Worldwide, some 50 million people live with epilepsy. They face increased risks of falls, car accidents, burns and more, potentially leading to significant injury or even death. Work being done at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital, and at other academic health-care systems across the U.S., is now giving people with epilepsy many options for decreasing the frequency or severity of their seizures, or even removing them from their lives altogether.

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – a heart condition also known as HCM is the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in young people, often going undetected. Thankfully a new drug could mean a brighter future for people suffering from HCM.

Quitting smoking seems like an impossible task, but the first step is understanding what you’re up against.

The Fetal Care Center is one of the only centers in the Midwest that offers prenatal surgery to treat spina bifida. Specialists have now seen positive results with an innovative, less invasive treatment called Fetoscopic surgery. With modern technology, spina bifida can be corrected before the baby is born, allowing spina bifida patients to lead happy, healthy lives.

In the fall of 2021, Curiosus writer and Barnes-Jewish Hospital administrative fellow Emily Dovolis Thomson, MHA, talked with Muhammad Faraz Masood, MD, Washington University cardiothoracic surgeon, and other members of a specialized team about a life-saving procedure called ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. Often used to treat the sickest of the sick, ECMO sustains life when the body no longer can. During the days of the SARS-coV-2 pandemic, ECMO, which performs the functions the heart and lungs can no longer manage, has become a valuable tool in saving lives.

This photo essay suggests the level of expertise required to care for patients undergoing ECMO, an intervention with many moving parts. It takes a dedicated team to manage the complexities.

BY Connie Mitchell

“It was a lonely experience.” That’s how Dave Barylski remembers the long hours at his babies’ bedsides. Twins, the girls were born in April 2019 weighing just more than 1 pound each after birth at 22 weeks of gestation. Barylski and his partner, Bethany Watkins, practically lived in the newborn intensive care unit (NICU) at St. Louis Children’s Hospital for seven months—and he was often the only father in the unit. “I was lucky that my job offered paternity leave and extended family leave so I could be there, but being a dad in that situation, I had to piggyback off the services that are usually focused on moms,” he says. “I was the only father there during lunches and in the support groups that were clearly aimed at moms’ needs.

The beeping vibrato of pressure monitors, mechanical rhythm of the blood pump, low hum of the oxygenator and metronomic beat measuring heart rate: These are the sounds that emanate from a complex circuit of pumps, tubes, filters and monitors called ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. ECMO moves blood outside of the body through cannulae, or tubes, to an oxygenator that provides a gas exchange in the blood, removing carbon dioxide and replacing it with oxygen. The oxygenated blood is then warmed to the appropriate temperature and returned to the body using rhythms that mimic a beating heart.

When disease or trauma prevent the body from performing these life-sustaining rhythms, ECMO can take over.

Three billion is such a large number that it’s hard to fathom. To put it in perspective:

• 3 billion seconds is about 95 years
• If you took 3 billion steps, you could walk around Earth at its equator more than 45 times
• Stacking 3 billion pennies would result in a tower nearly 3,000 miles tall

Three billion also happens to be the number of DNA building blocks, or base pairs, that make up a human genome. And nearly every single cell in our bodies contains two copies of those 3 billion base pairs.

Noah was just six years old when he walked up behind someone mowing the lawn who didn’t know he was there. In an instant, as the lawnmower was backed up, Noah’s foot was caught underneath it, sharp blades cutting through skin, muscle and bone in his foot and toes. “They told us at the hospital that his foot might have to be amputated,” says Hingst. “We were in total shock.”

They would fill St. Louis’ Busch Stadium more than twice, take every seat in 261 jumbo jets and fill each bed in Barnes-Jewish Hospital 85 times over. They are the more than 108,000 Americans waiting for an organ transplant. And for too many, a donor organ won’t arrive in time.

Every few years, as he pursues breakthroughs for one of the world’s most notoriously difficult cancers to treat, William Hawkins, MD, says he feels like the first man who walked on the moon. “When you have an idea, and you test it in the laboratory, and you find a new insight that no one else has known previously, that’s cool,” he says. “It pushes the frontier of cancer research that much closer to effective treatments for my patients. It really is like boldly going where no one has gone before.”

Whether it’s monthly menstrual cycles, pregnancy, childbirth or menopause, women’s bodies change a lot over a lifetime. But often, these life changes aren’t just physical. They can affect women’s mental health, too, in ways large and small.

Though people living in rural communities across the United States may be less likely to get cancer, they are more likely than people living in suburbs and cities to die from it. That’s what is known as a health disparity, a term that can sound rather abstract. The problem, however, is anything but.

When Jeannie Kelly, MD, MS, a Washington University maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, first arrived on the medical campus in St. Louis in 2016, she had already seen how opioid use can devastate a community. “I finished my training in Boston, where the opioid epidemic was exploding,” she says. While working there, Kelly saw addiction and overdoses. She was aware of the difficulties and dangers for pregnant women addicted to opioids, and the great risks to their babies. And she wanted to help.