Altered states of consciousness through yoga, mindfulness more common than thought and mostly beneficial, study finds — though clinicians ill-equipped to help those who struggle
The findings show non-drug techniques yield better short- and long-term results than the most widely prescribed sleeping pill, zolpidem, commonly known as Ambien. “Sleeping pills are the most frequent treatment…
In asthma, substances such as allergens irritate the airways and cause the smooth muscle cells around them to contract. With repeated attacks, lung tissues become damaged from cycles of inflammation…
Sharks’ tails have always mystified biologists. Their relatives, hundreds of different species of fish, happily push themselves through the water with symmetrical tails that move from side to side. But…
Senior author Christos Mantzoros, M.D., director of the Human Nutrition Research Unit and clinical research overseer of the Department of Endocrinology at BIDMC and associate professor of medicine at Harvard…
Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Toronto in Canada looked at 55 healthy, unrelated men and women, and they discovered 255 regions with relatively large gains or…
The work illustrates how vaccine development can advance by probing the physical architecture of viruses and finding the parts needed to prime the immune system. Rotavirus, which causes severe diarrhea…
Treatment with the Cypher sirolimus-coated stent, developed by Johnson & Johnson’s Cordis division, cost approximately $2,900 more per patient compared to the use of bare metal stents. The drug is…
“Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects,” says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. “These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later.”…
Caused by a mutation that inactivates the tumor suppressor gene LKB1, PJS causes gastrointestinal polyps that have a 30 to 50 percent chance of becoming cancerous, says senior author Lewis…
“Stem-cell transplants are already performed every day in Harvard-affiliated hospitals — and around the world,” says Harvard Stem Cell Initiative codirector David Scadden, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School…
Researchers compared outcomes for men who had undergone surgery or radiation in the first study to look at the effects of prostate cancer treatment on quality of life beyond five…
Bilateral frontoparietal polymicrogyria (BFPP) is a recessive genetic disorder resulting in severely abnormal architecture of the brain’s frontal lobes, as well as milder involvement of parietal and posterior parts of…
Folkman and Kalluri suggest that most tumors don’t develop a blood supply that allows them to grow and progress to cancer, because people produce natural inhibitors of blood vessel growth,…
Researchers already understood that the defective CFTR gene causes CF, explains senior author Steven D. Freedman, M.D., Ph.D., of the gastroenterology division at BIDMC and associate professor of medicine at…
Researchers found that among both whites and blacks, smoking rates are highest among those in working-class, non-supervisory occupations, including blue-collar and service jobs, and those with less education and lower…
A comprehensive review of 72 studies addresses the current controversy about testosterone replacement therapy and its potential health risks to men. “We reviewed decades of research and found no compelling…
Grammar is essentially a system of rules for taking a finite set of discrete elements and combining them into a limitless range of novel expressions. For humans, grammar cobbles together…
Researchers reviewed the records of 28,777 Medicare-eligible patients aged 65 and older who died within one year of being diagnosed with lung, breast, colorectal, and other gastrointestinal tumors between 1993…
In a study published in the December 2003 issue of Cell, investigators from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute demonstrated that a new technique has helped them to identify a class of existing…
More than 185,000 women from the Brigham and Women’s-based Nurses’ Health Study and Nurses’ Health Study II, who were free of multiple sclerosis (MS), were selected for a research study.…
Rats given kalitoxin, from scorpion venom, enjoyed 84 percent less jawbone loss than those that didn’t get the injections. “We are very excited because this is the first demonstration that…
Testing the hypothesis that rates of use of 12 high-cost procedures would be lower in for-profit health plans than in not-for-profit plans, researchers analyzed Medicare HEDIS (Health Plan Employer Data…
A study published in the Jan. 1, 2004 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry had a surprising start. As Michael Rohan, imaging physicist in McLean Hospital’s Brain Imaging Center,…
As readers of introductory psychology texts know, animals easily learn to fear a harmless stimulus, such as a tone, if that stimulus is paired with a painful one, such as…
More than 125,000 study participants who were free of diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease at the start of a study were selected from the on-going Health Professionals Follow-up Study and…
Findings by a research team could eventually lead to the development of a protease inhibitor drug, which in combination with antibiotics could be used to treat anthrax cases later in…
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highly recommends the flu vaccine for certain high-risk groups including people with chronic illnesses, children between the ages of six and 23 months,…
Scientists injected laboratory-created sperm into eggs, and the resulting embryos grew to the point where they would normally be implanted into a womb. The experiment was done with mouse stem…
Combination drug therapy – also called highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) – made a huge difference in the treatment of HIV infection during the 1990s, changing HIV/AIDS into an illness…
Featured series 
