Medicine & Health

Any child confronting an outraged parent demanding to know “What were you thinking?” now has a new response: “Scientists have discovered that my brain is organized differently than yours.” But all is not well for errant kids. The same new study also provides parents with a rejoinder: While the overarching organization scheme differs, one of the most important core principals of adult brain organization is present in the brains of children as young as 7.

BoyerMartin Boyer has been named the Carol B. and Jerome T. Loeb Professor in Orthopaedic Surgery at the School of Medicine. Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and Larry J. Shapiro, executive vice chancellor for medical affairs and dean of the School of Medicine, announced the appointment.

Researchers at the School of Medicine have found a way to dress and undress Leishmania, a parasite that causes death and disfigurement in developing countries. Scientists showed that they could control the parasite’s ability to put on its carbohydrate coat, causing it to put on the whole coat, a lighter version or to forego the coat entirely.

Mice lacking the L-Fabp gene (left) don’t become obese on a high-fat diet like normal mice.Obesity and gallstones often go hand in hand. But not in mice developed at the School of Medicine. Even when these mice eat high-fat diets, they don’t get fat, but they do develop gallstones. Researchers say the findings offer clues about genetic factors related to gallstones, and they believe better understanding of those factors may one day allow physicians to monitor people at risk and even, perhaps, to intervene before gallstones become a serious problem.

WUSTL computer engineers are bringing the minimalist approach to medical care and computing by coupling USB-based ultrasound probe technology with a smartphone, enabling a compact, mobile computational platform and a medical imaging device that fits in the palm of a hand.

HallahanDennis Hallahan has been chosen to head the Department of Radiation Oncology at the School of Medicine. Hallahan will be named the first Elizabeth H. and James S. McDonnell III Distinguished Professor in Medicine. He will also serve on the Senior Leadership Committee of the Siteman Cancer Center.

Certain characteristics of preschool-aged children at high risk for asthma could help physicians deliver more personalized and effective treatment. Researchers at the School of Medicine and five other sites nationwide found that children who showed the most improvement in days without wheezing using an inhaled corticosteroid drug were caucasian boys who had allergies and had a hospitalization or emergency department visit for asthma symptoms in the year prior to the trial.

Working with an asthma coach helps to significantly reduce hospitalizations of low-income, African-American children with asthma, results of a new, two-year study show. Researchers at the School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill worked with nearly 200 parents of children between 2-8 years old on Medicaid who had been hospitalized for asthma at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

“Timely identification and diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can impact a child’s development and is the key to opening the door to the services and therapies available to children with autism,” says Paul Shattuck, Ph.D., assistant professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. “Unfortunately, our research shows that the average age of autism diagnosis is nearly six years old, which is three to four years after diagnosis is possible.” Shattuck is the lead author of an article on the timing of ASD identification in the current issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Video available

A drug widely used to shrink enlarged prostates has been shown to lower the risk of prostate cancer by 23 percent in men who have an increased risk of the disease, according to results of an international clinical trial presented April 27 at the American Urological Association annual meeting in Chicago.