Medicine & Health

A narrow region on chromosome 15 contains genetic variations strongly associated with familial lung cancer, says a study conducted by scientists at the School of Medicine and other institutions. The researchers found a more than five times higher risk of lung cancer for people who have both a family history of the disease and these genetic variations. The risk was not affected by whether the study participants smoked or didn’t smoke.

BernsteinAccess to affordable health care has been a recurring topic in current political discussions. Merton C. Bernstein, leading health insurance expert and law professor emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis says that Medicare is the most practical platform for both extending coverage to everyone and taming medical cost inflation. He is available to discuss the candidates’ health care proposals.

Scientists at the School of Medicine, working as part of a large-scale federally funded research collaboration, have discovered new genetic mutations and molecular pathways underlying glioblastoma, the most common form of brain cancer and the most aggressive.

Researchers have found a potential new approach to treating endometrial cancer — a drug that was shown to be effective even against human endometrial cancer cell lines that tend to be treatment resistant. Scientists at the School of Medicine and the Translational Genomics Research Institute discovered that introducing a particular inhibitor drug can turn off cell receptors that are responsible for tumor growth.

For the first time, researchers have described hour-by-hour changes in the amount of amyloid beta, a protein that is believed to play a key role in Alzheimer’s disease, in the human brain. A team of scientists at the School of Medicine and the University of Milan report their results this week in Science.

“We are headed into a time when a confluence of changes are going to lead to a perfect storm, making us finally realize that our health care system needs a major overhaul,” says Timothy D. McBride, Ph.D., leading health economist and professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis. “As the elderly population doubles between now and about 2030, projections are that we will see at least a doubling of the costs of the federal and state health and retirement programs,” he says. “That will likely be when the perfect storm hits. But if we miss it then, we will likely have missed all the storm clouds for the foreseeable future.”

People have long prized silver as a precious metal. Now, silver-coated endotracheal tubes are giving critically ill patients another reason to value the lustrous metal. In a study published in the Aug. 20, 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers at the School of Medicine and the NASCENT Investigation Group, report that the silver-coated tubes led to a 36 percent reduction of ventilator-associated pneumonia.

image courtesy of Advanced BionicsCochlear implantJill B. Firszt, a cochlear-implant specialist at the School of Medicine, was working on her doctoral dissertation when she met with a 47-year-old patient who been deaf in one ear since childhood. The patient was scheduled to get a cochlear implant in her deaf ear because she recently had a tumor operation that destroyed the hearing in her good ear. Firszt knew there wasn’t enough pertinent information to predict how well the woman would hear with the implant. That experience inspired Firszt to propose an in-depth study, now funded by the NIH, of one-sided hearing.

Therapies, rehabilitation and specialty medical care are just a few of the extra costs parents face when raising children with special needs. In a new study published in Pediatrics, Paul T. Shattuck, Ph.D., professor of social work, found that families with similar demographics and nature of their children’s special needs have different out-of-pocket health expenditures depending on the state in which they live.

A mutation that causes a childhood tumor syndrome also impairs growth hormone secretion, researchers at the School of Medicine have found. The discovery provides new insights into an old mystery, revealing why patients with neurofibromatosis type 1 are frequently shorter than their peers. The surprising details have led scientists to consider modifying their search for treatments for the inherited disorder, which is caused by a mutation in the neurofibromin 1 (NF1) gene and is characterized by an increased risk of cancer.