The National Institutes of Health announced it will expand its efforts to solve medical mysteries by creating a network of six centers, including one in Boston, that will each receive $7.2 million over the next four years. The new Harvard Center for Integrated Approaches to Undiagnosed Diseases will combine the resources of Brigham and Women’s, Massachusetts General, and Boston Children’s hospitals. A coordinating center at HMS will help route patients to centers across the country and facilitate the sharing of data among the programs. Joseph Loscalzo, the Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic and chair of the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is quoted.
Anne Becker has been studying eating disorders for nearly three decades, but it was from her twin 13-year-old daughters that she learned the term “thigh gap.” Her daughters got their Seventeen magazine and pulled up Web site images to show Becker, a psychiatrist and eating disorders specialist at Harvard Medical School, what a thigh gap looks like. “They said kids at school talk about it offhandedly like, ‘Well, you have a thigh gap, so you can have the extra ice cream,’ ” Becker says.
A study published on Thursday found that chronic exposure to ultraviolet radiation triggers the release of endorphins - the so-called feel-good hormones - that function through the same biological pathway as highly addictive opiate drugs such as heroin and morphine. David Fisher, the Edward Wigglesworth Professor of Dermatology and chair of the Department of Dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, led the study.
New research shows it’s possible to pick up some of the signs of dyslexia in the brain even before kids learn to read. And this earlier identification may start to substantially influence how parents, educators and clinicians tackle the disorder. Nadine Gaab, assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, is one of the researchers.
