Newsroom Stories

With eight basic medical facts in hand, doctors can now estimate the risk of bleeding for a patient having a heart attack.

Researchers have linked a potential indicator of Alzheimer’s disease to brain damage in humans with no signs of mental impairment.

School of Medicine students have two new state-of-the-art simulation centers in which they can get hands-on clinical training.

School of Medicine clinical faculty and staff recently collected more than 1,500 medical textbooks to be donated to a hospital in Sudan.

WUSTL computer engineers are bringing the minimalist approach to medical care and computing by coupling USB-based ultrasound probe technology with a smartphone, enabling a compact, mobile computational platform and a medical imaging device that fits in the palm of a hand.

HallahanDennis Hallahan has been chosen to head the Department of Radiation Oncology at the School of Medicine. Hallahan will be named the first Elizabeth H. and James S. McDonnell III Distinguished Professor in Medicine. He will also serve on the Senior Leadership Committee of the Siteman Cancer Center.

Certain characteristics of preschool-aged children at high risk for asthma could help physicians deliver more personalized and effective treatment. Researchers at the School of Medicine and five other sites nationwide found that children who showed the most improvement in days without wheezing using an inhaled corticosteroid drug were caucasian boys who had allergies and had a hospitalization or emergency department visit for asthma symptoms in the year prior to the trial.

Working with an asthma coach helps to significantly reduce hospitalizations of low-income, African-American children with asthma, results of a new, two-year study show. Researchers at the School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill worked with nearly 200 parents of children between 2-8 years old on Medicaid who had been hospitalized for asthma at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

In the world of small things, shape, order and orientation are surprisingly important, according to findings from a new study by chemists at Washington University in St. Louis. Lev Gelb, WUSTL associate professor of chemistry, his graduate student Brian Barnes, and postdoctoral researcher Daniel Siderius, used computer simulations to study a very simple model of molecules on surfaces, which looks a lot like the computer game “Tetris.” They have found that the shapes in this model (and in the game) do a number of surprising things.

“Timely identification and diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can impact a child’s development and is the key to opening the door to the services and therapies available to children with autism,” says Paul Shattuck, Ph.D., assistant professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. “Unfortunately, our research shows that the average age of autism diagnosis is nearly six years old, which is three to four years after diagnosis is possible.” Shattuck is the lead author of an article on the timing of ASD identification in the current issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Video available