Health

Using an innovative screening approach, researchers in the lab of John Mekalanos have identified an entirely new class of antibiotics active against the cholera bacterium. While traditional antibiotics kill bacteria…

Scientists have long dreamed of prompting adult neurons of the central nervous system to regenerate. But these cells have the deck stacked against them in several ways. Molecules from the…

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.…

Harvard researcher Piotr Naskrecki hopes his new book, “The Smaller Majority” (Harvard University Press, 2005), will win over some new advocates for the tiny creatures he has spent his life…

Dry eye syndrome is characterized by a decline in the quality or quantity of tears that normally bathe the eye to keep it moist and functioning well. The condition causes…

Encouraging findings came from an interim report from HERA, an ongoing large, international clinical trial of Herceptin, published Oct. 19, 2005 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The analysis…

A study determined that previous measurements of the benefits of immunization have generally underestimated their economic value by focusing solely on health-related impacts such as averted illnesses, hospitalizations, deaths, disability,…

It was both unexpected and unsurprising when, in the mid -1990s, Michael Brenner, the Theodore Bevier Bayles professor of medicine, and his colleagues showed that some antigen- presenting cells display…

While there is still no consensus about the role of waxy amyloid plaques that fill the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, many in the field believe they are a root cause…

Depending on the circumstances, missing N-acetylaspartate (NAA) in the brain may indicate Alzheimer’s disease, ischemic stroke, a brain tumor, or traumatic injury. And, as doctors soon learned with the AIDS…

Tim Gallagher and Bobby Harrison almost flopped into the mud of Arkansas’ Bayou de View in their haste to get out of the canoe. They crashed through the undergrowth after…

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…

“Our primary finding was that about 30 percent of those patients judged ‘too good to treat’ either died or were discharged to a rehabilitation facility,” says Eric Smith, MD, FRCPC,…

Research appearing in the October 2005 issue of the American Journal of Physiology: Endocrinology and Metabolism suggests that high blood glucose levels early in pregnancy deprive the embryo of oxygen,…

In the 30th anniversary year for the Harvard Health Letter, the editors decided to revive a tradition and ask Harvard doctors whether they follow their own advice – two similar…

Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus Edward O. Wilson remains fascinated with the highly organized societies of ants, bees, wasps, termites, and humans. He and Bert Holldobler, with whom he shared a…

Health care in the People’s Republic of China is unequal and too expensive, and there’s not enough of it, but the Chinese government is aware of the problems and is moving to address them, China’s vice minister of health said Sept. 8 at Harvard Medical School.

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…

Li-Huei Tsai, Harvard Medical School (HMS) professor of pathology, HMS research fellow Sang Ki Park, and colleagues worked with mice and found a novel function for the molecule Par-4 (prostate…

An anthrax bacterium secretes three nontoxic proteins that assemble into a toxic complex on the surface of the host cell to set off a chain of events leading to cell…

According to senior author Barbara B. Kahn, M.D., chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism at BIDMC, these findings in mice and humans show that elevated levels of…

According to Christopher Roy, M.D., a hospitalist at BWH who studies patient safety, “We found that while approximately half of the patients in this study had test results that were…

In the July 15, 2005 Cell, a team led by Dennis Kasper, the William Ellery Channing Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of microbiology and molecular…

Tissues such as muscle and brain convert the inactive form of thyroid hormone, T4, into T3, the active form of thyroid hormone, when necessary. In the 1980s, researchers discovered that…

Scientists found that benign cells surrounding breast cancers undergo epigenetic modifications. The altered gene function causes the microenvironment cells to signal proliferation and increased aggression in the breast tumor cells.…

The PKC-Diabetic Retinopathy Study (DRS) was designed to evaluate the safety and effect of an oral treatment, RBX, on retinopathy progression or visual loss in patients with moderately severe to…

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…

Individuals respond with physical and emotional distress to situations that recall traumatic memories. Such responses usually diminish gradually, as those situations are repeated without unpleasant occurrences; this is called “extinction…

The WHS trial was led by BWH researchers Nancy Cook, Sc.D., and Julie Buring, Sc.D. Its results are published in the July 6, 2005 Journal of the American Medical Association.…

Dana-Farber’s Levi Garraway, M.D., Ph.D., and William Sellers, M.D., the paper’s first and senior authors, and their colleagues reported their findings in the July 7, 2005 issue of the journal…