Hospitalizations for children diagnosed with obesity almost doubled between 1999 and 2005, a new national study reports. Costs have almost doubled too, even though federal figures measuring the prevalence of childhood obesity appeared stable over the same period of time.

A research team led by Dr. Leonardo Trasande of Mount Sinai School of Medicine tracked the increase in hospitalizations of children and adolescents from 2 to 19 years old by analyzing records from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, the largest database for US hospitalizations. The researchers included obesity as a primary diagnosis as well as obesity when it was secondary to another medical condition, such as asthma, diabetes, or a mental illness.

Hospital stays for these children climbed from 21,743 in 1999 to 42,429 in 2005 while costs in constant dollars rose from $126 million to $238 million. The most common conditions the children had along with obesity were psychiatric disorders, pregnancy-related conditions, asthma, and diabetes. The increase in obesity diagnoses could not be explained by increases in the other conditions, which decreased or stayed the same, except for diabetes.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The controversial Boston University research laboratory built to study the world's deadliest germs will open its doors to scientists in a few months for training exercises, the university announced this afternoon.

When the researchers enter the South End facility late in the summer or early in the fall, they will not use any bacteria or viruses. Instead, university officials said, the exercises are being conducted to "test safety, health, and operational procedures." Later, emergency response teams -- including police officers and firefighters -- will engage in emergency response drills. The exercises are expected to last six to eight months.

The drills represent another milestone in BU's six-year-long quest to open its National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, which has encountered sustained opposition from neighborhood activists in the South End and Roxbury. Lab opponents sued in state and federal court to halt the facility, and while judges allowed construction to continue, they ordered further environmental reviews.

The four medical schools in Massachusetts earned passing grades for their conflict-of-interest policies in a new report card issued by a medical student's organization, including a jump from F to B for Harvard and a change from I to D for Tufts.

The American Medical Student Association's PharmFree Scorecard gave Bs to Boston University School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School for their guidelines governing interactions between pharmaceutical companies and medical students and faculty members. Tufts University School of Medicine got a D. Last year's grade was and I for "in process" while the school was working on its policy.

Dr. Anthony A. Gianelly, who was a leader at Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine for more than three decades, died of a heart attack May 28, BU said today. He was 72.

Gianelly was chair of the Department of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics at BU from 1968 to 2003 and had returned as interim chair in 2007. He won teaching awards as well as recognition for his research over his 40-year career. His three books include one in Italian, reflecting frequent lectures in Italy that spurred him to learn the language, BU said.

A native of Boston, Gianelly graduated from Harvard College in 1957, where he played on the football, track, and rugby teams. He earned a doctor of dental medicine degree from Harvard, studied orthodontics at the Harvard/Forsyth Dental Center, and joined the BU dental faculty in 1967. He received his MD from Boston University School of Medicine in 1974.

A memorial service will be held at 10:30 June 26 at BU's dental school, 670 Albany St.

The video is short, simple, and powerful.

A woman with advanced dementia -- wearing lipstick, beads and a white shawl -- stares blankly at the camera while her daughters ask her questions. A man's voice describes what she and others at this stage cannot do: communicate, walk or sit alone, feed themselves. She does not respond when her daughter asks her how many daughters she has, and she needs help to keep her spoonfuls of pureed food in her mouth.

Less than two minutes long, the video was shown to almost 100 elderly people taking part in a study comparing the effects of watching the narrated video of advanced dementia with listening to the verbal narration alone. Just over 100 other participants heard the narration. Both groups were then asked to choose what kind of end-of-life care they would want if they were in the same irreversible condition.

People who viewed the video were more likely to choose comfort care over life-extending measures than people who heard a verbal description alone, Dr. Angelo Volandes of Massachusetts General Hospital and his colleagues report in the British Medical Journal. Those who saw the video were also more knowledgeable about the disease, and more of them remained firm in their choice of end-of-life care six weeks after seeing the video.

"Most of our patients do not have experience with advanced stages of disease nor with the interventions such as CPR," Volandes said in an interview. "Video may be one way of better informing patients about decisions at the end of life. Video makes these conversations quite real."

