First report in a decade quantifies healthcare for U.S. children
Asthma, injuries and mental health problems are the leading causes of hospitalization of children over 5 years old, according to a report prepared by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health...
View ArticleMental health care doesn’t meet standards, study finds
Less than 15 percent of patients treated for three common mental illnesses received adequate care, according to a Harvard Medical School study. A key factor to obtaining acceptable mental health care...
View ArticleSimple screening test could detect cancer lesions in gay men
A Harvard study predicts that the use of a simple and inexpensive procedure, comparable to a Pap smear, would lead to detection of pre-cancerous lesions among high-risk, HIV-negative men and allow for...
View ArticleSharp declines in heart disease in women
During the course of a 14-year study, female participants’ consumption of red meat dropped by nearly 40 percent, intake of trans fats dropped by more than 30 percent, and use of high-fat dairy products...
View ArticleAccurately measuring socioeconomic differences, health disparities
For more than two years, Nancy Krieger and her colleagues have worked with approximately 1 million records from databases of the Massachusetts and Rhode Island Departments of Public Health as well as...
View ArticleUsing statistics to understand genes
Professor Jun Liu studies repetitive patterns in the DNA that lies between genes. This material contains instructions for regulating the expression of genes, and it is involved in whether the proteins...
View ArticleStudy confirms that students in “substance-free” dorms drink less
Residents of college housing where alcohol and smoking were banned were less likely to be victims of actions by students who were drinking. Findings from the Harvard School of Public Health College...
View ArticleDetermining colon cancer risk is becoming easier
More than 50 percent of colon cancers can be prevented through lifestyle changes and regular screening tests. The lifestyle changes are the same ones that reduce your risk of heart disease and other...
View ArticleSimulating disease trends with massive mathematical models
Researcher Karen Kuntz is currently developing a model to evaluate trends in colorectal cancer incidence and mortality. Nearly 50,000 Americans die each year from the disease, despite the fact that...
View ArticleTesting to identify drug-resistant AIDS strains is cost-effective
A new study led by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in March 2001, finds that testing people with HIV to determine whether they have a drug-resistant...
View ArticleStudy shows obesity can increase risk of pancreatic cancer
Each year almost 30,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. About the same number of people are killed by it. Pancreatic cancer is the fifth-leading cause of...
View ArticleBiostatisticians crunch data vital to AIDS research, genetics
Broadly defined, statistical genetics is the development of methods to analyze DNA. In recent years, the term has been more specifically applied to gene mapping, or the search for locations of genes...
View ArticleStatistical work helps calm worries about anti-AIDS drugs and pregnancy
For years, physicians have prescribed antiretroviral therapies for HIV-positive, pregnant women to reduce the risk of babies being born with the AIDS virus. About 6,000 HIV-infected women give birth...
View ArticleStudies find milk consumption, use of HRT, and pregnancy may influence...
IGF-1 is a hormone important to the growth and function of many organs. Higher levels of IGF-1 have been associated independently with an increased risk of a number of cancers, including prostate,...
View ArticleStudy predicts risk of prostate cancer death
Researchers followed 381 people to “identify predictors of time to prostate specific death following external radiation therapy.” “The results of this study give us a better understanding of what form...
View ArticleStudy finds frequent consumption of alcohol linked to lower risk of heart...
Men who drank moderate amounts of alcoholic beverages three or more times a week had a risk of myocardial infarction 30 to 35 percent lower than nondrinkers. The observational study, which tracked the...
View ArticleSmoking increases bleeding into the brain, study finds
A research team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) found that stroke risk for women increased proportionately with the number of cigarettes smoked each day. In contrast, women who stopped smoking...
View ArticleStudies find benefit in stop-smoking programs targeted for working-class groups
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...
View ArticleStudy finds heavy drinking linked to higher stroke risk
A study found that while light and moderate drinkers appear to be at neither greater risk nor greater advantage than abstainers when it comes to ischemic stroke, the frequency of their alcohol...
View ArticleWeight and weight gain may predict breast cancer survival
The study included 5,204 women with invasive breast cancer who were between the ages 30 to 55 when enrolled in the study in 1976. The researchers found that women who weighed more before they were...
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