A recent study found that the Family Van, an urban mobile health clinic run by HMS that travels to some of the city’s poorest, medically underserved communities, also saves money by preventing ER visits.
Alexander Leaf, the Jackson Professor of Clinical Medicine, Emeritus, who led the preventive medicine department at Harvard Medical School after stepping down as chief of medicine at MGH, died of pneumonia Dec. 24 at the age of 92.
According to a new study, when people outside of hospitals go into cardiac arrest, their brains are better preserved one month out if emergency medical responders use an older, lower-tech method called bag-valve-mask ventilation in conjunction with CPR to preserve the supply of air to the lungs than if they try to manage the situation more aggressively. Kohei Hasegawa, HMS instructor in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, is one of the authors.
Chicago residents have a new way of curing a hangover or flu: getting an IV. John Kelly, HMS associate professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, is quoted.
New research reports that 15 of 54 student athletes who seemed to have bounced back from a concussion saw a decline in memory skills after they exercised moderately — suggesting that their brains had not yet healed. Doing too much too early could delay recovery, concussion specialists say — draining needed energy away from healing. William P. Meehan, HMS assistant professor of pediatrics and Alex McLean Taylor, HMS instructor in psychology in the Department of Psychiatry, both of Boston Children’s Hospital, are quoted.
Long-awaited federal funding has been approved for a first-of-its-kind, Boston-led study to test whether drugs can hold off Alzheimer’s disease in people who have no symptoms of the illness, but who have an abnormal protein in their brains believed to be a hallmark of the disease. Reisa Sperling, HMS professor of neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, will lead the clinical trial.
Overdoses of drugs, particularly prescription pain-killers and heroin, have overtaken AIDS to become the leading cause of death of homeless adults, according to a study of homeless residents of Boston. Travis Baggett, HMS instructor in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, is the lead author of the study.
More than 12,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with cervical cancer this year. Hundreds more may go undiagnosed because of the widespread use of a screening test that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved for detecting the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes nearly all cervical cancers. David Wilbur, HMS professor of pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital, is quoted.
