rehabilitation

Washington University Orthopedics has opened a spine center at its outpatient facility in Chesterfield, Mo., to provide comprehensive, specialized care to patients with spine injuries and disorders.  

Young athletes are especially vulnerable to concussions because their brains are still developing. A team of concussion experts, led by a Washington University sports medicine specialist, recommends that no athlete be allowed back into competition the day of injury. It may be weeks or even months before it’s safe to go back on the playing field.  

Clinicians may be able to better predict the effects of strokes and other brain injuries by adapting a scanning approach originally developed for the study of brain organization, neurologists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found.

Women have different sports medicine needs than men.Reporting on issues unique to female runners in the journal Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinics of North America, Washington University physical medicine and rehabilitation specialists say women’s bodies adapt to athletic challenges differently. They say that when female athletes get injured, health-care professionals need to consider the anatomic, biomechanical, hormonal and functional factors that are unique to women.

Women have different sports medicine needs than men.In sports medicine, it isn’t always true that what’s “good for the goose is good for the gander.” Reporting on issues unique to female runners in the journal Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinics of North America, Washington University physical medicine and rehabilitation specialists say women’s bodies adapt to athletic challenges differently. They say that when female athletes get injured, health-care professionals need to consider the anatomic, biomechanical, hormonal and functional factors that are unique to women.

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.

Deanna Barch (right), co-author of a memory study that used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (shown in the background) to monitor the brain activity of people with schizophrenia.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.

Approximately 1 million stroke victims suffer from a condition called aphasia, which can affect reading, writing, speaking or understanding speech. Generally, speech therapists rely on their own experience and intuition to determine treatment for these patients, but a multidisciplinary research team from the School of Medicine has developed a speech rehabilitation program using the same evidence-based approach used by physicians and surgeons.

Chest x-ray of a lung affected by pneumoniaMany medical advances involve complicated new technologies or procedures. But Linda Mundy, M.D., associate professor of medicine and an infectious diseases specialist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, recently reported good results with a new pneumonia treatment that can be summed up in a single sentence: Get patients up out of bed earlier and more often, and they check out of the hospital an average of one day sooner. Mundy says the high volume of U.S. pneumonia hospitalizations could make the new treatment a potent cost-saver, but added that a second study of the approach, known as early mobilization, is needed to confirm the beneficial effects.