School of Medicine

New research at the School of Medicine shows that the earlier a deaf infant or toddler receives a cochlear implant, the better his or her spoken language skills at age 3 and a half.

Skip Virgin, M.D., Ph.D., has been named head of the Department of Pathology and Immunology at the School of Medicine, succeeding Emil R. Unanue, M.D.

A 16-year-old can walk again after Susan Mackinnon, M.D., chief of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Photo by Ray MarklinPart of clinical orientation for third-year medical students includes learning to suture with cow’s hearts.

The Children’s Discovery Institute, which will begin research later this year, named an executive director and scientific director.

K. Daniel Riew, M.D., has been named the Mildred B. Simon Distinguished Professor and Ken Yamaguchi the Sam and Marilyn Fox Distinguished Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the School of Medicine.

A brain region that focuses on vision also receives signals that may help configure the operation of the brain, neuroscientists at the School of Medicine report. If the brain is thought of as an army, the new signals may give scientists a unique opportunity to trace messages from the high command all the way down to individual soldiers.

Doctors may soon be prescribing personalized menus for pregnant women.Expectant mothers may someday get a personalized menu of foods to eat during pregnancy to complement their genetic makeup as a result of new research at the School of Medicine. Researchers used transparent fish embryos to develop a way to discover how genes and diet interact to cause birth defects.

Echocardiograms show that the thickness of left ventricular (LV) walls in the hypertrophied heart (left) are nearly twice that of the normal heart.”The heart is the single most energy-consuming organ per weight in the body,” says Lisa de las Fuentes, M.D. Under some conditions this energy-hungry organ is prone to defects in its energy metabolism that contribute to heart disease, according to research published in the Journal of Nuclear Cardiology by de las Fuentes and colleagues at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Patricia Wolff examines a young patient in her pediatric clinic in Cap Haitien, Haiti.Swollen bellies, orange hair, listlessness and dull eyes — these are the traits of child malnutrition in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and where roughly one of every three children is chronically malnourished. To try to change that statistic, Patricia A. Wolff, M.D., associate clinical professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, founded Meds & Food for Kids (MFK) in 2004.