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Tag: Harvard Medical School
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Health
Circadian rhythms may distinguish Alzheimer’s disease
Researcher David Harper and his colleagues monitored two key components of the circadian system — the rise and fall of core body temperature and the waxing and waning of spontaneous motor activity — in 38 dementia patients with either Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia, frontotemporal degeneration. They found that body temperature reached its…
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First domino falls in research on sense of touch
Unlike the other four senses, touch is ubiquitous, involving sensory terminals dispersed over the outside and on the inside of the body. This system encodes a variety of sensations in addition to touch, such as pain, vibration, pressure, stretch, itch, texture, and temperature. The system is sensitive to certain chemical states like painful tissue acidity,…
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Accomplice fingered in cholera toxicity
A study published in March 2001 revealed one of the ways that cholera toxin hijacks some of the cell’s own machinery. In uncovering part of the toxin’s trail, a team led by Tom Rapoport, Howard Hughes investigator and Harvard Medical School professor of cell biology, has also identified a novel mechanism for chaperoning the unfolding…
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Cancer cells’ immortality may depend on longevity protein
A team of Harvard Medical School researchers has identified a protein that 10 percent of tumor cells use to attain an immortal state. By blocking the molecule, it may be possible to stop these cancer cells from proliferating. The approach might also be used as part of a two-pronged strategy to combat the remaining 90…
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Human genome tally: Is recount in order?
The surprising finding that humans have fewer genes than expected led to endless speculations and editorial comments. Would biotech stocks be threatened? Should humans be more humble? Were entirely new theories needed to explain our biological complexity? But these opionions all relied on the idea that comparing the draft sequences of the human genome that…
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Rules for music wired into the brain
“Music is in our genes,” says Mark Jude Tramo, a musician, prolific songwriter, and neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. “Many researchers like myself are trying to understand melody, harmony, rhythm, and the feelings they produce, at the level of individual brain cells. At this level, there may be a universal set of rules that governs…
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Surgery without scalpels
Paul Simmons, a 29-year-old Maine farmer, suffered from a lung tumor. In February 2001, at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a probe containing a long needle was inserted into his chest and guided to the tumor by a scanning device. As Eric vanSonnenberg and his colleagues did the procedure, they could watch on…
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Medicare patients give higher overall marks to nonprofit health plans
The first large-scale national study that examines the relationship between health plan characteristics and patient ratings of their plan found that Medicare patients prefer not-for-profit or local plans over for-profit and nationally affiliated health care plans. These results are consistent with the growing number of other studies that have shown poorer performance in some aspects…
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Majority of Alzheimer’s plaques cleared from brains of living mice
Harvard Medical School researchers, working with scientists at Elan Pharmaceuticals, cleared 70 percent of Alzheimer’s plaques from the brains of mice by applying anti-plaque antibodies directly to the mouse brains through tiny holes in their skulls. A year and a half before, Elan scientists showed that they could prevent plaque formation in the Alzheimer’s-prone mice…
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Brain hesitates in assembling mosaic of motion
Your brain must integrate information from many different neurons in the primary visual cortex to interpret movement. But how does this complicated process work? Richard Born and Christopher Pack of Harvard Medical School report that an area of the brain known as the middle temporal (MT) visual area has a dynamic solution to the problem…
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Lyme disease vaccine found cost-effective only for those at high risk
Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted through deer tick bites, is rapidly emerging in the U.S. and currently affects about 15,000 people each year. But incidence varies widely according to region, with the highest rates in the Northeast and north central states. A group of researchers has looked at the cost-effectiveness of vaccination against Lyme…
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How embryonic stem cells become fine-tuned brains
Research by Michael Greenberg, Harvard Medical School professor of neurology at Children’s Hospital, begins to explain how the embryonic brain’s stem cells decide whether to mature into nerve or glial cells as development proceeds. Greenberg and colleagues reported that neurogenin, a protein known to nudge stem cells toward turning into neurons, does so by actively…
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Gene initiates joint formation
Researchers at Harvard Medical School have identified a molecule that plays a central role in the initiation of joint formation. Studying limb formation in the developing chick, postdoctoral fellow Christine Hartmann and her adviser, Clifford Tabin, Harvard Medical School professor of genetics, found that a previously uncharacterized member of the Wnt family, Wnt14, was expressed…
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Science & Tech
Radiation limits narrowing of arteries after stent
The results of a trial directed by the Harvard Clinical Research Institute and the Cardiovascular Data Analysis Center indicate there may be an effective alternative to placement of a stent to prevent artery narrowing after angioplasty. That alternative is intracoronary radiation therapy, or “brachytherapy.” The first-of-its-kind trial tested the safety and efficacy of the delivery…
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In human genome race, competition spurred better science
