Newsroom Stories

Signals from the immune system that help repel a common parasite inadvertently can cause a dormant viral infection to become active again, a new study from the School of Medicine shows. Pictured is a helminth parasite.

Vision researchers from 38 clinical sites, including the School of Medicine, have found that the eyesight of patients with an unusual vision disorder linked to obesity improves twice as much if they take a glaucoma drug and lose a modest amount of weight than if they only lose weight. Neuro-ophthalmologist Gregory Van Stavern, MD, led the study in St. Louis.

Studying mouth cancer in mice, researchers led by Ravindra Uppaluri, MD, PhD, have found a way to predict the aggressiveness of similar tumors in people, an early step toward a diagnostic test that could guide treatment.

Figuring out how to survive on a lean-season diet of hard-to-reach ants, slugs and other bugs may have spurred the development of bigger brains and higher-level cognitive functions in the ancestors of humans and other primates, suggests research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang is one of 25 recipients of a 2014-15 Berlin Prize Fellowship. Awarded by the American Academy in Berlin, the prize includes a residential fellowship at the academy’s Hans Arnhold Center in Berlin-Wannsee. Bang will be part of the spring 2015 class and she will work on a book of poems.

Studying children with autism and their parents, researchers have found that when a child has autism, his or her parents are more likely to have autistic traits than parents who don’t have a child with an autism spectrum disorder, as measured by a survey used to identify such characteristics. Pictured is one of the study’s authors, John Constantino, MD.

It has generally been assumed that people with episodic amnesia experience time much differently than those with more typical memory function. However, recent research by Washington University philosopher Carl F. Craver, PhD, disputes this type of claim. “There are sets of claims that sound empirical, like ‘These people are stuck in time.’ But if you ask, ‘Have you actually tested what they know about time?’ the answer is no.”

Pirooz Eghtesady, MD, PhD, has been named the first Emerson Chair in Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgery at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. He is a professor of surgery and of pediatrics and is chief of the section of Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgery at the School of Medicine.

New research from the School of Medicine’s Albert Kim, MD, PhD (left), and Hiroko Yano, PhD, helps explain how mutations in the gene that causes Huntington’s disease kill brain cells. The findings could open new opportunities for treating the fatal disorder.

Some clover species have two forms, one of which releases cyanide to discourage nibbling by snails and insects and the other of which does not. A scientist at Washington University in St. Louis found that this “polymorphism” has evolved independently in six different species of clover, each time by the wholesale deletion of a gene. The clover species are in a sense predisposed to develop this trait, suggesting that evolution is not entirely free form but instead bumps up against constraints.