By Chelsea Conaboy, Globe Staff

Kennedy's One Mind for Research: Globe reporter Bella English tells the story of Patrick Kennedy's new passion: raising money for brain research. Kennedy co-founded One Mind for Research, with the goal of raising $1.5 billion in private philanthropy and federal funding over 10 years to support study of the brain and convene scientists and policymakers. Kennedy said he has had a long interest in his family's DNA and history of neurological disorders, and he plans to make supporting brain research his life's work.

By Chelsea Conaboy, Globe Staff

There are lots of reasons why people don't get recommended preventive care. They are too busy to make the appointments or not aware of what's needed or what's available -- often with no out-of-pocket costs.

For others, the obstacles are more complicated. They have trouble understanding doctors' instructions because of a language barrier, for example, or a long-standing distrust of doctors keeps them away from the exam room.

A new study led by Dr. Karen Lasser of Boston Medical Center and other Boston-area researchers found that health coaches can overcome some of those obstacles.

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine are part of an international collaboration, announced today, to discover and map all of the genes linked to Alzheimer's disease in an effort to improve treatments.

The collaboration, which includes groups of scientists from the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, will study detailed files from 40,000 patients, half of whom have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and the rest healthy older adults. The patients come from across Europe, the UK, the United States, and Canada.

While each group of scientists is currently working with thousands of participants – including people with Alzheimer’s and those free of dementia – scientists in the four groups said that only by working together can they amass a large enough collection of participants to accelerate gene discovery. The collaboration creates a shared resource database that includes genetic data for the more than 40,000 individuals.

A primary goal, the scientists said, is to understand how people may inherit Alzheimer's and whether other factors may play a role.

"We are particularly interested in understanding the relationship between genes we uncover ... and environmental risk factors," one of the local lead researchers, Dr. Sudha Seshadri, of Boston University School of Medicine, said in a statement released by the school.

The group expects to present its first findings at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease in Paris in July.

Other Boston University researchers involved in the collaboration include Lindsay Farrer, Anita DeStefano, and Drs. Philip Wolf and Stephanie Debette.

The project is being funded by the Alzheimer's Association and the Fondation Plan Alzheimer of France, and includes a two-year, $250,000 grant from the Alzheimer's Association.

A Suffolk Superior Court judge has dismissed Boston Medical Center's lawsuit against the state, which accused officials of illegally cutting payments made to the hospital for treating thousands of poor patients.

In an opinion made public today, Justice Judith Fabricant ruled that neither the state nor federal law authorizes the courts to review the payment rates set by the state's secretary of health and human services, Dr. JudyAnn Bigby.

In its suit, filed last year, Boston Medical said the state financed its landmark health insurance law on the backs of poor residents by cutting money to the hospital that cares for many of them to pay for expanded coverage.

In her ruling, Fabricant said she does not "discount the seriousness" of Boston Medical's financial problems, but said that federal Medicaid laws do not guarantee the "economic well-being of any particular provider."

Bigby's office released a statement this afternoon saying the secretary is pleased that the suit was dismissed.

"We recognize the important role that these hospitals play in our health care system and look forward to continuing to work with them to ensure continued access and quality care for MassHealth members," the statement said.

Boston Medical Center also released a statement saying that its officials are still reviewing the court's ruling.

"We are pleased that the court recognized Boston Medical Center’s mission to serve all without regard for ability to pay," it said. "As we have stated from the beginning, this lawsuit was not the preferred avenue to resolve the long-term issues of how Boston Medical Center is paid for the cost of the care we provide to our patients. We continue to work cooperatively with the administration and know they share our commitment to Boston Medical Center's mission and patients."

By Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein, ProPublica

As medical schools wrestle with how to keep drug companies from corrupting their faculties, Stanford University is often lauded for its tough stance.

The school was one of the first to stop sales representatives from roaming its halls in 2006. It cut off the flow of free lunches and trinkets emblazoned with drug names. And last year, in a blow to its physicians' wallets, Stanford banned them from giving paid promotional talks for pharmaceutical companies.

By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff

Boston Medical Center has designated private space in its emergency room where bereaved families of homicide victims can grieve with the bodies of their loved ones away from the chaos of a trauma center.

The recent move is one of several concrete steps the hospital has taken in the past few months to provide better support to the families of murder victims. The changes at the hospital, which sees about half of Boston's homicides each year, will be described in detail Tuesday at a Boston City Council hearing examining the social services available for victims of violence.

"At a hospital we see lots of people who die, unfortunately," said Lisa Allee, a clinical social worker at BMC who will testify today before the council. "But a family who has lost someone to homicide has different needs than someone who died in a car accident."

A generation ago, babies born with AIDS weren't expected to survive. But in significant numbers, children born in the 1990s did live. Now they have grown up, but the struggle has left scars, a New York Times story says, from losing parents to suffering side effects from the drugs that keep them alive.

