Johns Hopkins Medicine News

Children with pelvic and thigh fractures develop dangerous blood clots so rarely that anti-clotting therapy should be given only to those with underlying conditions that increase clotting risk, according to a study from Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

Johns Hopkins scientists have discovered a protein that appears to play an important regulatory role in deciding whether stem cells differentiate into the cells that make up the brain, as well as countless other tissues. This finding, published in the April Developmental Cell, could eventually shed light on developmental disorders as well as a variety of conditions that involve the generation of new neurons into adulthood, including depression, stroke, and posttraumatic stress disorder.

New nerve cells formed in a select part of the brain could hold considerable sway over how much you eat and consequently weigh, new animal research by Johns Hopkins scientists suggests in a study published in the May issue of Nature Neuroscience.

A yeast geneticist and an economist at The Johns Hopkins University are among 220 “thinkers and doers” in the 2012 class of new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), long the master reference work in psychiatry, is seriously flawed and needs radical change from its current “field guide” form, according to an essay by two Johns Hopkins psychiatrists published in the May 17 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Mark E. Molliver, M.D., a professor emeritus of neuroscience and neurology in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine whose discoveries had a significant impact on analyzing the structure of the brain and its response to drugs; and whose skills as an influential teacher became legendary over a nearly half-century career, died on May 10 at The Johns Hopkins Hospital of complications following cardiac arrest. He was 75.

Even though hundreds of thousands more people finished grueling 26.2 mile marathons in the United States in 2009 compared to a decade earlier, a runner’s risk of dying during or soon after the race has remained very low — about .75 per 100,000, new Johns Hopkins research suggests. Men, however, were twice as likely to die as women.

Babies born to women with sensitivity to gluten appear to be at increased risk for certain psychiatric disorders later in life, according to research by scientists at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore.