Excerpts from the Globe's blog on the Boston-area medical community.
A peer reviewer for the Waltham-based New England Journal of Medicine leaked a negative article about a diabetes drug to its manufacturer more that two weeks before the study appeared, another major scientific journal reported last week. Dr. Steven Haffner of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio faxed his copy of a report on Avandia to drug maker
"Why I sent it is a mystery," Haffner told Nature. "I don't really understand it. I wasn't feeling well. It was bad judgment."
Nature's own embargo on the story was broken when US Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, made public a letter demanding answers from GlaxoSmithKline on the leak.
Abdominal aortic aneurysms can be patched before they rupture with fabric-covered metal stents threaded through arteries - a procedure called endoscopy - or they can be repaired during an operation that cuts through the abdominal wall. Randomized trials in Europe have shown that older people survived the less invasive surgery better than open operations, but the rate of repeat procedures needed to shore up the repair was higher in the endoscopic group.
"This shows for the older age group, there's no question they should have the endoscopic stent," said Dr. Marc L. Schermerhorn of Harvard Medical School, an author of the New England Journal of Medicine article.
Fenway Community Health has won a $1.75 million challenge grant from the Kresge Foundation to help it build a new health and research center. Fenway, which specializes in the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, must raise $6 million toward its goal of $18 million by July 2009 to receive the Kresge grant, which would be the largest in the health center's history.
Northeastern University professor Mansoor Amiji has been awarded a four-year, $1.34 million grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to study a potential treatment for inflammatory bowel disease.
ELIZABETH COONEY
