School of Medicine

A drug widely used to shrink enlarged prostates has been shown to lower the risk of prostate cancer by 23 percent in men who have an increased risk of the disease, according to results of an international clinical trial presented April 27 at the American Urological Association annual meeting in Chicago.

The School of Medicine remains No. 3 among research-oriented medical schools, according to the 2010 edition of U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Graduate Schools.” The rankings appear in the April 28 issue of the magazine and in an annual guidebook.

The search for the cause of an inherited form of a rare, aggressive childhood lung cancer has uncovered important information about how the cancer develops and potentially sheds light on the development of other cancers. The finding by researchers at the School of Medicine and other collaborating institutions adds the final link to the chain connecting the gene DICER1 to cancer development.

Assisted hatching, a procedure commonly thought to improve pregnancy rates during in vitro fertilization (IVF), does not affect outcomes in most women younger than 38 years old, according to researchers at the School of Medicine. The findings are available online in Fertility and Sterility.

With eight basic medical facts in hand, doctors can now estimate the risk of bleeding for a patient having a heart attack. Using clinical variables, researchers at the School of Medicine, Duke University and collaborating institutions have created a new method to estimate bleeding risk and help lessen the chances that heart attack patients will experience this common complication.

ConstantinoJohn Constantino has been named the Blanche F. Ittleson Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics and director of the William Greenleaf Eliot Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the School of Medicine. The appointment was announced by Charles Zorumski, the Samuel B. Guze Professor of Psychiatry, professor of neurobiology and head of the Department of Psychiatry.

A test developed by physician-scientists at the School of Medicine may help assess more quickly the ability of Alzheimer’s drugs to affect one of the possible underlying causes of Alzheimer’s disease in humans, accelerating the development of new treatments.

For years, microbiologist Stephen Beverley has tried to get the disease-causing parasite Leishmania in the mood for love. In this week’s Science, he and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health report that they may have finally found the answer: Cram enough Leishmania into the gut of an insect known as the sand fly, and the parasite will have sex.

The predominance of heartburn among asthma sufferers led many specialists to suspect that acid reflux could be a trigger for the coughing, wheezing and breathlessness of asthma. In fact, it has become standard practice to prescribe heartburn medication to people with poorly controlled asthma, even if they don’t have overt acid reflux symptoms. But a new study shows that heartburn medication does not help control asthma symptoms.

Alex A. Kane has been named the Dr. Joseph B. Kimbrough Chair for Pediatric Dentistry in the Washington University Department of Surgery, Division of Plastic Surgery for Use in the Cleft Palate/Craniofacial Deformities Institute for teaching and healing. Kane is associate professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the School of Medicine and director of the Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Institute at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.