Health

A study led by members of the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Policy (MGH-IHP) has found that institutional academic-industry relationships — financial relationships companies have with medical schools or teaching hospitals rather than with individual physicians or scientists — are as common and pervasive as individual relationships. The report, the first nationwide look at the extent and impact of these relationships, appears in the Oct. 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The pipeline isn’t the problem. That was the message of speakers addressing the topic of low numbers of women in top academic positions in science and engineering Wednesday (Oct. 10).

BOSTON – A study led by members of the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Policy (MGH-IHP) has found that institutional academic-industry relationships – financial relationships companies have with medical…

Investigators from six countries have completed the second phase of the International HapMap Project, an effort to identify and catalog genetic similarities and differences among populations around the world. Information…

It has been known that countries with rapidly developing economies may experience a double-disease burden that results from undernutrition and overnutrition. People living in poverty experience diseases that result from…

A study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers of girls and women who were sex-trafficked from Nepal to India and then repatriated has found that 38 percent were…

Administering androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) prior to surgery and combining ADT with radiation therapy are popular approaches to treating men diagnosed with advanced or high-risk localized prostate cancer. However, the potentially negative side effects of ADT are just now being explored. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found that ADT may increase the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, particularly in men who undergo surgery for prostate cancer. These results are published in the Oct. 9 online issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers at Harvard University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have discovered that a simple circadian clock found in some bacteria operates by the rhythmic addition and subtraction of phosphate groups at two key locations on a single protein. This phosphate pattern is influenced by two other proteins, driving phosphorylation to oscillate according to a remarkably accurate 24-hour cycle.

Mahzarin R. Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist, studies how people think, and how they think they relate to one another. She’s an expert in the little secrets we all have: those implicit attitudes — sometimes prejudicial — regarding race, age, gender, and similar territories of otherness.

Forty years ago, Edward O. Wilson and Robert H. MacArthur described how size and isolation determine how many species an island can support. Last week, biologists gathered to mark the theory’s anniversary, calling it a “pivotal point” in ecology’s relatively short history.

Growing recognition of the importance of health as a contributing factor to economic development and societal change has prompted the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) to add a new subsection on sustainable health to its existing section on sustainable Development.

Once viewed as a panacea to the nation’s health care problems, HMOs have fallen out of favor. Commercially insured patients who flooded into HMOs, or managed care, in the early 1990s left in droves by the end of the decade. Medicaid patients, however, don’t always have the luxury of choosing their health plans, and the proportion of Medicaid beneficiaries enrolling in HMOs continues to increase.

Researchers at the Partners AIDS Research Center (PARC) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) may have discovered a second molecular “switch” responsible for turning off the immune system’s response against HIV. Last year, members of the same team identified a molecule called PD-1 that suppresses the activity of HIV-specific CD8 T cells that should destroy virus-infected cells. Now the researchers describe how a regulatory protein called CTLA-4 inhibits the action of HIV-specific CD4 T cells that control the overall response against the virus. The report will appear in the journal Nature Immunology and is receiving early online release.

Harvard University scientists have identified a virtual “speed limit” on the rate of molecular evolution in organisms, and the magic number appears to be six mutations per genome per generation — a rate of change beyond which species run the strong risk of extinction as their genomes lose stability.

During a fatal heart attack, at least 1 billion heart cells are killed in the left ventricle, one of the heart’s two big lower pumping chambers that move blood into the body.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick Wed-nesday (Oct. 3) called on those attending the second day of a Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI)-sponsored Stem Cell Summit to support his proposed $1 billion life sciences initiative “so we can get partnering with you.”

New research has linked panic attacks in older women with an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and death from all causes, adding panic attacks to the growing list of mental and emotional conditions with potentially deadly physical effects.

A new study from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, found that mothers who experienced an increase in weight from the beginning of…

The importance of role disability, that is, inability to work or carry out usual activities, has become increasingly recognized as a major source of indirect costs of illness because of…

The forgotten faces of the AIDS epidemic belong to children: infected, neglected, and orphaned by a disease that ravages not only their bodies, but also their families and communities, according to a gathering of international AIDS experts Monday (Sept. 24).

Researchers believe they’ve found the cellular link between extremely restricted diets and dramatically lengthened lifespan and hope to use the knowledge to develop new treatments for age-related diseases.

Tiny islets in the Bahamas have proven useful laboratories to illustrate natural selection’s effects on island lizards, which saw their legs lengthen, then shorten as ground-dwelling predators drove them into the trees.

Harvard Medical School (HMS) researchers have successfully synthesized a DNA-based memory loop in yeast cells, an experiment that marks a significant step forward in the emerging field of synthetic biology.

An architect of Massachusetts’ year-old experiment with universal health coverage said Monday (Sept. 17) that because of the experiment 170,000 people have insurance today who otherwise would not, but that the problem may be bigger than initially thought.

Nine Harvard researchers “well-positioned to make significant – and potentially transformative – discoveries in a variety of areas,” ranging from brain development to reprogramming stem cells, have been awarded special…

The public and private agencies that respond to war and disasters sometimes respond disastrously — and it’s time to do something about it. That was the basic message of a three-day Humanitarian Health Conference at Harvard Sept. 6-8, which drew more than 120 emergency physicians, epidemiologists, and professional aid workers from 68 organizations.

Researchers have coaxed adult stem cells into forming artificial heart valves that could one day mean fewer surgeries for children suffering from heart defects.

Harvard researchers have coaxed adult stem cells into forming artificial heart valves that could one day mean fewer surgeries for children suffering from heart defects. The scientists, at Harvard-affiliated Boston…

When trying to understand someone’s intentions, nonhuman primates expect others to act rationally by performing the most appropriate action allowed by the environment, according to a new study by researchers…

Over a century ago, scientists first proposed that height is a complex trait — one influenced by environmental factors and multiple genes. While subsequent studies revealed that most of the…