Health

Harvard researchers have established a link between the growth of blood vessels and the mechanical stresses caused by the environment within which the vessels grow, a new understanding that researchers hope can lead to novel disease treatments based on manipulating blood flow to living tissues.

On Feb. 12, the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Much was made of his key idea, natural selection, and how it still resonates and informs science in the 21st century.

As the United States transitions to a new administration, and as the health care crisis mounts, the debate about how to buttress primary care delivery with information technology is getting louder. While much of the attention — and controversy — is focused on how to better equip physicians, little focus appears to be aimed at how to better equip patients to improve their health care.

Bacteria are the oldest living organisms, dating back 4 billion years. So it is only logical that they have evolved ways to communicate.

New research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital finds that taking a combination of vitamins B6 and B12 and folic acid appears to decrease the risk of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in women. This research is published in the Feb. 23 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the University of Minnesota have found that living just above the poverty line and having diabetes increases by 50 percent a woman’s chance of developing postpartum depression — a serious illness that affects about one in 10 new mothers.

Many popular diets emphasize either carbohydrate, protein, or fat as the best way to lose weight. However, there have been few studies lasting more than a year that evaluate the effect on weight loss of diets with different compositions of those nutrients.

A collaborative research effort spanning nearly a decade between Harvard researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and King’s College London (KCL) has identified a novel gene for inherited amyotrophic lateral…

The impact of the amyloid plaques that appear in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease may extend beyond the deposits’ effects on neurons — the cells that transmit electrochemical…

A new study by Harvard researchers and colleagues shows that eating fewer calories leads to weight loss, regardless of where those calories come from. Many popular diets emphasize either carbohydrate,…

A new statistical model could be used to predict an individual’s lifetime risk of stroke, according to the results of a study by Harvard researchers at the Children’s Hospital Boston Informatics Program.

Harvard Medical School (HMS) researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital have found that taking a combination of vitamins B6 and B12 and folic acid appears to decrease the risk of…

Researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the University of Minnesota have found that living just above the poverty line and having diabetes increases by 50 percent a woman’s chance…

A 15-month study of 21,860 patients and 110 primary care physicians at 11 Harvard Vanguard health centers found that patients who received mailed reminders that they were due for colorectal…

Researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Burnham Institute for Medical Research, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have reported the identification of human monoclonal antibodies (mAb) that…

Despite historic increases in health insurance coverage in Massachusetts, fewer than 20 percent of the commonwealth’s dentists accept patients insured through public programs such as Medicaid. Although state-subsidized insurance programs include dental care, the insurance mandate does not require employers to cover dental care. Dental schools are considered affordable sites for treatment, but even reduced fees are beyond the budgets of many families today.

Harvard President Drew Faust today renewed the University’s commitment to the vision of advancing interdisciplinary, collaborative science in general, and the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (SCRB), the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI), and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (WIBIE) in particular.

The National Science Foundation-funded, three-year effort aims to create 3-D digital models of each species represented in Harvard’s collection of 12,000 bird skeletons.

A new study has identified the first common gene variants associated with an increased incidence of hypertension — a significant risk factor for heart attack, stroke, and kidney failure. The…

Computer-based systems that allow clinicians to prescribe drugs electronically are designed to automatically warn of potential medication errors, but a new study reveals clinicians often override the alerts and rely instead on their own judgment.

Harvard statistics professor Samuel Kou, now 34, grew up in Lanzhou, a city in China’s mountainous northwest near the border with Inner Mongolia. The altitude there is higher than Denver’s storied mile, and earthquakes rumble through town several times a year.

Called the North Pond Basin, the site — researchers at Harvard and beyond believe — can provide a window onto a vast world of subterranean microscopic life that extends kilometers below the Earth’s surface and which, according to rough estimates, could rival life above the surface in both diversity and sheer mass.

Genetics may play a surprisingly small role in determining the precise wiring of the mammalian nervous system, according to painstaking mapping of every neuron projecting to a small muscle mice use to move their ears. These first-ever mammalian “connectomes,” or complete neural circuit diagrams, reveal that neural wiring can vary widely even in paired tissues on the left and right sides of the same animal.

Computer-based systems that allow clinicians to prescribe drugs electronically are designed to automatically warn of potential medication errors, but a new study reveals clinicians often override the alerts and rely…

Genetics may play a surprisingly small role in determining the precise wiring of the mammalian nervous system, according to painstaking mapping of every neuron projecting to a small muscle mice use to move their ears.

The largest study ever completed of genetic factors associated with heart attacks has identified nine genetic regions — three not previously described — that appear to increase the risk for early-onset myocardial infarction. The report from the Myocardial Infarction Genetics Consortium, based on information from a total of 26,000 individuals in 10 countries, was given early online release today by Nature Genetics.

What do Julie Andrews and Mozart have in common? And what links Hillary Clinton, Che Guevara, and Cameron Diaz? The former have absolute or perfect pitch; the latter are tone-deaf. How our brains differ to create these disparities was one of the subjects of “Crossing the Corpus Callosum,” a first-of-its-kind symposium held Jan. 10 at the Merck Research Laboratories-Boston.

Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE).

Small is beautiful. Small may also be powerful. Judging from a copy on display at Harvard’s Houghton Library, the book that changed the world is only 8 inches high and 5 1/2 inches wide.

Researchers have reported the first clinical evidence that gene therapy reduces symptoms in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an important milestone for this promising treatment . Described in the February issue of the journal Human Gene Therapy, the findings stem from a study of two patients with severe rheumatoid arthritis conducted in Germany and led by an investigator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC).