Medicine & Health

With the heat of summer upon us, kids everywhere are flocking to the pool. With that in mind, Kim Quayle, St. Louis Children’s Hospital emergency physician and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine, provides a list of water safety tips in the following St. Louis Post-Dispatch article.

An experimental device implanted into a Missouri man’s chest hopes to do what maximum doses of four medications can’t — lower his blood pressure. The electrical implant was activated at Barnes-Jewish Dialysis Center July 11. Marcos Rothstein, center director and associate professor of medicine, comments about the procedure in the following St. Louis Post-Dispatch article.

Each individual’s reponse to aerobic training allowed the researchers to identify regions on chromosomes 6, 7 and 19 that are linked to the debilitating disease.

Cathepsin G regulates the ability of neutrophils to secrete chemicals that attract other immune cells and start the local inflammatory process.

Photo by Robert BostonMembers of the acrobatic troupe the Flying Wallendas visit the lab of Aaron DiAntonio, M.D. DiAntonio hopes to name a recently discovered gene “Wallenda.”

It might help babies resist brain injuries from low oxygen and reduced blood flow, which is linked to premature birth and other irregularities. More medical news

Deanna Barch (center) discusses brain imaging techniques used in the experiment, which used the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine (shown at right).When encouraged to use memorization strategies commonly employed by healthy individuals, people with schizophrenia can be helped to remember information just as well as their healthy counterparts, a process that in itself seems to spur a normalization of memory-related activities in the brains of people with schizophrenia, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • Pomegranate juice good for moms (week of July 6) • Why depression is bad for hearts (week of July 13) • Risk factors for suicide (week of July 20) • Genes affect response to alcohol (week of July 27)

Arthritis can hit harder in African-Americans.A pilot study comparing the results of treatment for rheumatoid arthritis in African-Americans and Caucasians has revealed that African-Americans are more likely to suffer pain and disability from the disorder. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis studied a group of 33 African-Americans and 67 Caucasians and found that both disease activity and the resulting disabilities were worse in African-Americans. Further analysis showed this was linked primarily to socio-economic status rather than race.

Abnormal heart rate variability increases the risk of death for depressed heart patients.Scientists have known for years that depression increases the risk of dying in the months after a heart attack, but they haven’t understood how depression raises that risk. Now, behavioral medicine specialists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are reporting in the Archives of Internal Medicine that abnormal heart rate variability is partially responsible for depression’s effects in heart patients.