School Notes: School of Medicine
May/June 2009

Yale alumnus will head Yale Cancer Center

Thomas J. Lynch Jr. ’82, ’86MD, was named director of Yale Cancer Center and physician-in-chief of the new Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, which will open in October. For a Yale Alumni Magazine report, see "Custom-made Cancer Care.") Lynch, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, was chief of hematology/oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center. A lung cancer expert, he was director of the Center for Thoracic Cancers at MGH and director of medical oncology at the MGH Thoracic Oncology Center. In 1996, he helped found the Boston-based Kenneth B. Schwartz Center for the Promotion of Caregiver/Patient Relations and became vice chair of its board of directors in 2006. Lynch, who started his new job April 1, also will oversee a new institute for cancer biology at West Campus.

Road rage linked to cardiac arrests

Before exploding the next time you are cut off in traffic, consider findings from medical school researchers linking changes brought on by anger or other strong emotions to future arrhythmias and sudden cardiac arrests, which account for 400,000 deaths annually.

Research led by Rachel Lampert, associate professor of medicine, studied 62 patients with enlarged hearts and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs). Patients were monitored three months after the ICD was implanted and given a mental stress test requiring them to recall a situation that angered them. The team found that those with more anger-induced electrical instability were more likely to experience arrhythmias a year later than those in the control group. Lampert's work builds on research linking strong emotion to sudden cardiac death.

A piece in the Alzheimer's puzzle is identified

Yale researchers have filled in a missing gap on the molecular road map of Alzheimer's disease. They identified a protein required for amyloid-beta peptides to block brain function in Alzheimer's patients. "It has been a black box," said Stephen M. Strittmatter, senior author of the study and director of the Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair Program at the medical school. "We have known that amyloid-beta is bad for the brain, but we have not known exactly how amyloid-beta does bad things to neurons." Now, researchers believe they've identified the culprit: cellular prion proteins. These prion proteins are normally harmless and exist in all cells, but when amyloid-beta peptides latch onto them a cascade starts that makes neurons sick. The good news, Strittmatter said, is that since the prion proteins act at an early stage of disease development, they make a promising target for new Alzheimer's therapies.