As they turn 18, many lose the safety net of programs that has sustained them. Others rebel after a lifetime of drug regimens, the story says.

“It ain’t over yet,” Dr. Ellen Cooper, medical director of pediatric and adolescent HIV at Boston Medical Center, told the Times about keeping these young people alive and healthy. Although she has not lost a patient in five years, she says, “I’m expecting a second wave” of these young people “dying because they’re not adherent” to medication, or because of “complications from treatment.”

Read their stories here.

Women who are poor, uninsured, and belong to a minority group are less likely to get regular mammograms and more likely to die of breast cancer than their insured, white, and wealthier counterparts. New research from Boston Medical Center shows that screening mammogram rates can be improved among inner-city women if patient navigators help them overcome barriers to getting tested for early signs of breast cancer.

Dr. Karen Freund and her colleagues examined the use of patient navigators -- people who help patients find recommended care -- at three internal medicine practices serving mostly poor, minority women at Boston Medical Center. The 3,085 patients, who were from 51 to 70 years old and had not had a mammogram in at least 18 months, were divided into two groups at each practice.

One group got the usual care: Their doctors referred them for screening mammograms every other year, in line with recommendations for this age group. Women in the other group were contacted by patient navigators, who called them or sent them letters reminding them of their mammogram appointments. The navigators also asked why the women might not be able to keep their appointments and followed up if they didn’t. The navigators helped with transportation and interpretation services.

Before the study began, 75 percent of all the women got mammograms every other year. That’s below the 80 percent standard that national quality groups use to determine whether doctors are doing their part to encourage screening. In the Boston study, Hispanic women, who made up 11 percent of participants, were above that average, with mammogram rates of 85 percent. Freund, who is chief of the women’s health unit at Boston Medical Center, suspects that medical interpreters who work with Spanish-speaking women function like patient navigators, given their knowledge of the medical system.

After the nine-month study, mammogram rates rose to 87 percent among the women who worked with patient navigators. That compares to 76 percent among women in the comparison group.

“This to us is really exciting,” Freund said in an interview. “In a safety-net institution like ours, we can meet the standard, even given the extra barriers our patients face. I think this can serve as a model for lots of things we need to do, for other cancer screening care, diabetes care, heart disease prevention.”

The study, which appears online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, and the patient navigators’ work were funded by a grant from the Avon Foundation Safety Net Grant. Safety-net hospitals care for a disproportionate share of patients who are poor, uninsured, or from racial or ethnic minority groups.

No, no, and no, Dr. Timothy Naimi says.

Nobody recommends women drink alcohol while pregnant. There is no safe amount of alcohol a pregnant woman can drink, given ample evidence that alcohol kills brain cells in the developing fetus. And no one should change their thinking based on a British study that found no increased risk for social or cognitive problems among five-year-olds whose mothers had one or two drinks a week while pregnant.

“The results are highly implausible,” said Naimi, a Boston Medical Center physician and alcohol epidemiologist. “Alcohol is the leading fetal neurotoxin in the world. One would be challenged to come up with an explanation of why [the study results] would be biologically true.”

The British researchers report in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health on more than 11,500 children enrolled in a national study. Their mothers were asked about their drinking habits during pregnancy and the children's vocabulary and other cognitive abilities were tested at home by researchers. Children born to light drinkers scored better than children whose mothers stopped drinking during pregnancy. But there was something else about the light drinkers that was also important, the authors and Naimi said.

Light drinkers had family income that was twice as high as those who gave up alcohol while pregnant. They were more than twice as likely to be highly educated and almost twice as likely to work as a manager or professional as the non-drinkers during pregnancy. Teetotalers and heavy drinkers were not included in the comparison that the authors used. When the authors took the light drinkers' social circumstances into account, the differences between the children diminished.

“This study is hopelessly confounded by socioeconomic factors in that, as most people would be aware, people with high socioeconomic status generally have kids with much lower rates of behavioral and learning problems. And yet these are the same women who may consume very small amounts of alcohol in pregnancy,” Naimi said.

Dr. Kevin Pho isn't mincing words. The Nashua internist and blogger known as Kevin, MD headlines his entry "Boston Medical Center gets screwed by the Massachusetts government."

Linking to a piece in Boston magazine written by former Globe columnist Eileen McNamara, he says the hospital is in a no-win situation as it faces climbing losses and falling Medicaid reimbursement rates. The most recent Globe story is here.

"Boston Medical Center is where I got my start out of medical school, and has played a defining role in making me the doctor I am today. Its impending financial insolvency is heartbreaking, and is a situation that will echo across the country as Massachusetts-style reforms take hold nationally," he writes. "Universal coverage makes great headlines, helps get politicians elected, and, to be fair, is something that needed happen. But doing so without adequately addressing its cost is going to bankrupt hospitals, especially inner-city ones like BMC. That will hurt the Medicaid and Medicare patients dependent on them."