Health

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell highlighted recent moves to make the game safer and affirmed a commitment to player safety Thursday (Nov. 15) during a talk at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Harvard researchers are challenging the popular portrayal of Ebola and other viral hemorrhagic fevers. In a new paper in Science, researchers present evidence that the diseases may be more common — and much older — than previously thought.

Victims of U.S. syphilis experiments in Guatemala are still awaiting compensation that may or may not come, even as new laws passed in the wake of 9/11 make it harder, in some circumstances, to sue disease researchers for wrongdoing, panelists at Harvard Law School said.

A new study has found that participating in an eight-week meditation training program can have measurable effects on how the brain functions even when someone is not actively meditating.

Health care specialists discussed post-election Obamacare, including potential bumps in the road, in a panel talk at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Researchers have found that a protozoan parasite causing an STD that affects a quarter of a million people yearly is fueled in part by its own viral symbiont. Antibiotics that simply kill the parasite are not the solution.

Researchers have found that colorectal cancer survivors whose diet and activity patterns lead to excess amounts of insulin in the blood have a higher risk of cancer recurrence and death from the disease.

Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have mimicked pulmonary edema in a microchip lined by living human cells. They used this “lung-on-a-chip” to study drug toxicity and identify potential new therapies to prevent this life-threatening condition.

“We found that adding low amounts of physical activity to one’s daily routine, such as 75 minutes of brisk walking per week, was associated with increased longevity: a gain of 1.8 years of life expectancy after age 40, compared with doing no such activity,” explained Harvard Medical School Professor of Medicine I-Min Lee.

Harvard researchers have worked for years to understand better the familiar mystery of sleep, highlighting not only what happens when we close our eyes, but also the effects on us when we don’t.

Researchers find that they have the necessary starting material to understand the pathways that contribute to Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, and they also have a framework to better appreciate that these may not be two distinct diseases, but rather collections of many different diseases.

Geneticist Elaine Ostrander runs a comparative-genomics lab that examines dog DNA to understand better the traits that might aid understanding of human diseases.

Harvard researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute find that aspirin therapy can extend the life of colorectal cancer patients whose tumors carry a mutation in a key gene, but it has no effect on patients who lack the mutation.

HMS Professor John Mekalanos, an expert on cholera, suggested Oct. 22 that relief workers and peacekeepers from cholera-endemic countries be treated with antibiotics before serving in cholera-free countries, as a way to avoid a repeat of the post-earthquake cholera epidemic in Haiti, which has killed thousands.

In a critical breakthrough in unraveling how molecular “motors” ferry proteins and nutrients through cells, Harvard scientists have produced high-resolution images that show how the chemical “foot” of dynein — one of the most complex, but least understood such motors — binds to microtubules, the cellular structures it travels on.

Medical experts are coming to see cancer not as a disease of cells or even of genes, but as an “organismal disease,” Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning cancer history “The Emperor of All Maladies,” told a Harvard Medical School audience on Oct. 11.

Researchers at Harvard University and the SETI Institute are proposing a new spin on the giant-impact model to match the observed composition of the moon and its relationship to Earth.

In his new book, I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School assistant professor and a Radcliffe Fellow, explores the lucrative and legal dimensions of the growing practice of traveling to another country for health care.

In recent years Harvard investigators have discovered that breast tumors are influenced by more than just the cancer cells within them.

Models of low-cost, high-quality health care are cause for hope that disparities in treatment between U.S. whites and minorities can be closed, said speakers at a University-wide symposium on Oct. 11.

A Harvard study of sports programs at Brown University, Dartmouth College, and Virginia Tech finds that the way the head injury commonly called concussion is usually diagnosed varies greatly and may not be the best way to determine who is at risk for future problems.

A recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry investigated the workings of cell receptors, the basis of his groundbreaking research involving the complex process of how the body’s cells communicate and interact, while a young medical resident at Harvard.

Every 90 seconds, a mother dies in pregnancy or of childbirth complications — a tragic statistic, but one that may drive efforts to improve health care in developing countries, said public health specialists in a Harvard talk.

Arnold Arboretum Director William “Ned” Friedman and freshmen from his “Getting to Know Darwin” seminar went to the home of a pigeon fancier. “Darwin not only wrote about pigeons, he bred them himself,” Friedman said.

Scientists have long known the main proteins that lead to the development of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), respectively. Now research shows that these two motor neuron diseases likely share a pathway that leads to the development of disease.

Flipping a newly discovered molecular switch in white fat cells enabled mice to eat a high-calorie diet without becoming obese or developing the inflammation that causes insulin resistance, report Harvard scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Professor Charles Langmuir worked for 10 years on an update of “How to Build a Habitable Planet,” a textbook published in 1985 by famed geoscientist Wallace Broecker.

A new study describes the mechanism behind impaired muscle repair during aging and a strategy that may help rejuvenate aging tissue by manipulating the environment in which muscle stem cells reside.

Sugary cereals, oversized soft drinks, and quarter-pound cheeseburgers are among the unhealthy food choices kids face daily. Junk food, most of it highly processed, and sugar-sweetened beverages are major contributors to the childhood obesity epidemic.

Researchers have been able to take control of tiny, transparent worms by manipulating neurons in their brains, using precisely targeted pulses of laser light.