School of Medicine

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.

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.

Many kids who may benefit from ADHD medications don’t get them.In contrast to claims that children are being overmedicated for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found that a high percentage of kids with ADHD are not receiving treatment. In fact, almost half of the children who might benefit from ADHD drugs were not getting them.

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.