Adventures from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
In September 2016, a Nevada woman died of a bacterial infection. The woman, in her 70s, had been hospitalized previously in India due to a fracture of her right leg, which led to bone infections and more subsequent hospitalizations. During these infections, she almost certainly received antibiotics to help her recover, especially given that in(...)
What do a relatively unknown gene, a well-known signaling pathway and nuclear transport have in common? They’re all part of how diabetes and cancer drug metformin works. Metformin is a widely used type 2 diabetes drug that lowers glucose levels and sensitizes cells to insulin. Metformin’s mechanism has been long sought after, and studies into(...)
The United States spends more money on health care than any other country — $2.9 trillion in 2014, or about $9,110 per person. Spending continues to increase. With the arrival of the new Trump administration, the debate on health care costs is heightening. In preparation, let’s take a closer look at U.S. health care costs(...)
Major depressive disorder (MDD) afflicts more than 250 million people worldwide and is the most common source of disability for Americans. In addition to counseling and talk therapy, there is a veritable alphabet soup of medications, from amitriptyline to venlafaxine, currently prescribed to treat MDD. Each class of antidepressant acts on an individual or combination(...)
Today, adult women have a wide variety of choices of birth control methods, including daily pills, implants, IUDs and others. However, there is still no equivalent method of birth control for men, who have historically been limited to withdrawal, condoms and sterilization, placing the burden of pregnancy prevention on females. A recent study, co-sponsored by(...)
At the proverbial watercooler in teaching hospitals across the world, one hears remarkably similar refrains: “This patient is back again,” “I have no idea why my experiment failed this time” and, most universally, “I’ve only slept three hours in the past two days!” Medical trainees often view sleep deprivation as a badge of honor, one(...)
CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing is the hottest new technology being used by molecular biologists and geneticists around the world. The method, first developed in prokaryotes in a collaboration between Jennifer Doudna’s group at University of California, Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier’s lab at the Pasteur Institute in June 2012, allows targeted editing of the genomes of living(...)
In medicine, we would like to believe that treatment decisions are black and white, evidence is clear cut and uncertainty is a bygone impediment, squashed decades ago by the tight jaws of the scientific method. Yet it seems the more we learn, the more we have to argue about. Uncertainty is here to stay. As(...)
A priest, a minister and a rabbi walk into Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center to ingest psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms. Although this probably sounds like the beginning of a great joke, new advancements in the field of psychedelic medicine are no laughing matter. After nearly 50 years of prohibition, academic studies and clinical(...)
Yoshinori Ohsumi of the University of Tokyo was recently awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in mechanisms for autophagy. What is autophagy? From the Greek roots “auto,“ or self, and “phagia,” or eating, the word literally means self-eating. In cell biology, autophagy describes the way that cells recycle unneeded(...)