Medicine & Health

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.

The School of Medicine remains No. 3 among research-oriented medical schools, according to the 2010 edition of U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Graduate Schools.” The rankings appear in the April 28 issue of the magazine and in an annual guidebook.

The search for the cause of an inherited form of a rare, aggressive childhood lung cancer has uncovered important information about how the cancer develops and potentially sheds light on the development of other cancers. The finding by researchers at the School of Medicine and other collaborating institutions adds the final link to the chain connecting the gene DICER1 to cancer development.

David Kilper/WUSTL PhotoComputer engineers at Washington University in St. Louis 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. William D. Richard, Ph.D., associate professor of computer science and engineering, and David Zar, research associate in computer science and engineering, have made commercial USB ultrasound probes compatible with Microsoft Windows mobile-based smartphones, thanks to a $100,000 grant Microsoft awarded the two in 2008.

Assisted hatching, a procedure commonly thought to improve pregnancy rates during in vitro fertilization (IVF), does not affect outcomes in most women younger than 38 years old, according to researchers at the School of Medicine. The findings are available online in Fertility and Sterility.

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.