School of Medicine

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.

Constant blood flow shields the brain from cold, limiting the effects of any attempt to cool the brain.Attempts to cool the brain to reduce injury from stroke and other head trauma may face a significant obstacle: current cooling devices can’t penetrate very deeply into the brain. Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that blood flow in the brain creates a “cold shielding” effect and have developed a method for calculating brain temperature that may be used to improve brain cooling techniques.

In the Thoroughman laboratory, volunteers play games on a computer screeen using a robotic arm so that Thoroughman and his colleagues can study how people learn motor skills.Central to being human is the ability to adapt: We learn from our mistakes. Previous theories of learning have assumed that the size of learning naturally scales with the size of the mistake. But now biomedical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have shown that people can use alternative strategies: Learning does not necessarily scale proportionally with error.

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • ADHD kids not receiving treatment (week of Aug. 2) • How tumors cloak themselves (week of Aug. 9) • New info about macular degeneration (week of Aug. 16) • Why steroids weaken bones (week of Aug. 23) • The brain’s ‘cold sheild’ (week of Aug. 30)

UnanueEmil R. Unanue, has been named the Paul and Ellen Lacy Professor of Pathology at the School of Medicine. The appointment was announced by Skip Virgin, the Edward Mallinckrodt Professor and head of Pathology and Immunology at the School of Medicine.

New research may finally settle a decades-old debate about how the kidney keeps valuable blood proteins from harmfully slipping into the urine, a serious health symptom that often precedes kidney failure. WUSM scientists discovered that a structure, known as the glomerular basement membrane, plays a key role in the process.

A woman trying to conceive a child may receive as many as 1,000 fertility-enhancing injections per year, but a recent discovery at the School of Medicine may help reduce the required number of fertility shots to about one per week.

These before (left) and after images show the effects of fumagillin-laden nanoparticles in a rabbit aorta.In laboratory tests, one very low dose of a drug was enough to show an effect on notoriously tenacious artery-clogging plaques. But it wasn’t so much the drug itself as how it was delivered. Fumagillin — a drug that can inhibit the growth of new blood vessels that feed atherosclerotic plaques — was sent directly to the base of plaques by microscopically small spheres called nanoparticles.

Dark areas (marked with arrows) in the first image show a process of bone renewal and strengthening. The second image shows a reduction in this process after a cortisone injection.Scientists are closing in on the solution to a persistent medical puzzle: why do high doses of cortisone, widely prescribed for asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory and autoimmune conditions, weaken bones? Researchers at the School of Medicine have identified osteoclasts, cells that dismantle old bone, as the essential link between osteoporosis and cortisone.

VirginHerbert W. “Skip” Virgin has been named head of the Department of Pathology and Immunology at the School of Medicine. Virgin came to the department in 1990 as an instructor and became a professor in 2002. As the new department head, he becomes Edward Mallinckrodt Professor of Pathology and Immunology.