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149 stories tagged ‘Children’s Hospital Boston’
Seven children doing well with laboratory-grown organs
Three boys and four girls treated at Children’s Hospital Boston are the first people in the world to receive laboratory-grown organs. The children, aged 4 to 19, received bladders grown from their own cells and have now been followed for an average of almost four years. Their cases are reported in the April 4, 2006 [...]
Getting ACL tears to heal themselves
Orthopedic surgeon Martha Murray reports that a collagen gel enriched with blood platelets can stimulate natural healing of a partial anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear. Murray and colleagues at Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital Boston found the gel can help regenerate the knee ligament and restore mechanical strength. Their findings are preliminary, but could lead to a [...]
Researchers uncover cause of asthma
Medical experts have been baffled by what causes asthma. Most of them favor the idea that it stems from “helper” cells that have gone awry. But researchers at Harvard Medical School have come up with convincing evidence that the answer lies in a special type of natural “killer” cell. We were very, very surprised,” admits [...]
Protein underlies brain’s response to activity
Experience helps shape the brain, but how that happens – how synapses are remodeled in response to activity – is one of neurobiology’s biggest mysteries. Though axons and dendrites can be easily spotted waxing and waning under the microscope, the molecular middlemen working inside the cell to shape the neuron’s sinewy processes have been much [...]
The electric activity that spurs sperm to make a final dash to, then into, a female egg has been measured for the first time. To produce this all-important fertility sprint, sperm tails must switch from an easy, symmetrical beating to a frenetic whiplike lashing. This switching slows down sperm cells but gives them the extra [...]
RNAi solution knocks down herpes infection
Ever since RNA interference hit the scene a few years ago as a way to selectively turn off gene expression, researchers have been investigating whether these small but powerful bits of RNA can be used as therapies. The problem has been delivery – how to get the RNA into the cell where it can silence [...]
Doctors overprescribing antibiotics for sore throats
Doctors treating sore throats are overprescribing antibiotics to more than a million U.S. children annually, unnecessarily driving up health costs, promoting the rise of drug-resistant bugs, and exposing children to unnecessary drugs and their side effects. That’s the conclusion of a new study of national treatment data by faculty at Harvard Medical School and the [...]
Kids too often prescribed antibiotics for sore throat
Each year, millions of children visit their family physician or pediatrician seeking treatment for sore throats. While a sore throat could indicate many common illnesses, physicians are often most concerned about bacterial infections that warrant antibiotic treatments. The most common cause of sore throat for which antibiotics are indicated is group A streptococcal pharyngitis, or [...]
An existing diuretic may suppress seizures in newborns
A diuretic drug called bumetanide may serendipitously help treat seizures in newborns, which are difficult to control with existing anticonvulsants, according to a study in the November 2005 Nature Medicine. The study findings could lead to clinical trials of bumetanide in newborns, whose immature, rapidly- developing brains are especially vulnerable to seizures – particularly preterm [...]
Work progressing on Alzheimer’s, but too slowly
Actor David Hyde Pierce made an emotional plea for increased activism around Alzheimer’s disease Monday (Oct. 17), saying that federal funding has leveled off despite scientific progress in understanding and treating the disease in the last 15 years. Pierce, a member of the Alzheimer’s Association’s National Board, watched both his father and grandfather deteriorate and [...]
Double trouble: Cells with duplicate genomes can trigger tumors
So-called “double-value” cells are produced by random errors in cell division that occur with unknown frequency. The generation of these genetically unstable cells appears to be a “pathway for generating a tumor,” says David Pellman, MD, a pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber and at Children’s Hospital Boston and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. He [...]
Learning how the SARS virus spikes its quarry
Structural images that show how the SARS virus’s spike protein grasps its receptor may help scientists learn new details about how the virus infects cells and could also help in identifying potential weak points that novel drugs or vaccines could exploit. A worldwide SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak in 2002-2003 affected more than 8,000 [...]
