Posts in category: Uncategorized

Three years ago, the world stood on the precipice of a pandemic.

Racial minorities in the United States are less likely to receive treatment for prostate cancer and, overall, have worse survival outcomes compared to individuals who are white. Typically, patient-level and physician-level factors have been used to explain the racial and socioeconomic differences in prostate cancer disparities. However, a new study led by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, investigated the role of facilities themselves in relation to these disparities. Their results are published in Urologic Oncology: Seminars and Original Investigations.

Child and adolescent mortality rates in the United States rose by 20% between 2019 and 2021, the largest increase in at least 50 years, according to an editorial published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. These increases follow decades of progress in lowering the rate of death from childhood diseases. The alarming spike in pediatric mortality is primarily due to deaths from homicide, accidental drug overdoses, motor vehicle accidents and suicide among those ages 10 to 19.

In 1956, Alma Merrick Helms announced that she was bound for Stanford University. But she would not be attending classes. Upon learning that there was a “special shortage of women’s bodies” for medical students, this semiretired actress had filled out forms to donate her corpse to the medical college upon her death.

A recent series of three papers authored by Caitlin Lombardi demonstrate the effects of publicly funded health insurance for parents on three different metrics of children’s health and development. The newest, published in Southern Economic Journal, highlights a significant boost to children’s reading scores when their parents gain healthcare coverage.

Researchers from Lund University in Sweden have discovered higher levels of immune proteins in the blood before and after an epileptic seizure. The possible biomarkers can be identified using a simple blood test. Diagnosing epilepsy is currently resource intensive, and distinguishing it from other conditions can be challenging. Better diagnostic methods as soon as the patient seeks medical care after a suspected seizure are therefore an urgent necessity.

A promising therapy for a range of brain diseases involves antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs)—specialized molecules that can modulate RNA and alter protein production—directly injected into the cerebrospinal fluid, in the space around the brain and spinal cord. Unfortunately, when ASOs are injected like this, they often cause severe side effects.

Researchers have identified two previously unknown genes linked to schizophrenia and newly implicated a third gene as carrying risk for both schizophrenia and autism. Led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the multi-center study further demonstrated that the schizophrenia risk conferred by these rare damaging variants is conserved across ethnicities. The study may also point to new therapeutics.

Scientists have discovered why breast cancer cells that have spread to the lungs may “wake up” following years of sleep, forming incurable secondary tumors.

People subjected to mentally demanding tasks are likely to find it harder to go on to perform physical exercise, a new study shows.