Health

All Health

  • An opening for measles

    In the wake of the recent measles outbreak, a panel of experts convened at Harvard Law School to discuss the ethical, legal, and public health issues around vaccination.

  • Perception of food consumption overrides reality

    Targeting mechanisms in the central nervous system might yield the beneficial effects of low-calorie diets on healthy aging without the need to alter food intake, suggests new research from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

  • A new understanding of Alzheimer’s

    Using the principle of natural selection, researchers have outlined a new model of the disease suggesting that mitochondria — power plants for cells — might be at its center.

  • Malaria: Down but not out

    Anti-malaria efforts have made progress in recent years, but authorities have to keep up the pressure if they are to defeat an illness that is not only ancient, but resilient, speakers at Harvard said.

  • The entire egg

    Harvard Professor Walter Willett underlined the distinction between dietary and blood cholesterol, and stressed whole foods rather than any single nutrient as key to a healthy diet.

  • Shelter for the psyche

    Harvard psychiatrist Jacqueline Olds offers some tips for coping with the snow and the dark days of winter.

  • Obesity epidemic needs new approach

    Researchers call the notion that obesity is driven by either personal choice or the environment a false dichotomy, and suggest that these competing perspectives be merged to show the reciprocal relationship between the individual and the places he or she lives and eats.

  • Women with heart risk

    Heart disease is the leading cause of death in women in the United States, deadlier than all forms of cancer combined. The good news is that up to 90 percent of heart disease may be preventable.

  • Sick with measles, again

    Dyann Wirth, chair of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, discusses what’s behind the resurgence of measles in the United States.

  • Pinpointing danger in hypertension

    A Harvard endocrinologist was senior author on a study pinpointing the precise high blood pressure level and critical time when intervening was tied to a decrease in the risk of death.

  • Twice doomed?

    Growing evidence points to a role for volcanoes in dinosaur extinction, said planetary scientist Mark Richards in a Harvard lecture.

  • Unlocking fat

    A study by Emily Groopman ’14 shows that cooking helps to unlock the calories in fatty foods.

  • Walk like a man

    The fossilized hipbone of an ape called Sivapithecus is raising a host of new questions about whether the upright body plan of apes may have evolved multiple times.

  • Harvard’s Odyssey unlocks big data

    Harvard faculty and researchers are using big data to answer society’s most challenging questions, and doing it with the help of FAS Research Computing (FASRC). Founded in 2007, FASRC had one goal: to provide Harvard faculty, students, and staff with leading-edge computational resources.

  • Vitamin D protects some against colorectal cancer

    A new study by investigators at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute demonstrates that vitamin D can protect some people with colorectal cancer by perking up the immune system’s vigilance against tumor cells.

  • Imaging captures how blood stem cells take root

    Harvard-affiliated researchers have provided a see-through zebrafish and enhanced imaging that offer the first direct glimpse of how blood stem cells take root in the body to generate blood.

  • Steering stem cell trafficking into pancreas reverses Type 1 diabetes

    Harvard researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital have uncovered a way to enhance and prolong the therapeutic effects of mesenchymal stem cells in a preclinical model of Type 1 diabetes.

  • Breakthrough on chronic pain

    Imaging study finds the first evidence of neuroinflammation in brains of chronic pain patients, which could lead to new, targeted treatments.

  • Sounding out speech

    A new study demonstrates that infants as young as 6 months can solve the invariance problem in speech perception.

  • The divergent skull

    New work by Harvard scientists challenges long-standing ideas on skull development in vertebrates.

  • Year born may determine obesity risk

    Framingham Heart Study, PNAS Early Edition, Harvard Medical School Investigators working to unravel the impact of genetics versus environment on traits such as obesity may also need to consider a new factor: when individuals were born.

  • Bacteria ‘factories’ churn out valuable chemicals

    A team of researchers led by Harvard geneticist George Church at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School has made big strides toward a future in which the predominant chemical factories of the world are colonies of genetically engineered bacteria.

  • Growing support for dietary restriction

    A new study led by Harvard researchers identifies a key molecular mechanism behind the health benefits of dietary restriction, or reduced food intake without malnutrition.

  • Using weights to target belly fat

    A Harvard study found that men who did 20 minutes of daily weight training had less increase in age-related abdominal fat than men who spent the same amount of time doing aerobic activities.

  • A cost of culture

    A new study, authored by Collin McCabe, a doctoral student in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, suggests that increased exposure to disease has played an important role in the evolution of culture in both humans and non-human primates.

  • ‘Epidemics are optional’

    Expanded medical care could greatly reduce Ebola fatalities, says Paul Farmer of Partners In Health.

  • Reproductive strategies

    When compared with a solitary strategy of producing offspring who then go on to produce their own offspring, a new Harvard study has found that eusociality is a high-risk, high-reward gamble.

  • A pill to shed fat?

    Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers have taken what they describe as “the first step toward a pill that can replace the treadmill” for the control of obesity.

  • Crowdsourcing old journals

    Harvard’s Ernst Mayr Library is involved in a collaborative effort to digitize the handwritten journals of ornithologist William Brewster. The collaboration uses crowdsourcing for the transcription and video games as a way to check the work’s accuracy.

  • New parents weigh in on genomic testing

    A study by Harvard researchers is the first to explore new parents’ attitudes toward genomic testing on newborns. The findings suggest that if such testing becomes available, there would be an interest among new parents, regardless of their demographic background.