Featured series 
Tag: breathing
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Health
Jeremiah Mead, architect of respiratory mechanics field, dies
Jeremiah “Jere” Mead, architect of the field of respiratory mechanics and professor emeritus in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), passed away on July 4, 2009, at a health care facility in Ellsworth, Maine. He was 88 years old. Working in the 1950s with then-research fellow Mary Ellen…
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Health
Tobacco industry used cigarette menthol to recruit new adolescents and young adult smokers
Researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) have found that tobacco companies have deliberately adjusted menthol levels in cigarettes to recruit and addict young smokers by creating a milder experience for the first-time smoker. Menthol masks the harshness and irritation of cigarettes, allowing delivery of an effective dose of nicotine, the addictive chemical in…
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Campus & Community
Holding their breath for the breathless
Two researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) got the idea of studying free divers to get information that would help them help the breathless to breathe better. “We hope that by studying these athletes, we can teach patients how to better cope and recover from episodes of breathlessness,” says Andrew Binks. Divers…
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Campus & Community
Study: Predatory dinosaurs had birdlike pulmonary system
What could the fierce dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex and a modern songbird such as the sparrow possibly have in common? Their pulmonary systems may have been more similar than scientists previously thought, according to new research from Harvard University and Ohio University. Though some scientists have proposed that predatory dinosaurs had lungs similar to crocodiles and…
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Health
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 lesioning the spinal cord of dogs between the eighth and tenth thoracic vertebrae produced hind-limb paralysis while letting animals stay self-sufficient. Yang Teng, director of…
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Campus & Community
Breathing easier after spinal cord injuries
njuries to the upper spinal cord can take a victim’s breath away. Most people don’t know that breathing difficulties are the leading cause of disease and death after such injuries. Indeed, respiratory failure causes more deaths than limb paralysis does, and survivors often become dependent on ventilation machines. For the first time, Harvard researchers successfully…
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Campus & Community
Mystery of how lungs grow is solved
The puzzle of how lungs grow has been solved. Scientists watching the process in mice embryos have found that budding and branching of new air sacs is driven by the mechanical stretching of individual cells. What’s more, they demonstrated that this growth can be adjusted by manipulating mechanical forces involved in the cells’ skeleton, a…
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Health
Mechanism helps describe how airways respond to constriction
In asthma, substances such as allergens irritate the airways and cause the smooth muscle cells around them to contract. With repeated attacks, lung tissues become damaged from cycles of inflammation and repair. Scar tissue forms, which forces the airways to change their shape, or remodel. The airway walls become abnormally thick, potentially interfering with breathing.…
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Science & Tech
Lung imaging method allows visualization of airways
A new dynamic imaging technique described by Mitchell Albert, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of radiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Angela Tooker, MIT graduate student; Kwan Soo Hong, Harvard Medical School research fellow in radiology at BWH; and colleagues in the May 2003 Radiology promises to open new venues in research on lung diseases…
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Health
Bottle-feeding before bed time may increase risk of childhood asthma
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, increasing 160 percent among pre-school age children. Asthma is the third leading cause of hospitalization among children under age 15 and accounts for more than…
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Health
Breathing new life into asthma therapy
Asthma attacks have lasting effects because the lungs’ most delicate airways can become scarred. This makes future attacks all the worse. Researchers at Harvard Medical School have looked at what happens during asthma attacks, and believe that the damage to airways can be prevented or lessened by prescribing muscle relaxants in addition to anti-inflammatory steroids.…
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Health
Mapping the brain’s response to breathlessness
In an experiment, healthy men were placed on ventilators, and their ability to take deep breaths was controlled. As their breathing was regulated, their brains were imaged using a PET camera. The images were then compared to scans taken prior to the experiment to see which areas, if any, were turned on when the body…