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He was 98 and lived in Creve Coeur.

A memorial service will be held for Teresa J. Vietti, MD, professor emeritus of pediatrics and of radiology, at 4 p.m. April 28 at Graham Chapel.

A drug already prescribed to shrink benign, enlarged prostates has been shown to reduce the risk of a prostate cancer diagnosis by 23 percent in men with an increased risk of the disease, a large international trial has found. Results are reported April 1 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Nearly all animals make sounds instinctively, but baby songbirds learn to sing in virtually the same way human infants learn to speak: by imitating a parent. Now, an international team of scientists, led by the School of Medicine, has decoded the genome of a songbird — the Australian zebra finch — to reveal intriguing clues about the genetic basis and evolution of vocal learning. 

A team of psychologists at Washington University that include graduate student Jonathan Jackson have found an intriguing possibility that personality and brain aging during the golden years may be linked.