White coat notes

Excerpts from the Globe's blog on the Boston-area medical community.

In a new report from the American Medical Student Association, Harvard Medical School got an F for its inconsistent efforts to avoid conflicts of interest in the form of industry gifts, free samples, speakers fees, or payments to doctors, residents, and students. The school was dinged because each Harvard-affiliated hospital has its own policy, and the university is conducting a university-wide review of all of its conflict-of-interest policies. Tufts University School of Medicine earned an I for Incomplete. Its standards are still a work in progress.

Even Boston University School of Medicine, which has strict policies forbidding freebies, mustered only a B on the list. It could do better by adding a class on conflicts of interest, the students said.

The University of Massachusetts Medical School earned an A courtesy of a late-breaking reassessment that took into account changes in its disclosure and consulting relationship policies since the student group's November survey.

Out of 150 medical schools studied, 8 received A's and 60 flunked.

Risk factors for developing eating disorders are different for girls and boys, and a mother's history may affect girls differently depending how old they are, a Boston study of 12,000 teenagers reports.

Alison E. Field of Children's Hospital Boston and her colleagues report in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine that after seven years, 10 percent of the girls and 3 percent of the boys said they were binge eating - overeating and feeling out of control - or purging - vomiting or using laxatives to keep from gaining weight - at least once a week. For girls, purging was more common than binge eating. For boys, the opposite was true. Few did both, the study said.

There were two surprises: A mother's history of an eating disorder was tied to binge eating or purging in girls under 14 but not over that age. And binge eating and purging were not as tightly linked as previously thought in girls, which means a diagnosis of bulimia that requires both behaviors may miss some teens who need help, the authors said.

ELIZABETH COONEY