Medicine & Health

Parkinson’s disease is well-known for impairing movement and causing tremors, but many patients also develop other serious problems, including sleep disturbances and significant losses in cognitive function known as dementia. Now researchers at the School of Medicine have modeled Parkinson’s-associated dementia for the first time.

Scientists at the School of Medicine have identified a substance in the liver that helps process fat and glucose. That substance is a component of the common food additive lecithin, and researchers speculate it may one day be possible to use lecithin products to control blood lipids and reduce risk for diabetes, hypertension or cardiovascular disease using treatments delivered in food rather than medication.

Bernstein”Private employment provides less health insurance than believed,” says Merton C. Bernstein, a founding board member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. Bernstein is available to discuss health insurance in the U.S.

WUSM physician Mark Manary poses with a child in Malawi.A St. Louis-based team of plant and physician-scientists with a vision of eradicating malnutrition throughout the developing world today announced the formation of the Global Harvest Alliance (GHA), a humanitarian effort involving St. Louis Children’s Hospital, The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and the School of Medicine. Through a shared commonality of purpose, each institution brings unique strengths and leadership within their respective fields to bear on this global challenge.

Women doctors are the focus of a traveling exhibition opening Aug. 10 at the Bernard Becker Medical Library at the School of Medicine. The exhibit, which features prominent physicians from WUSM and elsewhere, highlights women’s struggles to gain access to medical education and to work in the specialty of their choice.

More than 350 physicians at the School of Medicine have been named to The Best Doctors In America for 2009. The number is twice that of any other physicians’ group in St. Louis and more than any other physicians’ group in the Midwest.

A recently identified gene allows immune cells to start the self-destructive processes thought to underlie autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and rheumatoid arthritis, researchers at the School of Medicine have found.

Illustration of two proteins involved in DNA repair by artist Amy VanDonselResearchers at the School of Medicine have shed new light on a process that fixes breaks in the genetic material of cells. The scientists studied protein molecules that have an important role in homologous recombination, which is one way that cells repair breaks in the DNA double helix. Their findings could lead to ways of enhancing chemotherapy drugs that destroy cancer cells by damaging their DNA.

The School of Medicine is participating in a national trial to determine whether back braces for adolescents with scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine, are effective in preventing the condition from progressing and, if so, which patients most benefit.

DornGerald W. Dorn II has been named the Philip and Sima K. Needleman Professor of Medicine at the School of Medicine. The professorship was established to support a faculty member holding a key leadership position within the BioMed 21 initiative, a multidisciplinary imperative to rapidly convert research findings into effective, individualized treatments.