Medicine & Health

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.

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

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

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.

MilbrandtJeffrey Milbrandt, M.D., Ph.D, professor of pathology and immunology, internal medicine and of neurology, will become the first David Clayson Professor of Neurology on Sept. 22.

Neuroscientists at the School of Medicine have assembled a first-of-its kind atlas of the folds of the cerebral cortex, the wrinkled surface layer of the brain credited with many of the higher cognitive functions that make us human.

NagamiInfectious diseases specialist Pamela Nagami will deliver the Olin Fellows Lecture for the Assembly Series at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 5th in Graham Chapel. Her talk will focus on the exotic and strange infectious diseases she has encountered throughout her medical career. The lecture is free and open to the public.