Featured series 
Tag: Harvard Medical School
-
Health
Enzyme pair joins fight against drug-resistant bacteria
Scientists have been striving to develop antibiotics against drug-resistant bacterial strains. Most attempts have been plagued by a lack of molecular tools for manipulating — and ultimately improving — the…
-
Health
Testosterone drives away the blues
In the 1940s, experiments showed that major depression can be relieved by injecting testosterone into men with low levels of that hormone. The treatment never caught on because the shots…
-
Health
Hundreds of thousands with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis could be saved
A study has provided the first hard evidence that outpatient community care in poor, urban shantytowns can work for the most difficult to treat form of tuberculosis. The multidrug-resistant tuberculosis…
-
Health
Meat consumption may not increase breast cancer risk
After following 88,647 women for 18 years, the largest and longest individual study of its kind to date, researcher Michelle Holmes and her co-investigators found no evidence that intake of…
-
Health
Alzheimer’s disease: New theory on how it damages brain
Studies have shown that the buildup in the brain of certain toxic proteins, called amyloids, leads to the emergence of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Research has traditionally focused on…
-
Health
Hospital length of stay may not affect a newborn’s health
Researcher Jeanne M. Madden and colleagues used seven-and-a-half years of data on 20,366 mother-infant pairs with normal vaginal deliveries within a large Massachusetts health maintenance organization to determine the effects…
-
Health
Formin gene may explain a common cause of female infertility
Harvard Medical School researchers Philip Leder and Benjamin Leader have discovered that oocytes from female mice without the formin gene Fmn2 cannot correctly position the metaphase I DNA-spindle. This produces…
-
Health
Replacing joints early may be better than waiting for some osteoarthritis sufferers
In a study, scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Toronto Western Hospital followed the progress of patients who opted to have joint replacement surgery. They found that those…
-
Health
Hormone replacement therapy may lower degenerative eye disease risk in postmenopausal women
ARM is a degenerative eye disease that affects the macula, which is responsible for central vision, which is necessary for reading, driving and recognizing people’s faces. Advanced ARM is the…
-
Health
Risk of stroke from obesity is now measurable
While it has been suspected for some time that being overweight could potentially increase a person’s chances of a stroke, a study published in the Dec. 9, 2002, issue of…
-
Science & Tech
Researchers regenerate zebrafish heart muscle
A research team led by Mark T. Keating showed that zebrafish can regenerate heart muscle within two months after a severe injury. The team, from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute…
-
Health
Gene signature identifies leukemia patients who should avoid transplants
It was previously known that only slightly over half of the patients with adult T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) could be cured with chemotherapy. Adult ALL patients often undergo transplants…
-
Health
Study predicts risk of prostate cancer death
Researchers followed 381 people to “identify predictors of time to prostate specific death following external radiation therapy.” “The results of this study give us a better understanding of what form…
-
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,…
-
Health
Protein predicts heart disease better than cholesterol
C-reactive protein’s claim to fame is based on its power to predict a woman’s risk of developing heart attack and stroke. In fact, high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) were…
-
Health
Stem cells reduce brain damage
Mice with the kind of brain damage caused by strokes or cerebral palsy received implants of stem cells that resulted in the spontaneous replacement of many of the missing cells,…
-
Health
Research finds benefits for adults who have tonsils removed
A study followed 83 chronic tonsillitis sufferers over a three-year period. Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers found that removing the tonsils was ultimately more effective than antibiotic treatments because those…
-
Health
Outpatient cardiology care improves survival odds after heart attack
Previous research suggests that patients may live longer if they are under a cardiologist’s care while hospitalized for myocardial infarction. In a new study, John Ayanian, Harvard Medical School associate…
-
Health
Drinking and hormones, alone and together, increase risk of breast cancer
According to the American Cancer Society, more than 190,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer annually. It is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women today. Using data from…
-
Health
Incidence of hip fractures reduced by walking
In the United States, one in every three adults 65 years old or older falls each year, with hip fractures resulting in the greatest number of deaths and most serious…
-
Health
Enzyme linked to pathology of Parkinson’s disease appears two-faced
A finding by Harvard Medical School researchers adds a new wrinkle to the story of Parkinson’s disease and insight into how failure to dispose of proteins can wreak havoc on…
-
Health
New device documents clot formation in living mice
In the October 2002 issue of the journal Nature Medicine, Bruce and Barbara Furie, both Harvard Medical School professors of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, reportrf on the…
-
Health
Food pathogen vector shows promise against cancer
For the past four decades, researchers have poked and prodded Escherichia coli and Listeria monocytogenes – the basic science trade names of sometimes deadly bugs – to discover how they…
-
Health
Study: Use of acetaminophen linked to hypertension
Out of a group of 80,000 women surveyed, those who regularly took acetaminophen or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) – and had no previous history of high blood pressure – had…
-
Health
How your heart got where it is
A team of scientists at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine and The Forsyth Institute in Boston believes it has found the answer to how bodily organs are formed. And…
-
Health
Bacterial construct makes for elegant vaccine
Investigators from Harvard Medical School and London’s Hammersmith Hospital have found a way to use the bacterium Listeria along with Escherichia coli to fight disease instead of causing it. In…
-
Science & Tech
Genetic sonograms may reduce need for amniocentesis
Radiologist Beryl Benacerraf is a Harvard Medical School clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Benacerraf, a handful of like-minded maternal-fetal ultrasound specialists, and…
-
Science & Tech
Putting bacteria to work
A nautical group of bacteria known as Prochlorococcus removes carbon dioxide from air and fixes it into the carbon content of their own tiny bodies. The more carbon dioxide they…
-
Health
AIDS vaccine trials underway
A new AIDS vaccine is being tested in Boston, according to senior investigator Clyde Crumpacker, infectious disease specialist in the Virology Research Clinic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC)…