Featured series 
Tag: Harvard Medical School
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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 structure of naturally occurring antibiotics. Harvard Medical School researchers Heather Losey, Christopher T. Walsh, and their colleagues reported in the Dec. 16, 2002 issue of…
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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 are painful, and effective antidepressant drugs started coming to market. More recently, however, testosterone patches and gels became available. In June 2000, the United States…
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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 treatment model could ultimately help save hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide. Among those who completed at least four months of therapy, the percentage with…
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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 meat during mid-life and later was associated with risk of breast cancer. Similarly, the data showed no reduced risk among women who were vegetarians. In…
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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 how to eliminate or lower the levels of these proteins in the brain as a potential treatment for the disease. But now researchers believe that…
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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 of reductions by the HMO in the postpartum length of stay and a subsequent state law establishing a minimum stay. The investigators measured the effects…
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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 daughter cells with an abnormal number of chromosomes, the leading cause of female infertility, birth defects, and embryo loss. Genes of the formin family, including…
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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 patients who had postponed having the surgery the longest — and therefore were experiencing the most pain and loss of joint function — also experienced…
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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 leading cause of irreversible blindness among elderly individuals worldwide. Approximately 1.7 million people have decreased vision due to ARM, and 200,000 people develop advanced ARM…
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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 the Archives of Internal Medicine offers some of the first concrete evidence that as a man’s weight increases, so do his chances of suffering from…
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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 at Children’s Hospital Boston, also identified a possible genetic and molecular model for regeneration in zebrafish that could help direct further research in humans. The…
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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 in an effort to beat back the stubborn disease. Until now there was no way to identify those who have a more favorable outlook and…
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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 of treatment will extend a patient’s life to a point where he’s more likely to die from causes other than prostate cancer,” says Anthony D’Amico,…
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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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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 found to presage a woman’s chances of developing heart disease more accurately than that reigning oracle of the cardiology world, cholesterol. Researchers Paul Ridker, Nader…
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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, according to Evan Snyder, a neurologist at the Harvard Medical School, who led the research. In other experiments, stem cells unexpectedly rescued the injured nerve…
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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 patients who had their tonsils extracted missed only 0.6 days of work a year on average after their tonsillectomy, versus 9.2 workdays before the surgery.…
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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 professor of medicine in the Department of Health Care Policy, and colleagues examined the records of patients covered under Medicare to see whether this held…
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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 the Brigham and Women’s Hospital-based Nurses’ Health Study, researchers compared women’s use of postmenopausal hormones and their alcohol intake. That data showed that postmenopausal women…
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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 problems. Women account for 80 percent of the 300,000 hip fractures that occur annually. A study, which included investigators from the Harvard School of…
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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 a cell. Much research has focused on how the aggregated proteins found in neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s are produced, overproduced, folded, and eventually clumped together.…
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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 timing and assembly of three components in arterial thrombosis in mice. Their findings suggest a revised model of the earliest steps of blood coagulation. Using…
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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 interact with the immune system, invade cells, rob them of nutrients, and blossom within other cells to eventually shut down necessary bodily functions. From his…
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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 a significantly elevated risk of becoming hypertensive. For example, women who took NSAIDs for 22 or more days per month increased their risk by 86…
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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 it’s electrifying. “All living things generate all sorts of electric fields inside themselves,” explains Michael Levin, an assistant professor at the Dental School and a…
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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 the November 2001 issue of Gene Therapy, Darren Higgins, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of microbiology, and Hammersmith co-authors report that by modifying E. coli…
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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 a growing number of older pregnant women believe in clarifying the risk of a genetic abnormality in a fetus by adding a detailed ultrasound known…
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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 take from the air, the less is available to capture the heat that is causing the warm-up of our planet. That adds up to a…
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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) and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School’s Division of AIDS. The study, which will include a total of 160 participants at 10 sites throughout…