Perceptions of racism -- from being treated with suspicion in a store to unfairness in employment or housing -- can heighten stress levels and affect health, research has shown. A new study from Boston University links these smoldering signs of racism to weight gain in black women, suggesting a possible explanation for the their higher obesity rates compared to white women.

Yvette Cozier, an epidemiologist at the Slone Epidemiology Center at BU, led a survey of more than 43,000 women enrolled in the long-running Black Women's Health Study. Writing in the June issue of Annals of Epidemiology, she and her co-authors describe participants' reports on their weight, body mass index, and perceptions of racism.

At the beginning of the eight-year study, the women were asked if they sometimes felt they were treated poorly in a restaurant or store, whether they thought people considered them dishonest or less intelligent, and if they had felt unfairness on the job, in housing, or from police. The women, 21 to 69 years old at the study's outset, were placed in four groups based on how frequently they said they experienced these signs of racism. Their weight was recorded every two years from 1997 through 2005. Their waist circumference was measured at the beginning and end.

At the end of the trial, all the women had gained weight. But the women who said they felt higher levels of racism gained more weight and had bigger waist-size increases compared to the women who felt the least racism. That held true after accounting for factors such as education, geographic region, and beginning body mass index.

"Racism is real and it has real effects," Cozier said in an interview. "It can result in real changes in the body."

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

Boston health authorities tonight closed the Harvard dental school's treatment clinic and the university temporarily shut the dental school as a precaution after a third-year student developed "a probable case" of swine flu, city and state health officials announced at a hurriedly called news conference.

Disease investigators from the Boston Public Health Commission are reviewing whether the student treated patients at the Longwood Avenue clinic, and tracking down any students and faculty members who might have had contact with him. The clinic treats about 50 patients a day, and the dental school has more than 200 students, faculty and other staff members.

The commission said it closed the Harvard Dental Center until the extent of the illness could be determined. The officials said they had also requested cancellation of classes for third- and fourth-year, and post-doctoral students and urged those students, and their teachers and staff to stay at home for now.

"We are all concerned, but there's no need for panic," said Dr. David Rosenthal, director of Harvard University Health Services.

Harvard Medical School is the top research medical school in the United States, according to annual rankings compiled by US News & World Report.

Boston University School of Medicine ranked 35th, Tufts University School of Medicine placed 45th, and University of Massachusetts Medical School came in 48th out of 126 US medical schools and 20 schools of osteopathic medicine.

In primary care, UMass ranked 7th, Harvard was 15th, and Tufts 40th. BU was among those not ranked in primary care.

A Boston radiologist studying how well a faster form of ultrasound can detect breast cancer is training the same tool on marathon runners and their tendons.

Dr. Alda Cossi, director of ultrasound in the radiology department at Boston Medical Center, hopes to improve the way both cancer and sports injuries are treated by getting a better picture of them before they get worse.

Typical ultrasound machines, like the ones in an obstetrician's office, send out sound waves, like ripples in a pond. When they meet tissue they compress it slightly, but too fast for the movement to be recorded. A newer kind of ultrasound technology called shear wave elastography borrows software from video games that captures images 10 times as fast, at 3,000 frames per second. That reveals the vibration of the sound waves on the tissue and allows radiologists to measure how stiff the tissue is.

That's important in cancer diagnosis because malignant tissue tends to be harder. That quality is also relevant in for athletes, who know the pain of muscle or tendon stiffness. Or the agony when they rupture, often without warning.

"We're pretty poor at looking at tendons," Cossi said. "You can do an MRI, but all you can tell is is, does a tendon have a hole or a tear? You're not really looking at the behavior of the tendon."

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The opening of a high-security laboratory in Boston's South End where scientists would work with the world's deadliest germs is being delayed once again -- until late next year at the earliest.

The federal health agency that is underwriting construction of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories on Boston University's medical school campus told a federal judge today that its latest safety review will take at least a year longer than originally projected.

The National Institutes of Health now estimates that it will not be able to submit the safety analysis to US District Court Judge Patti B. Saris until spring or summer 2010. Saris, overseeing a lawsuit filed by South End and Roxbury residents who want to block the project from opening, then will spend several months more evaluating the findings. If she gives the lab the green light, preparations for opening would still take additional time.