Leonard Zon and his colleagues at the Harvard Medical School were trying to find out how hemoglobin forms by studying zebrafish, small piscians whose transparent bodies allow their inner workings to be easily seen while they are alive. The effort centered on a mutated strain of fish known as “shiraz.” The researchers name their mutants [...]
Blood vessel drugs halt cancer growth
After decades of surviving peer rejection of his theory of cancer treatment by blocking tiny blood vessels, Judah Folkman has gone on to develop drugs that did what he predicted they would do. Folkman’s endostatin, the drug Fortune magazine called a failure, was used to treat 486 patients with lung cancer in China. At Dana-Farber [...]
Urine test may help monitor disfiguring birthmarks
Vascular anomalies include both vascular malformations and vascular tumors (most commonly hemangiomas). Hemangiomas, found in about 10 percent of infants, occur when the cells lining blood vessels multiply abnormally. Hemangiomas grow rapidly in the first year of life, then usually shrink and disappear. But some grow large, causing obstruction, ulceration, and other problems. Vascular malformations [...]
Child early intervention programs make for healthier adults
The Brookline Early Education Program (BEEP), a community- based child health and development program, was initiated by the Brookline Public Schools and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and ran from 1972-1979. Enrollment was open to families in Brookline, Mass., and to some urban families in neighboring Boston. The program provided health, educational, and social services [...]
‘Brown fat’ cells hold clues for possible obesity treatments
In laboratory studies of mouse cells, the research team identified genes that govern how precursor cells give rise to mature brown fat cells. There are two main types of fat cells in the body- white, designed to store energy for use in times of need, and brown, which burn energy and generate heat, leading scientists [...]
Breathing restored after severe spinal-cord injury
Keeping an animal functioning after a cervical spinal cord injury is nearly impossible. An American researcher developed the lower spinal cord rat model in the early 1900s. He found that lesioning the spinal cord of dogs between the eighth and tenth thoracic vertebrae produced hind-limb paralysis while letting animals stay self-sufficient. Yang Teng, director of [...]
Broken hearts may mend after all
Although adult muscle cells become inflexible after differentiation, these cells temporarily loosen the structure to divide in fetal development. Mark T. Keating found that in some lower vertebrates, heart tissue regenerates without the scarring seen in mammals. This seems to occur by proliferation of existing cardiomyocytes, not stem cells. Felix Engel, an HMS research fellow [...]
Breathing easier after spinal cord injuries
njuries to the upper spinal cord can take a victim’s breath away. Most people don’t know that breathing difficulties are the leading cause of disease and death after such injuries. Indeed, respiratory failure causes more deaths than limb paralysis does, and survivors often become dependent on ventilation machines. For the first time, Harvard researchers successfully [...]
Left- or right-brain? Genes may tell the story
According to HHMI investigator Christopher A. Walsh, postdoctoral fellow Tao Sun, and their colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, their discovery that a gene called LM04 is expressed differently on the two sides of the brain may help understand how one side of the brain is dominant in most people. [...]
Researchers induce heart cells to proliferate
In the best-documented effort to date, researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School have successfully induced adult heart-muscle cells to divide and multiply. Heart-muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, were previously considered incapable of replicating in mammals after birth, which is why heart attack is such a problem: Once [...]
Message to marathoners: Watch your fluid intake!
The study singled out substantial weight gain while running, long race duration, and a lower body mass index as the primary risk factors for hyponatremia in runners. Researchers suggest that the best way to reduce the frequency and severity of hyponatremia is to inform the greater public about the risk factors. ‘Our findings showed that [...]
Simple tools can reduce transmission
Viral upper respiratory and gastrointestinal infections are the two most common illnesses that occur in children enrolled in day care, and secondary attack rates within families can be as high as 27 percent for respiratory illnesses and 70 percent for gastroenteritis. New research published in the April issue of Pediatrics shows that in homes with [...]
Spread of common day care illnesses caused by misconceptions about illness transmission
A Harvard Medical School study found that only two-thirds of parents believed that contact transmission was important for the spread of colds, and fewer than half believed it was important in the spread of stomach flus. Perhaps more surprising, fewer than half stated that changing a diaper and eating food prepared by a person with [...]
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