School of Medicine

Vegetarians who don’t cook their food have abnormally low bone mass, usually a sign of osteoporosis and increased fracture risk. But a research team at the School of Medicine also found that raw food vegetarians have other biological markers indicating their bones, although light in weight, may be healthy.

What makes a woman a woman?The mysteries of both human sex chromosomes have now been laid bare with the publication of the sequence of the human X chromosome in the journal Nature. Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England led the effort to sequence the X, with significant contributions from the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University.

Gesturing as if turning sections of a large object over his head, Michael A. Province, Ph.D., tries to communicate the scope of his research field. “It’s like we’re all manipulating different parts of a huge, multidimensional Rubik’s cube,” he says. By “we,” Province means the worldwide community of geneticists, biostatisticians, physicians and molecular biologists who […]

School of Medicine researchers are testing the effectiveness of an investigational drug for the treatment of this neuropathic pain.

The grant will establish a University center that will develop better ways to prevent and treat heart disease in diabetics.

Photo by Tim Parker(From left) Sam, Dylan and Ashley Mopkins showcase the scarves they made for their mom at the Arts as Healing program.It offers patients’ children the opportunity to take an active, artistic role in the healing process while providing a group support network.

Such analysis may one day be a primary diagnostic tool for physicians deciding on a treatment course for trauma and other critically ill patients. More medical news

A bacterium that lives in the human gut adaptively shifts more than a quarter of its genes into high gear when its host’s diet changes from sugar to complex carbohydrates. This not only allows the bacteria to survive rapidly changing nutrient conditions but also helps maintain the stability of the gut’s highly complex microbial society, according to WUSM researchers.

Researchers at the School of Medicine are testing the effectiveness of an investigational drug for the treatment of sciatica pain. Sciatica involves pain in the lower back and hip that radiates down the thigh into the leg.

Bipolar disorder is often hard to diagnose in children, and it is easy to mistake the disorder’s manic phase for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, warns Joan Luby, a child psychiatrist at the School of Medicine and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Learn more about pediatric bipolar disorder in the following St. Louis Post-Dispatch article.