
Top Stories 
Published On January 15, 2010
CLINICAL RESEARCH
Getting Out the Gout
An underdiagnosed condition gets its first new drug in 40 years.
An ailment that usually strikes during ages of opulence now afflicts 5.1 million Americans. The return of gout, which is caused by uric acid crystallizing in the joints, is linked with the obesity epidemic. The overweight produce too much uric acid and don’t excrete it well. Though gout has been around for millennia, the condition is still often underdiagnosed and mismanaged—more’s the pity, now that the FDA has approved Uloric (febuxostat), the first new gout drug in 40 years, which lowers uric acid more effectively than previous treatments.
Dispatches

What Makes a Kid Clumsy? More research into coordination disorders shows why some children are more prone to trip, fumble and spill the milk.

Eyes in the Sky Satellite data can be used to assess the health impact of dust storms and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. Additional applications could be on the horizon.

Could This One Change Help Curb the Opioid Crisis? To prescribe an effective bridge to addiction treatment, emergency physicians must get special training and receive a waiver. Making that process easier—or eliminating the requirement altogether—could make a big impact.

One Thing Leads to the Next Robert Lefkowitz is best known for revealing the mechanism behind hundreds of drugs in use today. But he thinks of himself as a storyteller first and has a new book out to make his case.

Podcast: The Research Year That Was Medical research labs have faced a difficult stretch of closed buildings and competing priorities. Yet they have also produced milestone discoveries—and not only on COVID-19.

The Shape of Us Two milestone discoveries in protein modeling promise to change the fundamentals of drug discovery.

Universal Flu Vaccines Move Forward In the shadow of coronavirus vaccine development, another vaccine was making solid progress.

Top Stories 

The Neuroscience of Giving Up
Why do some people react poorly, even catastrophically, in emergency situations?