Medicine & Health

Poorly controlled blood glucose levels can negatively affect blood flow to the heart.In the heart muscle of type 1 diabetics, high blood glucose is a significant contributor to poorly opening vessels, or poor vasodilation, according to a study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Even administration of high levels of insulin, which usually enhances vasodilation, can’t counteract the negative effect of high glucose on the heart, and this contributes to increased plaque buildup and heart disease.

Sunlight promotes healthy teeth.As the days get shorter and colder, it gets harder to spend time in the sun, and that’s probably bad for your teeth. According to an article in the Journal of Periodontology from a researcher at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, our teeth may be light-sensitive, at least indirectly.

Women have different sports medicine needs than men.In sports medicine, it isn’t always true that what’s “good for the goose is good for the gander.” Reporting on issues unique to female runners in the journal Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinics of North America, Washington University physical medicine and rehabilitation specialists say women’s bodies adapt to athletic challenges differently. They say that when female athletes get injured, health-care professionals need to consider the anatomic, biomechanical, hormonal and functional factors that are unique to women.

Bernstein”Imagine an electrical appliance industry with plugs of 9,000 different shape and sizes that need one of 9,000 matching sockets to work. Preposterous as that is, that’s the “design” of American health insurance – tens of thousands of medical care providers must plug their billions of billings into thousands of differing insurance policies,” says Merton C. Bernstein, a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. “This wasteful design has its silver lining, though. Eliminating administrative costs through universal Medicare coverage, or Medicare-for-All, would save as much as $280 to $300 billion a year, enough to pay for covering the 45 million uninsured. ”

Nanoparticles attached to fibers in a blood clotNano-sized particles developed at the School of Medicine offer hope of replacing numerous medical tests, scans, or surgeries with a simple injection. The tiny spheres can travel through the bloodstream deep into the body to locate and highlight tumors undetectable by typical methods. While at the tumor site, the nanoparticles can deliver therapeutic agents to destroy the tumor.

In her most recent book, she describes the often-frightening truth about even the most seemingly harmless bite or bump.

“We were able to associate risk of death with the characteristics of the patients’ beta-adrenergic receptor genes,” says study co-author Howard McLeod.

Interferon — a critical protein that mediates the body’s defense against a wide variety of infectious agents and tumors — may soon have greater therapeutic value as the result of a new study by researchers at the School of Medicine.

A monoclonal antibody that can effectively treat mice infected with West Nile virus has an intriguing secret: Contrary to scientists’ expectations, it does not block the virus’s ability to attach to host cells. Instead, the antibody somehow stops the infectious process at a later point.

Survival of heart attack and unstable angina patients placed on beta-blocker therapy corresponds to specific variations in their genes, according to a study by researchers at the School of Medicine and the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City.