School of Medicine

The School of Medicine has received a $2.5 million grant to provide medical care to low-income and underserved adults living with HIV. The five-year grant, from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was awarded through the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Modernization Act.

A simple personality test could help doctors more quickly detect dementia with Lewy bodies, a form of dementia often confused with Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study led by researchers at the School of Medicine. Dementia with Lewy bodies is the second most common neurodegenerative cause of dementia. It shares many characteristics with both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Krikor Dikranian, Jay Piccirillo and David Windus recently received the Samuel R. Goldstein Leadership Awards in Medical Student Education for 2006. The awards honor outstanding educators at the School of Medicine and were established in 2000 in memory of Goldstein, a longtime friend of the medical school.

WarnerBrad W. Warner, M.D., has been named pediatric surgeon-in-chief at the School of Medicine and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. His appointment was announced jointly by Timothy Eberlein, M.D., Bixby Professor and chairman of the Department of Surgery, and Lee Fetter, president of St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

Discovery of alterations in a gene called FGFR2 could accelerate the development of new treatments for endometrial cancer, a type of uterine cancer. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen); the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, which is part of Cambridge University; and New York University School of Medicine reported the findings in the May 21, 2007, online version of the journal Oncogene.

The School of Medicine is launching a new effort to study infectious diseases that preferentially affect women. The center for Women’s Infectious Disease Research (cWIDR) will focus on issues such as microorganisms that cause urinary tract infections, infections that lead to premature delivery and microorganisms that may contribute to life-threatening conditions such as cancer and heart disease.

Photo by Robert BostonGraduating medical student Leana Wen was selected through an essay contest to spend three weeks in Africa with a columnist for The New York Times before beginning a Rhodes Scholarship this fall.

School of Medicine researchers found that in some cases, one spouse’s excesses with alcohol could protect the other from alcohol dependence.

A School of Medicine study investigating bone loss in women with breast cancer who take aromatase inhibitors is seeking volunteers.

An ongoing effort to identify the microorganisms that make us sick has discovered a new virus potentially linked to unexplained respiratory infections. Clinicians can typically use a patient’s symptoms to determine that a virus is the likely culprit in a respiratory infection. However, even with advanced testing they still can’t pin the blame on a particular virus in roughly one-third of all such infections.