Featured series 
Tag: Harvard Medical School
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Campus & Community
Seeing seeing in action
Harvard Medical School researchers are seeing what seeing does to the brains of animals and making images that show for the first time single brain cells working together. The work, by Professor of Neurobiology Clay Reid and colleagues from Harvard Medical School, combines existing imaging techniques to create high-resolution movies of the working brain. Previous…
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Campus & Community
New drug eases effects of Parkinson’s disease
A successful test of a new drug indicates that it can improve life for those with moderate and advanced Parkinson’s disease. Called rasagiline, the medication promises to reduce the time when other drugs are least effective and symptoms of tremors, stiffness, and impaired movement are at their worst, researchers report. “It made life easier and…
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Campus & Community
Scientists reveal key clue to how HIV infects cells
Harvard researchers have shown for the first time the critical “before” structure of an AIDS virus protein that plays a key role in the virus’ infection of cells. The protein, called gp120, is responsible for binding to target immune system cells. Once the protein binds to the cell, it changes its shape, allowing a second…
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Health
Schepens scientists regenerate optic nerve for the first time
In earlier research, Dr. Dong Feng Chen, lead author of the study, assistant scientist at Schepens Eye Research Institute and an assistant professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical school, and her team discovered several processes that they believed “locked up” the optic nerve’s ability to regenerate. The first lock was the turning off of the…
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Health
How often should women get mammograms?
With screening guidelines and financial coverage varying among health systems and insurers – sometimes dramatically – a new mathematical model provides quantitative predictions of the mortality benefits, on average, in populations of women over the course of 40 years. “We’re not advocating any particular interval for mammography screening,” says Sandra Lee, a biostatistician at Dana-Farber…
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Health
Long-term Celebrex use increases cardiovascular event risk
The findings prompted the suspension of Celebrex within the Adenoma Prevention with Celecoxib (APC) Trial, in which participants were to take celecoxib or placebo for three years. “These data suggest that there may be an increase in cardiovascular risk associated with the use of celecoxib. This information should be viewed in light of other studies…
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Health
Older doctors less likely to follow current standards of care
The study included a review of previously published papers with a large sample size of doctors. These studies included measures of physician knowledge or quality of care as well as the time since the physician’s medical school graduation or the physician’s age. The majority of these studies showed a decline in performance with time. Co-author…
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Science & Tech
Functional protein changes caught and quantified
Just knowing that a protein is expressed in a cell does not reveal what it is up to; increasingly, the chemical modifications it undergoes are the key to understanding its function at any given time. A study from the laboratory of Steven Gygi, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of cell biology, uses one of the…
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Health
Food ingredients may be as effective as antidepressants
Researchers report that omega-3 fatty acids and uridine, two substances in foods such as fish, walnuts, molasses, and sugar beets, prevented depression in rats as effectively as antidepressant drugs. “Giving rats a combination of uridine and omega-3 fatty acids produced immediate effects that were indistinguishable from those caused by giving the rats standard antidepressant medications,”…
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Campus & Community
Male body image
Asian men show less dissatisfaction with their bodies than males in the United States and Europe, according to a Harvard study. This may explain why anabolic steroid abuse is much less prevalent in places like Taiwan than in the United States, Europe, and Australia, the researchers found. “Disorders of body image, including a pathological preoccupation…
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Campus & Community
Suicide high among female doctors
Male doctors take their own lives at a higher rate than the general population of white men in the United States. That’s been known for some time. Now, the largest, latest study of physician suicides in this country has found that female doctors take their lives much more often. The study was undertaken by Harvard…
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Health
Phobic anxiety increases risk of sudden cardiac death in women
According to lead author Christine M. Albert, M.D., M.P.H., an epidemiologist at BWH and an electrophysiologist and cardiologist at MGH, “Phobic anxiety is associated with coronary heart disease risk factors. However, in this study, in which these risk factors were controlled, we found a correlation between higher levels of phobic anxiety and death from CHD,…
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Health
Weight and weight gain may predict breast cancer survival
The study included 5,204 women with invasive breast cancer who were between the ages 30 to 55 when enrolled in the study in 1976. The researchers found that women who weighed more before they were diagnosed with breast cancer and those who were lean but gained weight after diagnosis and treatment tended to have worse…
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Health
Scientists discover “master switch” that triggers insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes
“We zeroed in on a factor called NF-kB,” said principal investigator Steven E. Shoelson, M.D., Ph.D., Helen and Morton Adler Chair and head of the Section on Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Joslin, and professor of Medicine at Harvard Medicine School. Shoelson said that activating NF-kB in the livers of laboratory animals incited inflammatory responses.…
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Health
Study says women don’t experience pain, anxiety during mammograms
