Justina Pelletier, a teenager caught in the middle of a high-profile medical dispute and child custody battle, is expected to be discharged from Boston Children’s Hospital to a residential facility in the next few weeks, after a juvenile court judge moved on Friday to end a stalemate that has kept the girl at the hospital for almost a year.
According to new research, when patients in the midst of a migraine attack took a dummy pill they thought was a widely used migraine drug, it reduced their pain roughly as much as when they took the real drug thinking it was a placebo. Ted Kaptchuk, professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is the author of the study.
A never-before-used combination of lethal injection drugs could cause a condemned Ohio man to experience “the terror of air hunger” for five minutes, an anesthesiologist argued in federal court Friday. David Waisel, associate professor of anaesthesia at Boston Children’s Hospital, provided testimony in the case.
Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, and MIT have developed a new type of elastic glue that cures after being exposed to light for 5 seconds. Jeffrey Karp, associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Robert S. Langer, senior lecturer on surgery at HMS, invented the glue and recently published a paper with Pedro del Nido, the William E. Ladd Professor of Child Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital, about the technology.
Rafael Campo, associate professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a poet, is profiled as part of the PBS NewsHour series, “Where Poetry Lives.” HMS student Samyukta Mullangi was also featured in the segment.
Frontotemporal dementia, unlike Alzheimer’s, often hits people in the prime of their lives, and can make them act like a completely different person. A study by Brad Dickerson, associate professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, is cited.
It seems mysterious to most of us, but neurologists say there are decades of documented cases of people with Gabby Giffords’ type of brain damage, who struggle to speak words but can easily sing them. David Caplan, professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Gottfried Schlaug, associate professor of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, are quoted.
A new study shows that levels of the molecule BAIBA – short for beta-aminoisobutyric acid – increase during exercise, and this particular molecule increases the expression of calorie-burning genes in fat cells. Robert Gerszten, professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, led the study.
