Johns Hopkins Medicine News

Recent recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) advising elimination of routine prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate cancer in healthy men are likely to encounter serious pushback from primary care physicians, according to results of a survey by Johns Hopkins investigators.

Johns Hopkins researchers say a program they developed that uses personal advocates and community networks to find organ donors for friends and loved ones who need kidney transplants resulted in success for nearly half of the participants in its trial run.

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.