Health

A new, long-term study of mortality trends in U.S. counties from 1960 to 2000 finds that an overall average life expectancy increase of 6.5 years for men and women is…

“Most of the time,” said noted psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman to a packed house of students, scholars, and faculty at the Yenching Auditorium (April 15), “we run at very low effort.” It was a sobering claim for the heady academic set, but according to Kahneman, no one is immune from the diagnosis. Even those with a high level of intelligence, he said, “don’t check themselves as much as they should.” The researcher was referring to the human tendency to judge things quickly, to go with the familiar or what looks correct instead of giving a question or a problem sufficient attention, reflection, and thought.

Genetic researchers crossed a critical threshold last year in their ability to understand complex diseases, posting a number of new discoveries that advanced knowledge of ailments caused by small contributions from multiple genes, the environment, and other causes.

“13 October 2003.” Saintyl Louistess remembered the exact date she found out she had AIDS.

Naturally elevated levels of the antioxidant urate may slow the progression of Parkinson’s disease in men.  Researchers from the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease (MGH-MIND) and Harvard School of Public…

Infants and toddlers who sleep less than 12 hours a day are twice as likely to become overweight by age 3 than children who sleep longer. In addition, high levels of television viewing combined with less sleep elevate the risk, so that children who sleep less than 12 hours and who view two or more hours of television per day have a 16 percent chance of becoming overweight by age 3.

Since the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” efforts to trace evolutionary relationships among different classes of organisms have largely relied on external morphological observations.

Researchers at the Whitehead Institute and Harvard Stem Cell Institute(HSCI) have reported successfully reducing symptoms in a Parkinson’s disease rat model by using dopamine producing neurons derived from reprogrammed adult…

The discovery of a gene for a rare form of inherited iron deficiency may provide clues to iron deficiency in the general population – particularly iron deficiency that doesn’t respond…

Infants and toddlers who sleep less than 12 hours a day are twice as likely to become overweight by age 3 than children who sleep longer. In addition, high levels…

It was January 2008 and the baby – the youngest of four children – had been brought into the clinic Ivers heads at Boucan Carré, Haiti, after a period of vomiting and not eating well.

The history of alternative and complementary medical treatments can inform the medicine of today. That was the message of “Sectarian (to Unorthodox to Alternative) to Complementary Medicine: What Historical Perspectives can Tell Modern Medicine,” an afternoon of talks sponsored by the Countway Library’s Center for the History of Medicine on March 26.

Many medications are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on the brink of congressionally mandated deadlines, and those drugs are more likely to face later regulatory intervention than those approved with greater deliberation, researchers at Harvard University have found. Drugs fast-tracked by the FDA are more likely to eventually be withdrawn from global markets for safety reasons, undergo manufacturing revisions, or face labeling changes, according to Daniel Carpenter, professor of government in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The research was published in the March 27 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Behind glass cases, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology displays ancient tools, weapons, clothing, and art — enough to jar you back into the past. But the venerable museum offered a jarring moment of another sort in its Geological Lecture Hall last month (March 20). Paleoanthropologist Leslie Aiello delivered a late-afternoon talk on diet, energy, and evolution. It was jolting to see her, slight and matronly, stand before a story-high screen filled with images of rugged early hominids on a savannah, gathered around fallen game.

Scientists at Harvard University have found that a common class of freshwater invertebrate animals called bdelloid rotifers are extraordinarily resistant to ionizing radiation, surviving and continuing to reproduce after doses of gamma radiation much greater than that tolerated by any other animal species studied to date.

Harvard University researchers have discovered a new type of retinal cell that plays an exclusive and unusual role in mice: detecting upward motion. The cells reflect their function in the physical arrangement of their dendrites, branchlike structures on neuronal cells that form a communicative network with other dendrites and neurons in the brain.

Louise Ivers gently lifted the 7-month-old by his forearms, hoping he would pull himself up as a healthy child a third his age might. But his head hung limply back,…

Harvard researchers have discovered a previously unknown type of retinal cell that plays an exclusive and unusual role in mice: detecting upward motion. The cells reflect their function in the…

David Satcher — the 16th U.S. surgeon general and co-author of “Multicultural Medicine and Health Disparities” (McGraw-Hill, 2006), was in Boston (March 13) to deliver the fourth in a 2007-08 series of lectures in Public Health Practice and Leadership sponsored by the HSPH’s Division of Health Practice.

A relationship has been observed between deep sleep and the ability of the brain to learn specific tasks. Researchers at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have now shown that the processes that regulates deep sleep may affect visual learning. These results are published in the March 12 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

A study appearing in this week’s (March 19) New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) confirms that a combination of gene variants previously associated with cholesterol levels does reflect patients’ cholesterol levels and can signify increased risk of heart attack, stroke, or sudden cardiac death. Led by researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) cardiology division, the study’s findings are a first step toward the ability to identify individuals who might benefit from earlier use of cholesterol-lowering medications and other measures to combat elevated risk.

Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have initiated a Phase I clinical trial to reverse type 1 diabetes. The trial is exploring whether the promising results from the laboratory of Denise Faustman can be applied in human diabetes.

Using functional MRI (fMRI) scanning, researchers have found that the region of the brain associated with introspective thought “lights up” when people infer the thoughts of others like themselves. However, this is not the case when we’re considering people we think of as different politically, socially, or religiously. Published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study was led by Adrianna Jenkins, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, with Jason Mitchell, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard. Jenkins and Mitchell’s co-author was C. Neil Mcrae of the University of Aberdeen.

Individuals who engage in costly punishment do not benefit from their behavior, according to a new study published this week in the journal Nature by researchers at Harvard University and the Stockholm School of Economics.

More that 1.2 million deaths could be prevented in South Africa over the next five years by accelerating efforts to provide access to antiretroviral therapy (ART), according to a study released March 13 in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

A panel of Harvard Stem Cell Institute experts said recently that stem cell research’s biggest impact on patients’ health likely won’t come from therapies that inject stem cells or implant…

The Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has received a five-year, $20.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to expand an international program investigating the biological factors underlying immune system control of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The grant provides support to the International HIV Controllers Study, which currently involves researchers from more than a dozen countries and has the overall goal of discovering information that can guide design of a vaccine to limit viral replication in HIV-infected individuals. A primary focus will be to understand the genetic and immunological factors that have allowed a few individuals to control HIV naturally without the need for medications, some for more than 25 years.

Treatment with the aromatase inhibitor letrozole (Femara) can reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrence even when initiated one to seven years after a course of tamoxifen therapy. The results of a study involving women originally in the placebo arm of an international trial of letrozole will appear in the Journal of Clinical Oncology and are receiving early online release. Among those who chose to begin letrozole treatment after the initial trial was halted, the risk that their cancer would recur was cut in half compared with those who never received letrozole. In addition, the risk of metastasis was 60 percent lower with letrozole, and the chance that a new tumor would develop in the unaffected breast dropped more than 80 percent.

The way proteins fold, and the good and bad effects of this molecular phenomenon, are what keeps biologist Susan L. Lindquist busy. Lindquist Ph.D. ’76, a Radcliffe Fellow this year, is an award-winning professor and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a former director of the Whitehead Institute. She shared her insights on protein folding with an audience of 70 last week (March 5) at the fellowship program’s 34 Concord Ave. headquarters.

A panel of experts said Tuesday (March 11) that stem cell research’s biggest impact on patients’ health likely won’t come from therapies that inject stem cells or implant tissues made from them, but rather from the knowledge gained by examining diseased tissues grown from the cells.