Inside this issueCover storiesA major boost for recruiting top doctorsOf moths and mice: jumping genes make big leap to mammalsProgram aims to close the gender gap in medical researchPartnershipsYale and Donaghue partnership treats research advances as a practical matterStudents come north and aid flows south as Yale lends a hand in wake of KatrinaBenefit bike ride raises $250,000 for Yale survivors’ clinicGrants & contractsPeopleLifelines: Gail D’Onofrio on saving and changing livesDiabetes expert is named dean of nursingBorgstrom named president/CEO of Yale-New HavenNeuroscientist Horvath will chair Comparative MedicineOut & aboutAwards & honorsScienceAdvances: When it comes to taste, the nose knows | Cellular power plants help explain diabetesHealthLiver transplantation program formed with an international team of expertsDatabase promises early alerts of outbreaksDefusing vascular “time bombs” calls for group effortNew lens implant for cataracts is a bionic-style bifocalAdvances: A stubborn inequity in heart treatments | An upside to aneurysms? |
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AdvancesHealth and science news from YaleWhen it comes to taste, the nose knowsAnyone whose enjoyment of food has been blunted by a bad cold knows that a good part of taste involves the sense of smell. Our taste buds distinguish five elemental sensations—sweet, sour, salty, savory and bitter—but food’s flavor arises from pleasant odors that enter our nasal passages through the back of the mouth.
In new research published in the August 18 issue of Neuron, Dana Small, Ph.D., assistant professor of surgery, and colleagues at Yale, the John B. Pierce Laboratory and the University of Dresden Medical School in Germany inserted tubes that pumped odors, such as chocolate and lavender, into study subjects’ noses, either to the front of the nostrils (yellow arrow) or “retronasally,” to a region at the back of the nasal cavity (blue arrow). Using functional
magnetic resonance imaging, the team found that a single odor could activate
different brain regions depending on which nasal route it traveled. Odors
presented retronasally activated brain areas devoted to the mouth, which Small
says is “evidence of the existence of distinct olfactory subsystems,” one specialized
for sensing objects at a distance, the other for sensing objects in the mouth. A stubborn inequity in heart treatmentsIllness is a great leveler, but social and economic factors have profound effects on health, in terms of both vulnerability to disease and the treatments patients receive. After a series of studies in the 1980s and early 1990s showed that black and female patients were not treated as aggressively as white males after heart attacks, public health initiatives were launched to redress the problem. But in the August 18 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers at Yale and Emory reported that black patients, especially black women, are still less likely than white patients to receive standard tests or therapies after heart attacks. “We found persistence of an elevated risk
of death among African-American women,” says senior author Harlan M. Krumholz,
M.D., professor of medicine and public health and director of the Robert
Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program. “This finding, along with evidence
of differences in treatment, requires attention and remedy.” Cellular power plants help explain diabetesEvery cell in our bodies contains bacteria-sized powerhouses called mitochondria (seen as ovals in photo), where sugar combines with oxygen to produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the fuel for cells’ most important functions.
Insulin, which escorts sugar into cells, is a crucial player in this process. In type 2 diabetes, which affects 171 million people worldwide, cells become resistant to insulin and cellular energy production plummets. A study in the September issue of PLoS Medicine led by Kitt F. Petersen, M.D., associate professor of medicine, suggests that insulin resistance results from an inherited flaw in mitochondrial function. Petersen’s team used magnetic
resonance spectroscopy to zoom in on the effects of insulin in muscle cells
of children whose parents have type 2 diabetes and in a control group. They
found a striking difference: insulin spiked ATP production by mitochondria
in the control group’s muscle cells by 90 percent, but insulin-resistant
offspring of parents with type 2 diabetes had only a 5 percent increase. An upside to aneurysms?It’s never a good thing to have an aortic aneurysm, a weakness in the walls of the body’s largest artery, which rises from the heart’s left ventricle to supply the body with oxygenated blood. But in the September issue of the journal Chest, John Elefteriades, M.D., chief of cardiothoracic surgery, and colleagues reported a “silver lining in the cloud of aneurysm disease.” Atherosclerotic plaques, which can cause heart attacks or strokes if they rupture, begin to form in most people’s arteries by age 20. But Elefteriades and other Yale surgeons had noticed that even elderly patients with aortic aneurysms seemed to have virtually plaque-free arteries, “like a baby’s or a young child’s.” When the team tested this naked-eye clinical observation with precise radiological
measurements, they found that patients with ascending aortic aneurysms were
indeed far less prone to plaques. Elefteriades has shown in other studies
that aortic aneurysms are inherited, and he suggests that examining the same
genes could bring new insights into atherosclerosis. Any breakthrough there
would be invaluable, since cardiovascular disease, Elefteriades notes, is “the
leading cause of death in the Western world.” 
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Medicine@Yale Magazine
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October/November 2005 Volume 1 Issue 3
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