The conflicts between the two teams — one publicly funded, one private — that raced to sequence the human genome often drew more attention than the actual completion of the project itself. A team of Harvard researchers found that the rivalry spurred and improved a potentially sluggish public project. And an important consequence of the…
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Growth factor seen to reverse loss of muscle from aging, disease
Previous work by Nadia Rosenthal of Harvard Medical School and her colleagues showed that injection of a virus directing the expression of a molecule known as insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I) into a skeletal muscle resulted in a much larger and stronger muscle. Now research described by Rosenthal and colleagues illustrates that the effect of…
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T-cell response to HIV proteins may make them vaccine candidates
Development of a vaccine against HIV-1 has long focused on the virus’s structural proteins. These molecules are expressed relatively late in the viral life cycle, after HIV-1 has decreased the expression of an important set of cellular proteins involved in the body’s ability to fight viral infections. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical…
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Specific gene provides health benefits for moderate drinkers
Moderate alcohol consumption among people who have a specific version of a gene that metabolizes alcohol yields health benefits — less risk of heart disease and higher good cholesterol levels. “The study results support that it is the alcohol in alcoholic beverages that is responsible for the reduction in risk of heart disease, not other…
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Health
Increased consumption of soda promotes childhood obesity
Soft drinks are currently the leading source of added sugars in the daily diet of young Americans. Now, researchers have conducted the first long-term study to examine soda consumption and its precise impact on children’s body weight. Their findings show that for each additional daily serving of a sugar-sweetened soft drink, the incidence of obesity…
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Science & Tech
Charles Rosenberg looks at changing perceptions of illness
In Charles Rosenberg’s eyes, epidemics tell us a great deal about American society. Rosenberg, considered by many to be the nation’s pre-eminent medical historian, was recently named Professor of the History of Science at Harvard. Though many of Rosenberg’s works are well known, he is perhaps best known for his 1962 book, “The Cholera Years:…
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Cloak partly lifted on tiny Chlamydia
The Boston Public Health Commission released 1999 statistics showing 2 percent of the city’s 15- to 19-year-olds have chlamydia. Boston’s minority girls were reported to have infection rates of almost 6 percent, and a 1998 Journal of the American Medical Association study of sexually active teenage girls in Baltimore found infection rates approaching 30 percent.…
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Protein may play double role in issuing genetic gag order
So cells can differentiate and maintain their specialized identities, large sections of unneeded genes must be turned off. During cell division, the stability of every chromosome depends upon sections of chromosomes remaining silent. Cancer is believed to be due, in part, to the loss of cell identity and unstable chromosomes. Aging also may be linked…
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Fish may reduce risk of stroke in women
“Our research suggests that women can reduce their risk of thrombotic stroke by up to 48 percent by eating fish two to four times per week,” said Kathryn M. Rexrode, Harvard Medical School instructor in medicine. “The findings also indicate that higher intake of omega-3 fatty acids may help women reduce their risk of stroke.”…
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Alzheimer’s vaccine looks promising
In 1993, Harvard researchers Dennis Selkoe and Howard Weiner got together over dinner to talk about how they might combine their expertise to find a better treatment for Alzheimer’s, a disease that robs more than 4 million Americans of their cognition and personalities. Selkoe has spent much of his research career trying to understand how…
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Gene for familial dysautonomia discovered
Familial dysautonomia is a neurodegenerative disease that mainly targets Ashkenazi Jews. The disease, which affects one in every 3,600 members of this group, impairs the development of the sensory and autonomic nervous systems. Babies born with the disease often have trouble sucking and swallowing, forcing many to be tube fed. Nor can they taste or…
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Genetic link discovered for late onset Alzheimer’s
Although they have not yet identified the actual gene, researchers have evidence that a gene located on human chromosome 10 could be more potent than previous risk factors for late onset Alzheimer’s disease. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be a bigger Alzheimer gene than APOE4,” said Rudolph Tanzi, Harvard Medical School…
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Lowering iron levels does not cut heart attack risk for men
Men who give blood reduce the amount of iron in their bodies, but that does not result in a reduction in their risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) and heart attack. Iron levels in the body had once been thought to explain the difference in CHD rates among men and women. “The results of this…
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Researchers see better treatments for cancer
“Before the development of insulin, diabetes was as deadly as many cancers are today,” says Harvard researcher Joseph Paul Eder, who is testing Endostatin on patients with advanced cancers. “In a couple of decades, people may be able to live 30 to 40 years, or more, after being diagnosed with breast, prostate, or other cancers.”…
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A new reason to sleep on it
In findings published in the December 2000 issue of Nature Neuroscience, a team of Harvard Medical School scientists found that people who stay up all night after learning and practicing a new task show little improvement in their performance. That means that school kids who are cutting back on sleep to finish ever mounting piles…