Health

An international scientific collaborative led by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute’s Kornelia Polyak has discovered why women who give birth in their early 20s are less likely to develop breast cancer than women who don’t, triggering a search for a way to confer this protective state on all women.

The Harvard Allston Education Portal on Thursday hosted a workshop examining the effects of gluten on health, with Jennifer Zartarian of Cambridge Health Associates answering questions and acting as a guide through the latest research.

Scientists at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute observed a strong and selective immune response in some patients who received several doses of a “personalized” tumor vaccine composed of their own inactivated leukemia cells combined with an immune stimulant.

About half of a small group of patients with fibromyalgia — a common syndrome that causes chronic pain and other symptoms — were found to have damage to nerve fibers in their skin and other evidence of a disease called small-fiber polyneuropathy.

Amy Wagers and Emmanuelle Passegué have found that cancer stem cells actively remodel the environment of bone marrow, where blood cells are formed, so that it is hospitable only to diseased cells. This finding could influence the effectiveness of bone marrow transplants.

Working from data collected between 1991 and 2009 from almost 90,000 individuals who responded to the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, Professor David Cutler has found that, even as life expectancy has increased over the past two decades, people have become increasingly healthier later in life.

Drinking several cups of coffee daily appears to reduce the risk of suicide in men and women by about 50 percent, according to a new study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Harvard researchers have identified a pair of genes that appear to be responsible for allowing a specific strain of bacteria in the human gut to break down Lanoxin — a widely prescribed cardiac drug — into an inactive compound, as well as a possible way to turn the process off.

Researchers have long understood that genetics can play a role in susceptibility to cholera, but a team of Harvard scientists is now uncovering evidence of genetic changes that might also help protect some people from contracting the deadly disease.

Harvard Professor Martin Nowak and Ivana Bozic, a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics, show that, under certain conditions, using two drugs in a “targeted therapy” — a treatment approach designed to interrupt cancer’s ability to grow and spread — could effectively cure nearly all cancers.

Harvard researchers have generated long-lasting blood vessels from reprogrammed human cells. The study in the mouse model reveals both the potential and remaining challenges to vessel regeneration.

“The Road to Vital Therapy,” part of the Broad’s Institute’s midsummer science lecture series, discussed how researchers are tapping the human genome, hoping to create effective treatments for vexing afflictions.

With classes in plant morphology fading in universities across the country, an Arnold Arboretum short course is seeking to plug the hole, bringing in top botany graduate students and postdoctoral fellows for an intensive, two-week course.

Australian scientist Stephen Simpson’s locust research has led to insights on human nutrition.

Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers have identified in the most aggressive forms of cancer a gene known to regulate embryonic stem cell self-renewal, beginning a creative search for a drug that can block its activity.

Harvard nutrition experts and leaders of the food industry met this week at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge to discuss recommendations for changing menus of everything from restaurants to cafeterias to prepared foods in an effort to improve the American diet and lessen the environmental impact of the foods we eat.

Specialists examines the country’s obesity problem from several angles at an HMS-MGH forum.

As part of Professor Gonzalo Giribet’s Biology of Invertebrates class, students make closely observed, highly detailed sketches of animals they study in the lab.

Ministers of health from around the world came to the Harvard Kennedy School this week as part of a leadership workshop, co-sponsored with the School of Public Health, to improve health leadership globally.

Harvard researchers have demonstrated that the levels of barium in teeth correspond with breast-feeding. Importantly, they said, the barium levels can remain in fossils that are thousands of years old. This provides new opportunities to study breast-feeding behavior among Neanderthals and early humans.

Dan W. Brock of Harvard Medical School on Wednesday delivered the 63rd George W. Gay Lecture in Medical Ethics at the School, focusing on population bioethics.

Jay Winsten of the Harvard School of Public Health hopes to recruit entertainers for a campaign to reduce distracted driving.

Researchers from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) are the first to report that synthetic silicate nanoplatelets (also known as layered clay) can induce stem cells to become bone cells without the need of additional bone-inducing factors.

Led by Joshua Sanes and Jeff Lichtman, a group of Harvard researchers has made a host of technical improvements in the “Brainbow” imaging technique.

A team at Tel Aviv University in Israel and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has just discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

In a new paper, Professor of Psychology Richard McNally and graduate student Don Robinaugh say that while people suffering from complicated grief — a syndrome marked by intense, debilitating emotional distress and yearning for a lost loved one — had difficulty envisioning specific events in their future, those problems disappeared when they were asked to imagine an alternate future that included their lost loved one.

Two Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers have identified a protein in the blood of mice and humans that may prove to be the first effective treatment for the form of age-related heart failure that affects millions of Americans, a study says.

A slowdown in the growth of U.S. health care costs could mean a savings of as much as $770 billion on Medicare spending over the next decade, Harvard economists say.

Fifty years after its founding, the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Global Health and Population took time for reflection and a look ahead on April 25 during an all-day symposium at the School.

An organismic and evolutionary biology course this semester has formed a virtual classroom with other universities to examine the holdings of museum collections and the vast amount of data they contain and integrate them into the classroom.