Health

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  • Nearly half of college students used tobacco in one-year period

    In 2000, nearly one-half of college students reported using tobacco products in the previous year. By including the use of cigars and smokeless tobacco, a study found a greater prevalence…

  • Active girls who drink colas are five times more likely to fracture bones

    In a study, more than 460 ninth- and tenth-grade girls reported their activity levels, soda drinking habits, and history of bone fractures. A researcher found that drinking any type of…

  • Cognitive testing of elderly could help detect medical problems

    Shari Bassuk, research fellow in the Department of Health and Social Behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health, and her colleagues have found that even mild impairments in areas…

  • Physically active women reduce risk of stroke

    A Harvard study followed 72,488 nurses for eight years and concluded that the more a woman exercises, the lower the odds she will suffer a stroke. Two large Harvard studies…

  • New treatment effective against psoriasis

    Psoriasis is a skin disease that disfigures people’s bodies with scaly red plaques. Thirteen patients had portions of their psoriasis patches irradiated with intense beams of ultraviolet laser light at…

  • Biological clock genes identified

    “We’ve identified the molecules that we believe form the essential gears of the 24-hour clock,” says researcher Steven Reppert, who is a professor of pediatrics at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.…

  • Study points to more targeted use of Ritalin

    An area known as the putamen, located deep in the center of the brain, helps to control movement and attention. Harvard researchers believe that the putamen is involved in Attention…

  • Researchers face up to liars

    What category of people do you think would be best at detecting lies? It’s not Secret Service agents, or psychiatrists, or even mothers. Investigators working at Massachusetts General Hospital in…

  • Public health researchers battle West Nile virus

    West Nile encephalitis infection, carried by mosquitoes, can cause the brain to swell but rarely leads to death. Many people carry the virus with mild if any symptoms, but people…

  • Potent cancer drugs made from sea squirts

    In May 2000, researchers at Harvard University announced that they had succeeded in synthesizing a complex anti-tumor drug that is more powerful than any other known drug. The drug, ecteinascidin,…

  • Birth of new brain cells induced in birds

    Stem cells that are naturally present in the brains of finches were induced to replace lost cells and restore the birds’ ability to sing their distinctive song. “Our results represent…

  • Understanding how fish swim

    The pattern is hard to see at first because the movement seems to happen in the blink of an eye.

  • Unlocking the mystery of artistic taste

    “Unlike infants, who share innate preferences about shapes and colors, preschoolers already differ in their artistic tastes,” says Kim Sheridan, a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.…

  • Treating advanced lung cancer with light

    Photodynamic, or light, therapy was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in December 1998. The FDA has also approved using lasers for treatment of advanced stages of cancer of…

  • Shadow proteins in thymus may explain how immune system gets to know its own body

    Researchers recently identified a protein that appears to work by turning on in the thymus, which lies beneath the breast bone, the production of a wide array of proteins from…

  • Researchers switch cancer off and on in mice

    An antibiotic added to the drinking water of mice stops the progress of leukemia. Harvard researcher Claudia Huettner cannot do the same thing in humans, unfortunately, but through such experiments…

  • Oldest known flowering plants identified by genes

    Flowering plants now number 250,000 different species, including virtually all the vegetables and grains we eat, as well as most of the food of the animals that we consume. “It’s…

  • ‘Take two aspirin and call me manana’

    Harvard Medical School is attempting to bridge the language barriers that sometimes arise in medical settings. A set of three medical phrasebooks was first offered in 1999 in three different…

  • Jolie-Pitt Foundation Donates $2 Million to Global Health Committee to Fight HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis in Ethiopia

    The Global Health Committee (GHC) has announced it will receive $2 million dollars from the Jolie-Pitt Foundation to bring life-saving medicines to Ethiopians suffering from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. The money…

  • Paying attention to attention: How active is hyperactive?

    McLean Hospital researcher Martin Teicher and his team believe that the surest way to separate youngsters who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from those with other problems is to…

  • Diving into the gene pool

    Maryellen Ruvolo, professor of anthropology, specializes in the analysis of human and primate family trees using DNA data, a subfield of molecular evolution. She is probably best known for her…

  • Electromagnets used in treating depression

    Recent studies by Harvard researchers at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., have enlarged the body of knowledge about a promising, though still experimental, treatment for a variety of psychiatric disorders.…

  • Aging Brains Lose Less Than Thought

    It’s considered a dreaded inevitability of growing old—you lose thousands of brain cells every day. This idea has been a centerpiece of scientific dogma and popular lore for 40 years.…