Featured series 
Tag: Harvard Medical School
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Health
Keeping synapses clean may hold key to fear-conditioning
As readers of introductory psychology texts know, animals easily learn to fear a harmless stimulus, such as a tone, if that stimulus is paired with a painful one, such as…
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Health
Coffee cuts diabetes risk
More than 125,000 study participants who were free of diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease at the start of a study were selected from the on-going Health Professionals Follow-up Study and…
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Health
New study identifies inhibitor of anthrax toxin
Findings by a research team could eventually lead to the development of a protease inhibitor drug, which in combination with antibiotics could be used to treat anthrax cases later in…
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Health
Sperm cells made in lab can fertilize eggs
Scientists injected laboratory-created sperm into eggs, and the resulting embryos grew to the point where they would normally be implanted into a womb. The experiment was done with mouse stem…
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Health
Ritalin use in childhood may increase depression
A study, led by McLean Hospital’s William Carlezon and Susan Andersen, found that adult rats given Ritalin as juveniles behaved differently than their placebo-treated counterparts in a host of tests…
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Science & Tech
Minimally invasive prostate cancer treatment works as well as traditional techniques
Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men and the cause of approximately 29,000 deaths a year. Currently, the most common treatments for prostate cancer include radical prostatectomy…
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Health
Finding challenges predominant theory that arthritis prevents bone loss
For more than 30 years, it has been accepted in the medical community that women with arthritis are actually much less likely to experience accelerated bone loss. New findings, outlined…
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Health
Dramatic gains shown with moderate weight loss, exercise
A study of 35 obese people included three groups of volunteers; all were obese and had a body mass index above 30 kg/m2 and had insulin resistance. The first group…
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Health
Researchers find way to block SARS virus from entering cells and spreading infection
SARS – severe acute respiratory syndrome – is a viral respiratory illness caused by coronavirus, a family of viruses also implicated in the common cold. SARS is a distinct form…
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Campus & Community
New stage of memory found
It’s been known for a while that sleep helps consolidate certain memories; that’s probably a major purpose of sleep. But the latest experiments by Harvard Medical School researchers show that…
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Science & Tech
Puberty gene identified
A gene discovered by Harvard researchers and their colleagues in England makes a protein necessary to trigger a hormonal cascade that flows from the brain to the gonads. Without it,…
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Health
Smoking increases bleeding into the brain, study finds
A research team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) found that stroke risk for women increased proportionately with the number of cigarettes smoked each day. In contrast, women who stopped…
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Health
Regeneration of insulin-producing islets may lead to diabetes cure
Type 1 diabetes develops when the body’s immune cells mistakenly attack the insulin-producing islet cells of the pancreas. As islet cells die, insulin production ceases, and blood sugar levels rise,…
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Health
Physicians report trouble obtaining specialty services for uninsured
A research team surveyed more than 2,000 physicians at U.S. academic health centers who had provided direct patient care during the preceding year. Among the questions asked were whether the…
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Health
Study challenges proposed changes to clinical definition of mental illness
As the American Psychiatric Association prepares for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’s fifth edition, there is debate over whether to eliminate milder forms of diseases to prevent…
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Health
Is your heart in the right place?
In a frog, the position of the heart is determined within the first hour in the womb, Harvard scientists have discovered. Researchers all over the world believe that frogs and…
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Health
Did life originally spring from clay?
While the research is a far cry from proving that humans sprang from clay, as some creation myths assert, it does provide a possible mechanism for explaining how life initially…
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Health
Enzyme responsible for protein’s ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’ personality
Normally, a protein regulates when and how body parts develop, but when mutated, it triggers a rare, often-lethal infant leukemia called mixed lineage leukemia. The newly identified protease enzyme, Taspase1,…
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Health
Matrix-buster inhibitor has second way to throttle angiogenesis
Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and their regulators, the tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs), form an intriguing partnership. MMPs work by breaking down the dense matrix surrounding cells, freeing them to wander…
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Campus & Community
Low-carb more effective than low-fat
A study put three groups of dieters on different regimens. They included a low-fat group, a low-carbohydrate group that ate the same number of calories, and a third group on…
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Campus & Community
Breast cancers tied to brain survival
A gene produces a protein that evidently protects cancer cells in the same way it shields brain cells from damage caused by diseases like Alzheimer’s and strokes. “The same substance…
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Health
Compound traces brain plaques in real time
Alzheimer’s disease is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Though sophisticated functional and cognitive tests can help, they often fail to distinguish between Alzheimer’s and other non-amyloid-based dementias, particularly frontotemporal dementia. The…
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Health
Innate signal sparks homing of T cells
The results of three studies published together in the Aug. 31, 2003 online edition of Nature Immunology help explain the uncanny ability of T cells to home to problem areas…
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Health
Stages of memory described in study
“To initiate a memory is almost like creating a word processing file on a computer,” explains researcher Matthew Walker, instructor of psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard…
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Health
Dieting may actually promote weight gain in children
The prevalence of overweight and obese children has increased by 100 percent since the 1980s. Americans spend about $33 billion a year on weight loss products and services, however, only…
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Health
Hold that penicillin
“The threat of resistance to antibiotics by bacteria increased so dramatically from the 1970s to the mid-1990s that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) labeled it a national…
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Health
Close interaction seen between blood vessel development and fat tissue formation
Findings from researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital could eventually help to solve problems ranging from cancer, to obesity, to the development of replacement organs. The findings involve the key physiological…
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Health
Osteoporosis appears to be poorly treated after fractures
Hip and wrist factures, suffered by more than 550,000 individuals annually, are a leading cause of hospitalization and death in the elderly. Often one fracture from osteoporosis leads to another,…
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Science & Tech
Blue light special
Jet-setters and shift workers now sit in front of glaring white lights to readjust their body rhythms and avoid sleep and alertness problems. New experiments condcuted by Harvard University researchers…
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Health
Longer life for blood
Blood platelets, which are transfused into those who lose too much blood from wounds, major surgery, or cancer treatments, can be kept for only five days. Then they must be…