For now, the $192 million building sits complete but vacant on Albany Street. The centerpiece of the project -- which was originally expected to begin welcoming scientists in late 2007 or early 2008 -- is a Biosafety Level-4 lab designed to let researchers hunt for vaccines and drugs targeted at the highly lethal germs that cause diseases such as Ebola, Marburg, and plague.

If medical journals were a monarchy, this would be a royal wedding.

Two former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine are tying the knot this morning, formalizing a longtime relationship.

Dr. Marcia Angell and Dr. Arnold Relman, who have each held the top spot at the prestigious publication, are getting married today at Cambridge City Hall, Angell said this morning, taking a break from playing Tinker Toys with her grandson.

The two doctors met when Angell was a medical student at Boston University and Relman was on the faculty some 40 years ago, but they did not become romantically involved until 15 years ago, she said.

So why get married now?

"We thought we knew each other well enough," Angell said with a soft chuckle. "It just seemed the thing to do."

Angell's brother, two daughters, grandson, and Relman's daughter and one of his two sons will attend the ceremony.

Angell, 69, is a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School. Relman, 85, is an emeritus professor of medicine and social medicine at Harvard.

They were colleagues at the New England Journal and continue to write together, especially about conflicts of interest in medicine.

"I read everything he writes and he reads everything I write," she said. "It's a working relationship in both senses."

Asthma is the most common chronic disease in children, but it hits poor children especially hard. One-third of children who live in urban public housing have an allergic form of asthma, a story posted today by The New York Times says, which spurred a researcher now working in Boston to find out why.

Dr. Daniel G. Remick, a professor of pathology at the Boston University School of Medicine, vacuumed house dust, reduced it to an extract that could be injected into mice, and tested the primed rodents. When exposed to proteins found in cockroach exoskeletons and droppings, the mice had rodent versions of asthma attacks.

"For inner-city children, the major cause of asthma is not dust mites, not dog dander, not outdoor air pollen. It’s allergies to cockroaches," Remick told the Times. "We're pretty excited because this is the first time someone has actually taken stuff from houses where kids have asthma.”

Fourth-year medical students chose primary care today in somewhat larger numbers than in recent years on the day future MDs across the country learned where they will spend the next phase of their medical training.

In Massachusetts, the percentage of students who picked primary care -- which includes family practice and pediatrics -- stayed about the same or grew at Boston University School of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine, and University of Massachusetts Medical School. At Harvard Medical School the percentage dipped slightly, part of an up-and-down pattern over the past 10 years.

Here are the primary care numbers for this year (and last):

BU: 26 percent of 105 students (17 percent last year)
Harvard: 10 percent of 165 students (12 percent last year)
Tufts: 18 percent percent of 104 students (17 percent last year)
UMass: 39 percent of 100 students (35 percent last year)

Some students who were matched to internal medicine residencies may later enter primary care, so there may be more primary care doctors in the pipeline than it would appear.

Primary care has been losing ground for many years to more lucrative specialties, including dermatology and surgery. As shortages of primary care doctors have deepened, physicians have faulted a healthcare system that pays more for procedures than for care that primary care doctors provide.

At Harvard, 8 percent of fourth-year students picked dermatology, up from 3 percent last year but the same as in 2003. That puts dermatology ahead of the 7 percent of students entering residencies in pediatrics this year, but the opposite was true for the last nine years. Pediatrics and internal medicine have been the top two choices since 2000.

"My students keep picking what are claimed to be the lowest-paid specialties: internal medicine and pediatrics," said Dr. Nancy Oriol, dean of students at Harvard Medical School. "I have a hard time seeing anything having an impact on their choices."

Students applied to programs in July, before the current economic downturn that began last fall. But the money owed for student loans has been a concern for the last several years, said Dr. Amy Kuhlik, dean of student affairs Tufts.

"We know debt level impacts student choices," she said, citing national surveys. "About 30 percent of students say it impacts their choice of field. But generally speaking I think they feel secure in the fact they are going into residency and secure they will have jobs when they get out."

Boston researchers are sounding the alarm about the fitness of firefighter and ambulance crew recruits in Massachusetts.

