Medicine & Health

As the United States considers major health-care reforms, it may have lessons to learn from Seguro Popular, Mexico’s ambitious plan to improve health care for its estimated 50 million uninsured citizens.

With eight basic medical facts in hand, doctors can now estimate the risk of bleeding for a patient having a heart attack. Using clinical variables, researchers at the School of Medicine, Duke University and collaborating institutions have created a new method to estimate bleeding risk and help lessen the chances that heart attack patients will experience this common complication.

ConstantinoJohn Constantino has been named the Blanche F. Ittleson Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics and director of the William Greenleaf Eliot Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the School of Medicine. The appointment was announced by Charles Zorumski, the Samuel B. Guze Professor of Psychiatry, professor of neurobiology and head of the Department of Psychiatry.

A test developed by physician-scientists at the School of Medicine may help assess more quickly the ability of Alzheimer’s drugs to affect one of the possible underlying causes of Alzheimer’s disease in humans, accelerating the development of new treatments.

For years, microbiologist Stephen Beverley has tried to get the disease-causing parasite Leishmania in the mood for love. In this week’s Science, he and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health report that they may have finally found the answer: Cram enough Leishmania into the gut of an insect known as the sand fly, and the parasite will have sex.

The predominance of heartburn among asthma sufferers led many specialists to suspect that acid reflux could be a trigger for the coughing, wheezing and breathlessness of asthma. In fact, it has become standard practice to prescribe heartburn medication to people with poorly controlled asthma, even if they don’t have overt acid reflux symptoms. But a new study shows that heartburn medication does not help control asthma symptoms.

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.