Medicine & Health

Many kids who may benefit from ADHD medications don’t get them.In contrast to claims that children are being overmedicated for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found that a high percentage of kids with ADHD are not receiving treatment. In fact, almost half of the children who might benefit from ADHD drugs were not getting them.

Constant blood flow shields the brain from cold, limiting the effects of any attempt to cool the brain.Attempts to cool the brain to reduce injury from stroke and other head trauma may face a significant obstacle: current cooling devices can’t penetrate very deeply into the brain. Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that blood flow in the brain creates a “cold shielding” effect and have developed a method for calculating brain temperature that may be used to improve brain cooling techniques.

When thinking about the well-being of older adults, most people focus on medical care, but mental health care is a growing, pressing concern for older adults and their families. “At least one in five older adults suffer from a mental disorder and experts in geriatric mental health anticipate an ‘unprecedented explosion’ of older adults with disabling mental disorder,” says Enola K. Proctor, Ph.D., mental health care expert and professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis. “While older adults may receive adequate medical and psychiatric care, they rarely receive the care necessary to deal with the general ‘problems with living,’ or social stresses. These psychosocial problems, such as isolation and family stress, may exacerbate psychiatric problems, depression in particular, and contribute to functional decline.”

In the Thoroughman laboratory, volunteers play games on a computer screeen using a robotic arm so that Thoroughman and his colleagues can study how people learn motor skills.Central to being human is the ability to adapt: We learn from our mistakes. Previous theories of learning have assumed that the size of learning naturally scales with the size of the mistake. But now biomedical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have shown that people can use alternative strategies: Learning does not necessarily scale proportionally with error.

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • ADHD kids not receiving treatment (week of Aug. 2) • How tumors cloak themselves (week of Aug. 9) • New info about macular degeneration (week of Aug. 16) • Why steroids weaken bones (week of Aug. 23) • The brain’s ‘cold sheild’ (week of Aug. 30)

UnanueEmil R. Unanue, has been named the Paul and Ellen Lacy Professor of Pathology at the School of Medicine. The appointment was announced by Skip Virgin, the Edward Mallinckrodt Professor and head of Pathology and Immunology at the School of Medicine.

New research may finally settle a decades-old debate about how the kidney keeps valuable blood proteins from harmfully slipping into the urine, a serious health symptom that often precedes kidney failure. WUSM scientists discovered that a structure, known as the glomerular basement membrane, plays a key role in the process.

A woman trying to conceive a child may receive as many as 1,000 fertility-enhancing injections per year, but a recent discovery at the School of Medicine may help reduce the required number of fertility shots to about one per week.

These before (left) and after images show the effects of fumagillin-laden nanoparticles in a rabbit aorta.In laboratory tests, one very low dose of a drug was enough to show an effect on notoriously tenacious artery-clogging plaques. But it wasn’t so much the drug itself as how it was delivered. Fumagillin — a drug that can inhibit the growth of new blood vessels that feed atherosclerotic plaques — was sent directly to the base of plaques by microscopically small spheres called nanoparticles.

Dark areas (marked with arrows) in the first image show a process of bone renewal and strengthening. The second image shows a reduction in this process after a cortisone injection.Scientists are closing in on the solution to a persistent medical puzzle: why do high doses of cortisone, widely prescribed for asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory and autoimmune conditions, weaken bones? Researchers at the School of Medicine have identified osteoclasts, cells that dismantle old bone, as the essential link between osteoporosis and cortisone.