Medicine & Health

A bacterium that lives in the human gut adaptively shifts more than a quarter of its genes into high gear when its host’s diet changes from sugar to complex carbohydrates. This not only allows the bacteria to survive rapidly changing nutrient conditions but also helps maintain the stability of the gut’s highly complex microbial society, according to WUSM researchers.

Researchers at the School of Medicine are testing the effectiveness of an investigational drug for the treatment of sciatica pain. Sciatica involves pain in the lower back and hip that radiates down the thigh into the leg.

Bipolar disorder is often hard to diagnose in children, and it is easy to mistake the disorder’s manic phase for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, warns Joan Luby, a child psychiatrist at the School of Medicine and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Learn more about pediatric bipolar disorder in the following St. Louis Post-Dispatch article.

Genomic analysis may one day be a primary diagnostic tool for physicians deciding on a course of treatment for trauma and other critically ill patients in the intensive care unit (ICU), according to a new study by a national collaboration of more than 70 physicians and scientists.

Initial results from an ongoing study evaluating the benefit of prostate cancer screening practices demonstrate that the combined use of both standard tests—the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test and the digital rectal exam (DRE)—is optimal for detecting cancer.

Child psychiatry researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are investigating the effectiveness of several therapies for children with bipolar disorder, also known as manic depressive illness.

The rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes among children in the U.S. is rapidly rising. Many children with Type 2 diabetes don’t even know they have the disease. Neil White, a pediatrician at WUSM and St. Louis Children’s Hospital, outlines symptoms and risk factors for diabetes in the following St. Louis Post-Dispatch article.

Scientists may have found a way to throw a wrench in the transmissions of several speed demons of the parasite world. Researchers at the School of Medicine and Harvard University have identified a protein that could help them develop drugs to stop or slow cell invasion by malaria and other parasites known as apicomplexans.

A five-year, $14 million grant will establish a center at the School of Medicine that will develop better ways to prevent and treat heart disease in diabetic patients. The grant was awarded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Photo by Robert BostonA fossil of a diminutive human nicknamed “the Hobbit” likely represents a previously unrecognized species of early humans, according to the results of a detailed comparison of the fossil’s brain case with those of humans, apes and other human ancestors.