New research shows that 77 percent of candidates for firefighting and emergency medical technician positions were overweight or obese. The study, published online today in the journal Obesity, was conducted by researchers from Boston University School of Medicine, Harvard University and the Cambridge Health Alliance.

"If they are beginning their careers overweight and obese unless there is an intervention, it would be worse over time," said Dr. Stefanos Kales, director of the occupational & environmental medicine residency at the Harvard School of Public Health and senior author of the study.

A graduate of the Boston University School of Medicine has pledged $10.5 million to build a new center for breast cancer research, the university announced today.

The donor, who has chosen to remain anonymous, is a two-time cancer survivor who trained at Boston City Hospital and has worked on healthcare projects in developing countries. Her gift, the school's largest individual donation, will support an assistant professorship, an international scholars training program, and the construction of a new, nine-story building that will house 208 medical students on the BU medical campus.

The Framingham Heart Study, famous for its lessons about high blood pressure and cholesterol gleaned from generations of the town's volunteers, is searching for a new way to predict who might be at high risk for heart disease and stroke.

The 60-year-old study announced today that it would partner with Waltham-based BG Medicine in a five-year project to study blood tests and other medical records from more than 7,000 participants. They hope to discover substances in the blood that may be linked to heart disease and metabolic syndrome, a collection of risk factors such as obesity and high blood sugar that can precede type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.

Researchers will study about 1,000 proteins or molecules, called biomarkers, in the blood samples.

"This new agreement takes our research to a whole new level," Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, said in a statement. "Imagine having a simple blood test to tell us if a patient is at high risk for a heart attack or stroke -- we could do so much more to prevent or delay these often debilitating and deadly diseases."

The Framingham Heart Study is funded by NHBLI and conducted in collaboration with the Boston University School of Public Health. BG Medicine will bring its technology for detecting biological changes to the project.

Going home from the hospital can be confusing for patients. It can also be dangerous if they don't grasp their diagnosis, their medications, or what kind of follow-up appointments they need to keep.

For one in five patients, problems with medications or other complications mean a return trip to the hospital, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

A team at Boston Medical Center devised a program in which nurses used a personalized booklet to teach patients about their conditions, explain the medications they need to take, and arrange appointments with the doctors they need to see. A pharmacist called the patients about two days later to check on their medications.

In a randomized clinical trial of the program, half of about 700 patients got the intensive discharge education plus followup while half got the standard discharge instructions. Patients who got the extra attention were 30 percent less likely to return to the hospital, whether it was a visit to the emergency room or readmission as an inpatient. The results of the study appear in tomorrow's Annals of Internal Medicine.

"The intervention showed a remarkable effect, much more than any of us ever imagined," Dr. Brian Jack, who led the Boston Medical Center team, said in an interview. "If you apply that to 38 million discharges [a year across the country], that's a real lot."

Babies who are born more than three months early are up to three times more likely than other children to show symptoms of autism when screened using a standard checklist, Boston researchers report. The higher rate persisted even after excluding visual, motor, hearing, and cognitive impairments that are common in premature babies.

The 988 children in the study had not been diagnosed with autism, but they showed signs of the disorder according to a screening tool used by pediatricians for children who are 16 to 30 months old. The checklist asks whether a child points at an object to show interest, for example, or how good their hearing is.

Among children in the general population, the rate of positive scores is 5.7 percent. Among children in the study, who were born after less than 28 weeks of pregnancy, the rate was 21 percent. After children with disabilities were removed from the analysis, the rate was 16 percent.

"We're not implying that it's prematurity that causes autism," lead author Dr. Karl Kuban, chief of pediatric neurology at Boston Medical Center, emphasized in an interview. "They may hare a common risk that leads to both, but it's not that one causes the other."

Pediatricians should be aware that children who have handicaps may score positive on the autism checklist without having autism, he said. Autism is diagnosed after a more rigorous evaluation, but because early detection helps children get treatment that can help them, screenings are recommended.

In general, 0.6 percent of children are diagnosed with autism, about one-tenth of the number who score positive on the checklist.

