School of Medicine

An experimental device implanted into a Missouri man’s chest hopes to do what maximum doses of four medications can’t — lower his blood pressure. The electrical implant was activated at Barnes-Jewish Dialysis Center July 11. Marcos Rothstein, center director and associate professor of medicine, comments about the procedure in the following St. Louis Post-Dispatch article.

Teenage soda consumption is on the rise.A new study released by the Center for Science in the Public Interest calls on the Food and Drug Administration to require health warnings on sodas as teenage consumption of sugary drinks continues to rise. Teenage boys who drink carbonated or non-carbonated soft drinks consume an average of three 12-ounce cans per day, and girls more than two cans, according to a new analysis of 1999-2002 government data. Teens who drink soft drinks get nearly 15 percent of their total calories from those drinks. Connie Diekman, a dietary expert at Washington University in St. Louis, has several suggestions for helping to curb teenage soda consumption.

Each individual’s reponse to aerobic training allowed the researchers to identify regions on chromosomes 6, 7 and 19 that are linked to the debilitating disease.

Cathepsin G regulates the ability of neutrophils to secrete chemicals that attract other immune cells and start the local inflammatory process.

He served as the organization’s vice president this past year, and has been elected an AAI counselor for years; he will serve a one-year term as president.

Participants must be in stable health and not be performing vigorous exercise more than one time a week.

Photo by Robert BostonMembers of the acrobatic troupe the Flying Wallendas visit the lab of Aaron DiAntonio, M.D. DiAntonio hopes to name a recently discovered gene “Wallenda.”

It might help babies resist brain injuries from low oxygen and reduced blood flow, which is linked to premature birth and other irregularities. More medical news

Deanna Barch (center) discusses brain imaging techniques used in the experiment, which used the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine (shown at right).When encouraged to use memorization strategies commonly employed by healthy individuals, people with schizophrenia can be helped to remember information just as well as their healthy counterparts, a process that in itself seems to spur a normalization of memory-related activities in the brains of people with schizophrenia, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • Pomegranate juice good for moms (week of July 6) • Why depression is bad for hearts (week of July 13) • Risk factors for suicide (week of July 20) • Genes affect response to alcohol (week of July 27)