A study led by Dr. Nassir Marrouche, director of the Tulane Heart and Vascular Institute, shows that the simple approach — compared to advanced image-guided technology to aggressively target diseased areas of the heart — has better patient outcomes when it comes to ablation, a procedure that destroys cardiac tissue to correct irregular heart rhythms, also known as atrial fibrillation.

A research team led by Dr. Samir El-Dahr, Jane B. Aron Professor and chair of pediatrics at the School of Medicine, examined why human kidneys, which are composed of nearly a million filter units, stop creating new filter cells after birth. The researchers used a mouse model to understand what occurs when a fetal stem cell differentiates into a mature kidney cell. Researchers found that near the time of birth, the DNA blueprint that controls the fate of kidney stem cells changes dramatically.