“I think it’s an old wives tale that mammograms hurt,” says the study’s lead author, Alice Domar, PhD, director of the Mind/ Body Center for Women’s Health at Boston IVF and senior psychologist in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. According to the American Cancer Society, one-third to one-half…
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Health
Weight gain and obesity linked to higher risk of kidney stones
“Our study demonstrated that multiple measures of larger body size, including larger waist circumference, higher weight, and higher body mass index, were related to an elevated risk of kidney stones,” said Eric Taylor, M.D., a BWH researcher and nephrologist. The data are based on a study of approximately 45,000 men and more than 200,000 women…
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Health
First view of many neurons processing information in living brain
A Harvard Medical School (HMS) research team used a new technique to obtain the first close-up look at the neural circuits that produce vision in cats and rats. “Put simply, this technique allows us to see the brain seeing,” said R. Clay Reid, HMS professor of neurobiology, a member of the HMS Systems Neuroscience initiative,…
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Health
One alcoholic drink per day improves cognitive function among older women
According to the study’s senior author, BWH’s Francine Grodstein, Sc.D., “Much evidence has demonstrated the heart benefits of light alcohol drinking, but less research has focused on cognitive functioning. While we all continue to recommend exercising caution when consuming any type of alcohol, our study suggests that moderate consumption might provide older women some cognitive…
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Health
Monitoring system needed to prevent safety hazard of problem physicians
Asserting that “physician performance failures are not rare and pose substantial threats to patient welfare and safety,” experts in medical error are calling on state medical boards and healthcare organizations to institute a formal monitoring and prevention system for catching “problem doctors” before they do further harm. Research has shown that “the vast majority of…
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Health
Findings recommend herpes vaccine for human trials
Research published in the January 2005 Journal of Virology compared three different experimental vaccines for herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2), which causes most cases of genital herpes. Lead author Stephen Straus, senior investigator in the Medical Virology Section in the Laboratory of Clinical Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tested…
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Health
Disparate proteins structurally identical
Gerhard Wagner, the Elkan Blout professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology, and Tucker Collins, the S. Burt Wolbach professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital, made a crucial connection between two unrelated proteins. They were studying a particular type of protein when a database search for proteins with similar structures turned…
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Health
One third of U.S. adults use complementary and alternative medicines
The continued widespread use of individual and multiple CAM therapies underscores the need to rigorously evaluate the safety, efficacy, and cost-effectiveness of these approaches, according to the study’s lead author Hilary Tindle, Harvard Medical School (HMS) research fellow, and co-author David Eisenberg, director of the Division for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medical…
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Health
Protein in urine may warn of preeclampsia risk in pregnant women
Preeclampsia, or toxemia, develops during pregnancy. In severe cases, it can rapidly escalate to eclampsia, a condition in which the mother suffers a series of potentially fatal complications. Ananth Karumanchi, MD, a nephrologist in the Department of Medicine at BIDMC and assistant professor of medicine, obstetrics and gynecology at Harvard Medical School, explains that while…
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Health
Researchers discover why we go gray
People turn gray, Harvard scientists found, when certain adult stem cells gradually die off. The stem cells provide a continuous supply of other, pigment-producing cells that give your hair its natural color. These same types of pigment cells, called melanocytes, can become cancerous in melanoma, the lethal form of skin cancer that killed about 8,000…
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Health
Anti-psychotic drugs may be associated with increased risk of diabetes in schizophrenia patients
According to the article’s background information, “Recently, the newer ‘atypical’ antipsychotic agents have been linked to several forms of morbidity, including obesity; hyperlipidemia; type 2 diabetes mellitus; and diabetic ketoacidosis [a severe complication of diabetes].” David C. Henderson, M.D., from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and colleagues evaluated 36 non-obese outpatients with schizophrenia…
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Health
Study finds heavy drinking linked to higher stroke risk
A study found that while light and moderate drinkers appear to be at neither greater risk nor greater advantage than abstainers when it comes to ischemic stroke, the frequency of their alcohol consumption may modestly influence their risk. The findings reinforce the importance of the volume and frequency of alcohol consumption. “In this study, the…
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Health
Researchers identify gene’s role in suppressing longevity
SIRT1 is involved in cellular senescence, or limitation of cells’ reproductive lifespan, a process thought to ensure that aging cells don’t pass on harmful mutations. Frederick W. Alt, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and colleagues suppressed SIRT1 activity in cultures of mouse embryonic fibroblasts, or primitive cells…
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Health
Extended release stimulant effective for long-term ADHD treatment
In the October 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, a multi- institutional research team reported finding that treatment with Concerta, a once-daily form of the drug methylphenidate, successfully controlled ADHD symptoms in more than 200 children with ADHD. The study was supported by McNeil Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures…