School of Medicine

EllenbergerThomas Ellenberger, D.V.M., Ph.D., has been named the Raymond H. Wittcoff Professor and head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the School of Medicine.

The School of Medicine will receive $5.9 million over the course of five years to begin an ambitious and potentially decades-long search for the earliest signs that a seemingly normal person may someday develop Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers at the Genome Sequencing Center (GSC) at the School of Medicine will lead the sequencing of the genome of maize, more popularly known to consumers as corn. The National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy allocated a total of $32 million for sequencing maize. The GSC maize genome project will receive $29.5 million of that funding.

A combination of brain scanning with a new imaging agent and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) analysis has left neuroscientists encouraged that they may finally be moving toward techniques for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease before its clinical symptoms become apparent.

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • Pitchers’ elbow (week of Nov. 2) • Mouse love songs (week of Nov. 9) • Early removal of thyroid cancer (week of Nov. 16) • Diabetic epidemic worsens (week of Nov. 23)

Perlmutter (left) checks the lighting at a work area of client Gay Hirsch, who has low vision.Monica Perlmutter is taking her “show on the road” to help older adults with low vision live independently in their homes. Nearly 4 million adults age 65 and older have visual impairment severe enough to interfere with daily activities. Macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, inoperable cataracts and glaucoma are leading causes of low vision.

Children treated for sickle cell disease have worse symptoms if they are also asthma sufferers, physicians at the School of Medicine noted. Further, children with asthma often also have breathing disturbances during sleep.

Pitchers often lose range of motion in their pitching elbows.Now that the Chicago White Sox have swept the Houston Astros in the World Series, most baseball players are taking some time to rest. Time off is especially important for pitchers because throwing a baseball overhand is both an unnatural motion and a burden on the shoulder and elbow. Now a research team led by Washington University sports medicine specialists has found that professional pitchers have significantly decreased range of motion in their throwing elbows. But that limited range of motion doesn’t seem to be influenced by the age of the pitcher, how many innings he has pitched or whether he has a history of injuries.

A dotted line indicates the former position of the thyroid in this child.When a child inherits an abnormal gene that leads to thyroid cancer, surgical removal of the thyroid gland before the cancer spreads is the only sure cure. Now a new study shows it is best to take out the thyroid before a child turns eight to guarantee a life free of thyroid cancer. The researchers tracked the effectiveness of preemptive thyroid removal in 50 at-risk children ranging in age from three to 19 years. All patients were followed for at least five years at Washington University School of Medicine and at Duke University School of. The surgeons found that none of the 22 children who were under eight at the time of surgery showed signs of thyroid cancer five or more years later. However, they did find indications of thyroid cancer in six of the 28 children who were older than eight when they had surgery to remove the thyroid gland.

Tasks requiring shifting of attention, like driving a car while conversing with a passenger, may be challenging for people in very early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.People in early stages of Alzheimer’s disease have greater difficulty shifting attention back and forth between competing sources of information, a finding that offers new support for theories that contend breakdowns in attention play an important role in onset of the disease. Published in a recent issue of the journal Neuropsychology, the study suggests that subtle breakdowns in attention may offer one of the earliest reliable clues that a patient is grappling with early symptoms of Alzheimer’s-related dementia.