Health

In the 19th century, hysteria was considered one of the most common disorders afflicting women. Doctors advised parents to keep their daughters from riding horseback, eating vanilla, or reading novels,…

A study found that errors involving leaving surgical sponges or instruments inside patients are more likely to happen during emergency procedures, or in operations where there is a sudden change…

Findings by Harvard researchers, published in the Jan. 16, 2003 issue of Nature, represent the first survey of an entire genome for all genes that regulate fat storage. The research…

Polycystic kidney disease, or PKD, is the most common life-threatening genetic disease. It is caused by mutations in one of two genes. Though the genetic defect that causes PKD is…

Scientists have been striving to develop antibiotics against drug-resistant bacterial strains. Most attempts have been plagued by a lack of molecular tools for manipulating — and ultimately improving — the…

In the 1940s, experiments showed that major depression can be relieved by injecting testosterone into men with low levels of that hormone. The treatment never caught on because the shots…

A study has provided the first hard evidence that outpatient community care in poor, urban shantytowns can work for the most difficult to treat form of tuberculosis. The multidrug-resistant tuberculosis…

Men who drank moderate amounts of alcoholic beverages three or more times a week had a risk of myocardial infarction 30 to 35 percent lower than nondrinkers. The observational study,…

After following 88,647 women for 18 years, the largest and longest individual study of its kind to date, researcher Michelle Holmes and her co-investigators found no evidence that intake of…

Studies have shown that the buildup in the brain of certain toxic proteins, called amyloids, leads to the emergence of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Research has traditionally focused on…

A study led by Joslin Diabetes Center researchers and published in the Jan. 24, 2003 issue of the journal Science brings scientists one step closer to turning the dream of…

Researchers tracked the diet and health outcomes of more than 43,000 male participants for 12 years. Using detailed food frequency questionnaires, participants were asked how often they ate fish, ranging…

If physicians are reluctant to be vaccinated themselves against smallpox, large numbers of Americans will be unwilling to do it voluntarily. Also, if there are deaths from side effects of…

Researcher Jeanne M. Madden and colleagues used seven-and-a-half years of data on 20,366 mother-infant pairs with normal vaginal deliveries within a large Massachusetts health maintenance organization to determine the effects…

Harvard Medical School researchers Philip Leder and Benjamin Leader have discovered that oocytes from female mice without the formin gene Fmn2 cannot correctly position the metaphase I DNA-spindle. This produces…

In a study, scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Toronto Western Hospital followed the progress of patients who opted to have joint replacement surgery. They found that those…

ARM is a degenerative eye disease that affects the macula, which is responsible for central vision, which is necessary for reading, driving and recognizing people’s faces. Advanced ARM is the…

Murat Kalayoglu of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Peter Libby of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Gerald Byrne of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center searched MEDLINE…

While it has been suspected for some time that being overweight could potentially increase a person’s chances of a stroke, a study published in the Dec. 9, 2002, issue of…

It was previously known that only slightly over half of the patients with adult T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) could be cured with chemotherapy. Adult ALL patients often undergo transplants…

A nationwide survey examined the views of 831 physicians in April-July 2002 and 1,207 adults in April-June 2002. Some 42 percent of the public and more than one-third of U.S.…

Phthalates are a class of compounds used to hold color and scent in many cosmetics and personal care items such as soaps, detergents, skin preparations and aftershave lotions, and they…

An ongoing clinical study by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists suggests that a three-drug therapy, which includes a novel medication called sirolimus, reduces graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) in stem cell transplant patients…

Most cancer deaths are caused not by the original or primary tumor but by the metastasizing of tumor cells to other organs. Until now, cancer specialists have viewed the development…

Researchers followed 381 people to “identify predictors of time to prostate specific death following external radiation therapy.” “The results of this study give us a better understanding of what form…

Nearly one in 13 children in America has asthma. The National Institutes of Health reports that the prevalence of asthma around the world has doubled in the last 15 years,…

New findings by researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center visualize the protein that is mutated in most individuals having a form of diabetes called Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young (MODY).…

Women in a study who reported eating nuts at least five times per week reduced their risk of type 2 diabetes by almost 30 percent compared to those who rarely…

C-reactive protein’s claim to fame is based on its power to predict a woman’s risk of developing heart attack and stroke. In fact, high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) were…

Mice with the kind of brain damage caused by strokes or cerebral palsy received implants of stem cells that resulted in the spontaneous replacement of many of the missing cells,…