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  • Enzyme linked to pathology of Parkinson’s disease appears two-faced

    A finding by Harvard Medical School researchers adds a new wrinkle to the story of Parkinson’s disease and insight into how failure to dispose of proteins can wreak havoc on…

  • New device documents clot formation in living mice

    In the October 2002 issue of the journal Nature Medicine, Bruce and Barbara Furie, both Harvard Medical School professors of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, reportrf on the…

  • Long-term memory not fixed until after age one

    When does long-term memory develop? This was a natural question for Conor Liston, a Harvard senior, and his mentor Jerome Kagan, Starch Research Professor of Psychology. Liston conducted experiments under…

  • Patching up depression

    In a study, almost half of the people who wore an antidepressant skin patch recovered after only six weeks, and many of them “showed remarkable improvement much sooner,” according to…

  • Food pathogen vector shows promise against cancer

    For the past four decades, researchers have poked and prodded Escherichia coli and Listeria monocytogenes – the basic science trade names of sometimes deadly bugs – to discover how they…

  • Starship memories

    Psychologists are at odds over the idea that people can forget traumatic events then “recover” intact memories of the trauma years later. On one side are clinicians, who observe that painful memories can be repressed, banished from a trauma survivor’s consciousness until they’re “recovered” with the help of certain psychotherapeutic techniques in adulthood. Memory researchers, on the other hand, say that people don’t repress traumatic events.

  • Study: Use of acetaminophen linked to hypertension

    Out of a group of 80,000 women surveyed, those who regularly took acetaminophen or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) – and had no previous history of high blood pressure – had…

  • How your heart got where it is

    A team of scientists at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine and The Forsyth Institute in Boston believes it has found the answer to how bodily organs are formed. And…

  • Bacterial construct makes for elegant vaccine

    Investigators from Harvard Medical School and London’s Hammersmith Hospital have found a way to use the bacterium Listeria along with Escherichia coli to fight disease instead of causing it. In…

  • Early onset of perimenopause linked to economic hardship

    Perimenopause is the period leading up to menopause. The World Health Organization defines perimenopause as the phase during which hormonal, biological, and clinical changes begin. Studies have shown that up…

  • Specific types of exercise can significantly reduce risk of heart disease among men

    A pool of 44,452 men from the Health Professionals’ Follow-Up Study were monitored via questionnaire every two years from 1986 to 1998 to determine potential coronary heart disease risk factors…

  • Ban on coal burning in Dublin cleans the air, reduces death rates

    In the 1980s, Dublin’s air quality suffered as people switched from oil to cheaper and more available coal for home and water heating. On Sept. 1, 1990, the Irish government…

  • AIDS vaccine trials underway

    A new AIDS vaccine is being tested in Boston, according to senior investigator Clyde Crumpacker, infectious disease specialist in the Virology Research Clinic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC)…

  • Protector protein part of nerve cell defense

    Heat shock proteins are known to protect all cell types from various general assaults. They were originally discovered when cultured cells that were heated expressed the proteins at high levels…

  • Hormone receptor variation linked to cancer risk

    Endometrial cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women in this country, according to National Cancer Institute statistics. Progesterone’s important protective role showed up three decades ago, articulated in…

  • Dual signals may drive early breast cancer

    Researchers from the lab of Joan Brugge, Harvard Medical School professor of cell biology, may have uncovered one of the central mechanisms of breast cancer. They found that dual signals…

  • Genes found that regulate brain size

    A gene that builds bigger brains, called beta-catenin, was discovered in the laboratory of Christopher A. Walsh, Bullard Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Researchers there engineered increased activity…

  • Harvard researchers complete genomic sequence of deadly malaria parasite

    Malaria is the world’s most serious parasitic tropical disease and kills more people than any communicable disease except for tuberculosis. There is more human malaria in Africa today than at…

  • Mammalian teeth regrown in lab

    A study involved seeding cells from the immature teeth of six-month old pigs onto biodegradable polymer scaffolds. The researchers then placed these structures into rat hosts. Within 30 weeks, small,…

  • Students develop system to fight TB

    A new system developed by Harvard undergraduates delivers anti-tuberculosis drugs through an inhaler, increasing the likelihood that patients will take them over longer periods, and reducing the side effects of…

  • Chili peppers and inflammation

    Researchers have discovered that the burinng pain of arthritis is similar to the pain associated with eating chili peppers. “The receptor activated by chili peppers in the mouth and other…

  • Researchers isolate key part of cells’ ‘death’ signals

    In the cover article of the September 2002 issue of the journal Cancer Cell, researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute reported that peptide subunits of cell-signaling “BH3” proteins could out-maneuver opposing…

  • HIV-1 positive mothers taking vitamin A increase risk of transmitting HIV to newborns

    In many regions of Africa, between 15 and 30 percent of women attending prenatal care clinics are HIV-1 positive. And 20 to 45 percent of children born to HIV-1 positive…

  • Protein seen to animate cell skeleton

    The cytoskeleton is made up of arrays of actin filaments that are arranged into widely different structures — parallel arrays that mediate muscle contraction, networks of branched filaments at the…

  • Study suggests surprising cause of arthritis

    Julia Ying Wang, a Harvard Medical School assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was exploring whether a particular class of carbohydrates called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) trigger an immune…

  • Alzheimer’s-associated enzyme elevated in key brain areas

    A research report that appears in the September 2002 issue of the journal Archives of Neurology may improve understanding of the most common form of Alzheimer’s disease. “Our key finding…

  • Studies find milk consumption, use of HRT, and pregnancy may influence hormone levels associated with cancer risk in women

    IGF-1 is a hormone important to the growth and function of many organs. Higher levels of IGF-1 have been associated independently with an increased risk of a number of cancers,…

  • Experimental drug shows promise in treating severe, often-lethal complication of stem cell transplants

    An experimental drug called defibrotide reversed severe veno-occlusive disease (VOD) of the liver in more than one third of the stem cell transplant recipients enrolled in a study. VOD is…

  • Maternal history influences risk of asthma in children exposed to cats

    Recent studies have gathered evidence that cat exposure during infancy can be protective against asthma. Research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital confirmed these findings in all but one situation: when…

  • Glowing mouse shows how immune alarm rallies troops against invasion

    In the body, dendritic and other antigen-presenting cells initially handle all infections in the body. The dendritic cells lurk in the skin, lungs, gut, and other tissues. On sentry duty,…