Health
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Food, water — and a friendly face
Health professionals view social contact as basic human need. Now researchers have tracked neurological basis for it.
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Older adults at highest risk for suicide, yet have fewest resources
Study highlights imbalance in targets of online suicide prevention efforts
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Harvard startup creating a new class of antibiotics
Compounds show promise against drug-resistant infections, diseases
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Eating citrus may lower depression risk
Physician-researcher outlines gut-brain clues behind ‘orange a day’ finding
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Primary care has money problems. This might help.
Physician-researcher sees promise in five-year ‘prospective payment’ experiment
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Urine test may help monitor disfiguring birthmarks
Vascular anomalies include both vascular malformations and vascular tumors (most commonly hemangiomas). Hemangiomas, found in about 10 percent of infants, occur when the cells lining blood vessels multiply abnormally. Hemangiomas…
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Child early intervention programs make for healthier adults
The Brookline Early Education Program (BEEP), a community- based child health and development program, was initiated by the Brookline Public Schools and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and ran from…
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DNA-scanning technology finds possible sites of cancer genes in chromosomes of lung cancer cell
In a study in the July 1, 2005 issue of the journal Cancer Research, the researchers used single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array technology to identify regions of chromosomes where genes…
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Higher levels of systemic inflammatory markers associated with progression of AMD
Researchers led by Johanna M. Seddon, M.D., at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard School of Public Health, conducted a prospective longitudinal study to examine…
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Disease mutation tracked down, ending ‘curse’ for Colombian families
Three years later, Joseph Arboleda-Velasquez, an HMS graduate student who led the scientific team that identified the mutations, and his collaborators have worked out an early step in the events…
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Gene clue to brain asymmetry revealed on right side
Although many assumed that the asymmetry-producing genes, when found, would be more highly expressed on the left side of the brain than the right, Sun Tao, Christopher A. Walsh, and…
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Fetal-cell transplants reverse Parkinson’s in two patients
The two patients were part of a small exploratory study in Halifax. In the study, the cells were bathed in the trophic factor GDNF before being implanted into the striatum,…
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Studies chip away at sex hormone roles in prostate and breast cancers
In recent work, Myles Brown and colleagues combined chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChiP) assays with measures of DNA structure and large-scale gene chip analyses to study where, when, and how androgen and…
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Novel combination overcomes drug-resistant multiple myeloma cells
The researchers hope to move rapidly to clinical trials of the therapy, a combination of the drug Velcade and an experimental compound that was designed by researchers at the Broad…
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CT significantly reduces the need for appendectomy
For the study, the researchers analyzed 663 patients who were examined on CT for suspected appendicitis. An appendectomy was performed on 268 of the CT-screened patients. Of these 268 patients,…
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‘Brown fat’ cells hold clues for possible obesity treatments
In laboratory studies of mouse cells, the research team identified genes that govern how precursor cells give rise to mature brown fat cells. There are two main types of fat…
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Exercise shown to promote breast cancer survival
Exercise plays a role in preventing breast cancer, and research strongly suggests that breast cancer patients who are more physically active improve their self-esteem and body image. Now, a landmark study from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) finds that exercise after diagnosis may help breast cancer patients live longer.
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Imaging may not be major driver of hospital cost increases
“There have been several news stories and reports from insurers claiming that imaging costs are catching and even surpassing drug costs as major drivers of health care inflation,” says Scott…
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Magnetic stimulation may improve stroke recovery
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment improved motor function in a small group of people. For the stimulation, an insulated wire coil is placed on the scalp, and an electrical current…
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TB gene identified
As many as one out of three people in the world are infected with the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, public health experts estimate. That could lead to a global plague…
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Broken hearts may mend after all
Although adult muscle cells become inflexible after differentiation, these cells temporarily loosen the structure to divide in fetal development. Mark T. Keating found that in some lower vertebrates, heart tissue…
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Breathing restored after severe spinal-cord injury
Keeping an animal functioning after a cervical spinal cord injury is nearly impossible. An American researcher developed the lower spinal cord rat model in the early 1900s. He found that…
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Insulin prods development of type 1 diabetes
Joslin Diabetes Center researchers Diane Mathis’s and Christophe Benoist’s finding that the lymph node draining the pancreas was intrinsic to the autoimmune response in mice made David Hafler, HMS professor…
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Aspirin use may protect against colon cancer recurrence, reduce risk of death
“Our data are intriguing because they showed that aspirin use notably reduced the risk of recurrence in patients with advanced colon cancer, but more research is needed before any treatment…
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Drug combination boosts survival rate in head and neck cancers
Previous studies have shown that using combination chemotherapy of cisplatin and 5-fu yields a 25 to 50 percent rate of complete pathological responses (the tumor disappeared). Robert Haddad, M.D., and…
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Left- or right-brain? Genes may tell the story
According to HHMI investigator Christopher A. Walsh, postdoctoral fellow Tao Sun, and their colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, their discovery that a gene called…
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Brain chemical serotonin involved in early embryo patterning
A study published in the May 10, 2005, Current Biology has ramifications for neuroscience, developmental genetics, evolutionary biology and, possibly, human teratology (a branch of pathology and embryology concerned with…
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Study finds men who consume more dairy products have lower incidence of diabetes
A report from researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) – the first large-scale, prospective examination of a relationship…
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Low-fat dairy foods may help reduce risk of type 2 diabetes
“Our study found that men consuming higher levels of dairy products, especially low-fat dairy foods, had a significantly lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes during a 12-year period,” says…
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T cell misfits may spell autoimmunity
For a would-be T cell, the journey from cradle to grave is likely to be brief. After leaving the bone marrow, the immature immune cell travels directly to the thymus,…
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Antibiotics do not prevent heart attacks; New findings from the PROVE IT-TIMI 22 clinical trial
Christopher P. Cannon, M.D., of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, noted that the fact that many patients do not exhibit identifiable risk…
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Routine HIV screening recommended for most
Researchers at Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Yale University have shown that routine screening for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, could increase survival, prevent transmission of the disease, and…
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TB susceptibility gene identified
As many as one out of three people in the world are infected with the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, public health experts estimate. That could lead to a global plague…
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Blood test can accurately diagnose heart failure in emergency patients
“We found that testing with the NT-proBNP assay was an extremely accurate way to identify or exclude heart failure in patients with shortness of breath,” says James Januzzi Jr., M.D.,…
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Stronger evidence found linking Epstein-Barr virus and risk of multiple sclerosis
Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, Kaiser Permanente, and a team of collaborators have found further evidence implicating the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) as a possible contributory cause to…