The study appears in the Journal of Pediatrics . Follow-up studies of the children in the study are needed, Kuban said.

"If it turns out these children do go on to have autism much more often than we would expect, it does beg the question of why that should be and it offers us an avenue of study," he said.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

State public-health regulators expressed broad support today for a far-reaching campaign to combat obesity that is championed by the administration of Governor Deval Patrick.

The backing of the Public Health Council appears to ensure that starting in the fall, calorie counts will be posted prominently in major chain restaurants and schoolchildren will receive weight report cards.

The council, an appointed board of physicians, consumer advocates, and academic specialists, is expected to give final approval in a few months to the regulations governing calorie displays and weight report cards. The public will likely get its say during hearings in February.

"It's important that we keep this on the front burner so that people are aware of the problem," said council member Harold Cox, an associate dean at the Boston University School of Public Health.

An opponent of letting tobacco companies pay for medical research takes the stage today at one of four Massachusetts universities that have accepted funding from the nation's largest cigarette manufacturer.

Alan Blum, director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society at the University of Alabama, will discuss the issue at noon today at Boston University School of Medicine in a forum sponsored by BU's School of Public Health. In a Friday interview with BU Today, he compared a medical researcher taking money from a tobacco company to a detective taking money from the Mafia.

BU has received $3.99 million from Philip Morris USA over the past 10 years. The maker of Marlboro cigarettes has also given grants to scientists at Harvard University, MIT, and the University of Massachusetts over the last decade, as this Globe story explained earlier this year. Harvard banned its researchers from seeking tobacco company funds in 2004 and UMass Medical School no longer has any research supported by the tobacco industry, the story said.

Dr. Michael Siegel, a researcher at the BU School of Public Health who organized today's event, hopes the forum will prompt a discussion about the ethics of accepting money from sources like Philip Morris. He has invited university administrators to attend.

"If the university is going to take this tobacco company money, we need to know why. We need to know what their reasons are, and how they defend it," he said in an interview this morning. "It's important to be able to discuss what criteria you would set for [taking] funding from a given organization or not."

In an expansion of its mantra "people, not projects," the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for the first time is funding small groups of scientific collaborators working on specific ideas that reach beyond their primary research focus.

The biomedical research philanthropy today announced $40 million in grants over four years to eight groups led by HHMI investigators, including two from Harvard University and one from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. The Collaborative Innovation Awards, which range from $700,000 to $1.4 million per year, make up a pilot program intended to spur innovation in a time of tighter federal funding for research. Typically HHMI supports scientists who become Howard Hughes investigators while continuing to work at their own institutions.

"We're excited about this program because of the quality of the projects, but also because it broadens the community of scientists supported by HHMI,” Thomas R. Cech, president of HHMI, said in a statement. "It incorporates people outside of the HHMI investigator program in solving important problems, and lets us do something really new."

Can you picture a future when some political operative swipes a presidential candidate’s strand of hair, decodes its genetic data, and predicts mental or physical danger based on the analysis?

Bioethicist George J. Annas and neurologist Dr. Robert C. Green of Boston University School of Public Health can.

Two months before Barack Obama takes the oath of office, the two prominent leaders are calling for ground rules on disclosing personal genomic information in the next presidential campaign.

“By then, advances in genomics will make it more likely that DNA will be collected and analyzed to assess genetic risk information that could be used for or, more likely, against presidential candidates,” they write in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Judith Palfrey of Children's Hospital Boston has been elected president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, taking office for 2009-2010. She is the director of the Children's International Pediatric Center and the principal investigator of Opening Doors, a project directed at improving access for children and youth from traditionally underserved communities with special health care needs.

Richard Clapp, a professor of environmental health at the Boston University School of Public Health, has won the 2008 Research Integrity Award from the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. He is being honored for his fight to study cancer deaths among IBM employees and have the results published despite resistance from IBM and a journal publisher, the organization said.

Moderate alcohol consumption might be good for your heart, but it doesn’t appear to protect your brain.

Researchers from Wellesley College and Boston University examined MRIs and surveys about drinking from more than 1,800 people in the Framingham Offspring Study. They report in the Archives of Neurology that the more alcohol that a person consumed, the smaller their total brain volume. The association was stronger in women then men, even though women tend to drink less than men.

