Health

It has long been a given that adult humans — and mammals in general — lack the capacity to grow new nephrons, the kidney’s delicate blood filtering tubules, which has meant that dialysis, and ultimately kidney transplantation, is the only option for the more than 450,000 Americans who have kidney failure.

Authorities on malaria from around the world came to Harvard Medical School to participate in a forum discussing a change in strategy in the battle against malaria, moving from control to eradication.

Harvard researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital find that participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress.

Evolution icon Charles Darwin rushed “On the Origin of Species” into print to beat the competition, but neglected to credit early thinkers on the subject, who let him know it after the book’s 1859 publication, leading to his appended “Historical Sketch” in later editions.

Harvard researchers have estimated the likely cost-effectiveness of post-discharge follow-up phone calls to smokers hospitalized with acute heart attacks. In a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the researchers suggest that phone calls to these discharged smokers encouraging them to quit would yield significant health and economic gains.

Harvard researchers in the Children’s Hospital Boston Informatics Program have created a model for predicting a drug’s tendency to cause birth defects.

In the first study to look at the potential for organ donation from dying infants in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) setting, Harvard researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital Boston, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center demonstrated that an estimated 8 percent of NICU mortalities would be eligible for organ donation after cardiac death.

The vitamin D levels of newborn babies appear to predict their risk of respiratory infections during infancy and the occurrence of wheezing during early childhood, but not the risk of developing asthma. Results of a study in the January 2011 issue of Pediatrics support the theory that widespread vitamin D deficiency contributes to risk of infections.

A comparative analysis found wide disparities in the results of four common measures of hospital-wide mortality rates, with competing methods yielding both higher- and lower-than-expected rates for the same Massachusetts hospitals during the same year.

Patients who were knowingly given placebos for irritable bowel syndrome experienced significant symptom relief when compared with controls.

By comparing the DNA of modern elephants from Africa and Asia to DNA extracted from two extinct species, the woolly mammoth and the mastodon, researchers have concluded that Africa has two — not one — species of elephant. Now that we know the forest and savanna elephants are two very different animals, the forest elephant should become a bigger priority for conservation purposes.

People’s ability to recognize and remember faces peaks at ages 30 to 34, about a decade later than most other mental abilities, a new study says.

Scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health and collaborators from other institutions have identified a natural substance in dairy fat that may substantially reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Researchers at Harvard University and Bates College say female chimpanzees appear to treat sticks as dolls, carrying them around until they have offspring of their own. Young males engage in such behavior much less frequently.

Harvard researchers have shed light on how the sense of smell works to induce behavior, linking patterns of electrical spikes in the brain to behavior in laboratory animals.

Harvard School of Public Health researchers are mounting a major study of chronic disease in four African nations, which organizers hope will provide a foundation for understanding and treating chronic ailments like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

The discovery of an unknown 1848 letter by the great naturalist sheds light on a murky part of his life, and on a friendship that eventually went awry.

Media mogul Ted Turner and Harvard School of Public Health Dean Julio Frenk kicked off a new Internet-focused communication effort by discussing problems in global health.

A team of researchers has determined that the strain of cholera erupting in Haiti matches bacterial samples from South Asia and not those from Latin America.

A novel type of biomedical imaging, made possible by advances in microscopy from scientists at Harvard University, is so fast and sensitive it can capture “video” of blood cells squeezing through capillaries.

A Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative trial that gave HIV-positive mothers in Botswana antiretroviral drugs during the months after birth showed a dramatic reduction in the transmission of the virus from mothers to breast-fed babies.

Shore Fellowships provide important breathing room for junior faculty members pressed by the demands of work and home life.

Researchers at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital and the University of Utah have developed the best biologically based test for autism to date. The test was able to detect the disorder in individuals with high-functioning autism with 94 percent accuracy.

Harvard scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute say they have for the first time partially reversed age-related degeneration in mice, resulting in new growth of the brain and testes, improved fertility, and the return of a lost cognitive function.

Researchers’ findings pinpoint a critical gene involved in melanoma growth, and provide a framework for discovering ways to tackle cancer drug resistance.

A treatment model designed to accommodate the beliefs and concerns of Chinese immigrants appears to significantly improve the recognition and treatment of major depression in this typically underserved group.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine have found that by mimicking a rare genetic disorder in a dish they can rewind the internal clock of a mature cell and drive it back into an adult stem-cell stage.

Florian Engert, a new professor of molecular and cellular biology in Harvard’s Bio Labs, works and plays hard.

In an aging society, Harvard researchers are plumbing the depths of what it means to have a larger proportion of the population elderly — and figuring out how to keep them healthy.

Partnerships, training of local medical personnel, and practice in delivering services are all key if the effort to improve global health is to be successful, say speakers at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Global Health’s inaugural symposium.