Harvard researchers reported that four out of every five children hospitalized in the U.S. are treated with drugs that have never been tested in children and are FDA-approved only for adults. Florence Bourgeois, HMS assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston, is the author of the study.
Researchers are taking middle-age memory lapses more seriously. The good news is that they have found that memory often bounces back in post-menopausal women. Karen J. Carlson, HMS associate professor of medicine; Hadine Joffe, HMS associate professor of psychiatry; and Anne Louise Oaklander, HMS associate professor of neurology, all at Massachusetts General Hospital, are quoted.
A recent essay on the plight of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) trainees and physicians was written by Mark Schuster, the William Berenberg Professor of Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston, and describes his view of the plight of LGBT and other minority medical students when he was a student. He acknowledges that the medical landscape has largely changed, though he says minorities still don’t generally feel comfortable in medicine.
David Sachs, the Paul S. Russell/Warner Lambert Professor of Surgery and A. Benedict Cosimi, the Claude E. Welch Distinguished Professor of Surgery, both of Massachusetts General Hospital, will receive this year’s Thomas E. Starzl Prize in Surgery and Immunology, which honors the surgery pioneer who turned UPMC into a world-renowned transplant center.
A parent’s depression can be linked to all kinds of problems, even in the lives of older children, according to experts. William Beardslee, the George P. Gardner and Olga E. Monks Professor of Child Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at Children’s Hospital Boston, is quoted.
Cuba now has one of the world’s smallest AIDS epidemics, a mere 14,038 cases. Its infection rate is 0.1 percent, on par with Finland, Singapore and Kazakhstan. That is one-sixth the rate of the United States, one-twentieth of nearby Haiti. Arachu Castro, HMS associate professor of global health and social medicine, is quoted.
Harvard scientists gave white fat, which stores energy, the calorie-burning properties of brown fat, which keeps hibernating bears warm in the winter, in a development that may lead to new therapies for obesity. Jorge Plutzky, HMS associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is the author of the study.
On Friday, the Massachusetts House unveiled new legislation to control rising health care costs. A statement made in 2009 by Jeffrey Flier, dean of the faculty of medicine at HMS, is included in the article.
Ryan Christ, a Harvard pre-med student, is profiled as the founder of the Harvard Alzheimer’s Buddies program, a collaboration with Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Boston that pairs residents with Alzheimer’s and Harvard student volunteers.
