Medicine & Health

As America considers major healthcare reforms, it may have lessons to learn from Seguro Popular, Mexico’s ambitious plan to improve healthcare for its estimated 50 million uninsured citizens, suggests Ryan Moore, co-author of a new evaluation of the program. Conducted through a partnership of Mexican health officials and researchers from leading American universities, the study offers a model U.S. policymakers might use to scientifically explore solutions to America’s own looming healthcare crisis.

Alex A. Kane has been named the Dr. Joseph B. Kimbrough Chair for Pediatric Dentistry in the Washington University Department of Surgery, Division of Plastic Surgery for Use in the Cleft Palate/Craniofacial Deformities Institute for teaching and healing. Kane is associate professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the School of Medicine and director of the Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Institute at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

“‘Meetings on the Move’ is an inexpensive, easy way to improve health and productivity,” says Tim McBride, Ph.D., associate dean for public health at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. Meetings on the Move (MOTM) get employees on their feet and out of the office environment. “Forty percent of the population are absolute couch potatoes,” says Debra Haire-Joshu, Ph.D, and professor of social work at Washington University. “That’s almost a learned behavior. You learn to sit at school; you learn to sit at work. What ‘Meetings on the Move’ really does is get us active like we used to be when we were kids. We can learn then to bring activity back into our daily life, just like we learned to take it out.” Haire-Joshu also is the director of the Obesity Prevention and Policy Research Center at the Brown School. Video available.

The Kay Yow/Women’s Basketball Coaches Association Cancer Fund and The V Foundation announced that Michael Welch, Ph.D. and John-Stephen Tyler, Ph.D. received the first research grant awarded with money raised by the Kay Yow/WBCA Fund. Awarded during the NCAA Women’s Final Four weekend in St. Louis, Mo., the grant will fund a breast cancer research project at the Siteman Cancer Center at the School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

Researchers have used socialization and mating among fruit flies to explore the connections between memory and sleep.A new theory about sleep’s benefits for the brain gets a boost from fruit flies in this week’s Science. Researchers at the School of Medicine found evidence that sleep, already recognized as a promoter of long-term memories, also helps clear room in the brain for new learning.

Patients with severe heart failure can be bridged to eventual transplant by a new, smaller and lighter implantable heart pump, according to a just-completed study of the device. Results of this third-generation heart assist device were reported at the 58th annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology on March 30.

Scientists who first established a link between obesity and the trillions of friendly microbes that live in the intestine now are investigating whether the organisms can contribute to the converse: severe malnutrition. Researchers at the School of Medicine, led by microbiologist Jeffrey Gordon, M.D., will study whether severely malnourished infants living in Malawi and Bangladesh have a different mix of intestinal microbes than healthy infants in the same areas, and whether those microbes might account for their illness. This three-year, $5.5 million project is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

DehnerLouis P. “Pepper” Dehner, a faculty member at the School of Medicine, received the Distinguished Pathologist Award of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP) at the academy’s 2009 annual meeting. Held in Boston March 7-13, the meeting is the largest annual gathering of pathologists, and the Distinguished Pathologist Award is its highest honor.

Funding from the Missouri Life Sciences Research Fund, part of the 1998 state tobacco settlement, will establish the St. Louis Institute of Nanomedicine Working Group, a collaborative regional effort to apply advances in nanotechnology to the treatment of human diseases.

Bacteria that cause urinary tract infections make more tools for stealing from their host than friendly versions of the same bacteria found in the gut.