Medicine & Health

Scientists revealed in November 2006 that stress increases production in mice of a brain peptide critical to Alzheimer’s disease. Now the same group has shown that blocking a different brain peptide slows the stress-induced increase, opening a new door to treatment. Researchers from the School of Medicine report the results online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

W. Donald Gay, D.D.S., has been named the Christy J. and Richard S. Hawes III Professor at the School of Medicine. Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and Larry J. Shapiro, M.D., executive vice chancellor for medical affairs and dean of the School of Medicine, made the announcement. Before their deaths, Mr. and Mrs. Hawes established the professorship in honor of and in gratitude to Gay, who directs the Division of Maxillofacial Prosthetics in the Department of Otolaryngology. Mrs. Hawes was one of Gay’s patients.

The School of Medicine has received a $2.5 million grant to provide medical care to low-income and underserved adults living with HIV. The five-year grant, from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was awarded through the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Modernization Act.

A simple personality test could help doctors more quickly detect dementia with Lewy bodies, a form of dementia often confused with Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study led by researchers at the School of Medicine. Dementia with Lewy bodies is the second most common neurodegenerative cause of dementia. It shares many characteristics with both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Krikor Dikranian, Jay Piccirillo and David Windus recently received the Samuel R. Goldstein Leadership Awards in Medical Student Education for 2006. The awards honor outstanding educators at the School of Medicine and were established in 2000 in memory of Goldstein, a longtime friend of the medical school.

WarnerBrad W. Warner, M.D., has been named pediatric surgeon-in-chief at the School of Medicine and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. His appointment was announced jointly by Timothy Eberlein, M.D., Bixby Professor and chairman of the Department of Surgery, and Lee Fetter, president of St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

Tommy Thompson, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, will be among the speakers at a June 8 conference on Medicaid financing.Rising healthcare costs and diminishing health insurance coverage will be among critical issues debated by leading medical policy experts as Washington University hosts a daylong public forum on Medicaid financing June 8 in the School of Medicine’s Eric P. Newman Education Center. Participants include top administrators from a half dozen major research hospitals and a range of academic, government and think-tank policy experts, including Tommy Thompson, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Discovery of alterations in a gene called FGFR2 could accelerate the development of new treatments for endometrial cancer, a type of uterine cancer. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen); the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, which is part of Cambridge University; and New York University School of Medicine reported the findings in the May 21, 2007, online version of the journal Oncogene.

The School of Medicine is launching a new effort to study infectious diseases that preferentially affect women. The center for Women’s Infectious Disease Research (cWIDR) will focus on issues such as microorganisms that cause urinary tract infections, infections that lead to premature delivery and microorganisms that may contribute to life-threatening conditions such as cancer and heart disease.

An ongoing effort to identify the microorganisms that make us sick has discovered a new virus potentially linked to unexplained respiratory infections. Clinicians can typically use a patient’s symptoms to determine that a virus is the likely culprit in a respiratory infection. However, even with advanced testing they still can’t pin the blame on a particular virus in roughly one-third of all such infections.