School of Medicine

Photo by Tim Parker(From left) Sam, Dylan and Ashley Mopkins show the scarves they made for their mom.When dealing with life-threatening diseases such as cancer, complete care sometimes extends to other members of the family. That’s the idea behind the Help Us Give Support (HUGS) program at Siteman Cancer Center. Members of HUGS, children between the ages of 4 and 12, recently took part in an Arts as Healing event to create decorative scarves for their mother or grandmother fighting breast cancer. Read more from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Scientists have identified an important link between kidney damage and cardiac problems, creating new possibilities for treating the primary cause of death in kidney disease patients.

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.