Brain volume, which decreases with age, is linked to the progression of dementia and trouble with learning, memory, and cognition.

"The public health effect of this study gives a clear message about the possible dangers of drinking alcohol," the authors write. "This study suggests that, unlike the associations with cardiovascular disease, alcohol consumption does not have any protective effect on brain volume."

The largest grant in the history of Boston University's dental school will support research into disparities in oral health, the university said today.

Boston University Goldman School of Dental Medicine has received $14.5 million from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research to fund work through 2015 at the Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities, one of five national centers. The BU center's goal is to achieve equal oral health among all social and ethnic groups in New England.

The grant's principal investigator is Dr. Raul Garcia and the co-principal investigator is Dr. Michelle Henshaw.

A Japanese scientist who works at two Massachusetts research institutions won a share of the Nobel Prize in chemistry today for the discovery of a glowing protein in jellyfish later exploited to study how living cells work.

Osamu Shimomura (left) of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and Boston University School of Medicine and Americans Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Tsien of University of California, San Diego were honored for their research on green fluorescent protein, or GFP, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Here's the Globe story.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

Responding to complaints about the timing of an earlier hearing, a blue-ribbon panel advising the federal government on Boston University's controversial research laboratory will conduct a nighttime public hearing.

The public will have its say from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Oct. 14 at the Roxbury Center for Arts at Hibernian Hall, 182-186 Dudley St.

The panel is advising the National Institutes of Health on how to improve its environmental review of the lab project, being built in the South End on BU's medical school campus.

Boston University ethicist George J. Annas takes his New England Journal of Medicine readers through a thicket of ethical issues entangling lethal-injection executions, constitutional law, and physician participation.

The Supreme Court has often considered whether the death penalty carried out in any form fits the Eighth Amendment definition of cruel and unusual punishment, but lately its task has been to weigh the thorny issue of whether the cocktail of drugs used to induce death also inflicts inordinate suffering. Annas asks whether doctors can be involved in ensuring that lethal injection is "more humane."

Researchers scrutinizing genetic data including samples from three generations of the Framingham Heart Study have discovered two new genes and confirmed a third that are linked to an elevated risk of developing gout. The findings are the first published results based on Framingham medical information, which was made available to scientists around the world a year ago.

Led by Dr. Caroline S. Fox of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, an international team of scientists studied genetic variations among more than 7,000 Framingham Heart Study participants who agreed to give their genetic and clinical data to an online database called the SHARe program, short for SNP Health Association Resource. (SNP stands for single nucleotide polymorphism, which is a kind of genetic variation.) Other samples came from a large study in the Netherlands.

People who have all three genes have a risk of getting gout that is 40 times higher than people who don't have the genetic variations, the researchers report in The Lancet. About 3 million Americans suffer from gout, a painful form of arthritis caused by a buildup of uric acid in the blood. Being able to predict who might develop gout based on their genetic risk could help guide treatment and perhaps find better therapies, the authors suggest.

The Framingham study, sponsored by Boston University School of Medicine, Boston University School of Public Health, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, began in 1948.

Former New England Patriot Ted Johnson has agreed to donate his brain after he dies to help a Boston program study the long-term effects of repeated concussions in athletes.

The Center for the Study of Traumatic Enecephalopathy, a newly formed joint effort of Boston University School of Medicine and the Sports Legacy Institute, is building a brain donation program for living active and retired athletes to better understand the significant brain degeneration players suffer after head injuries. Johnson told his story last year to draw attention to the problem.

The center's researchers have studied the case of football player John Grimsley, who died in February at age 45. He had pronounced chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition that includes memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, paranoid and aggressive behavior, depression, dementia, and Parkinsonism, a statement from the center said. He is the fifth National Football League player diagnosed with the disease since 2002.

Johnson is one of 12 athletes, including six from the NFL and a former member of the US women's national soccer team, who have agreed to donate their brains to the BU center, The New York Times reported today.

Dr. Leon Eisenberg, emeritus professor of psychiatry and former chairman of social medicine and health policy at Harvard Medical School, will receive the Juan Jose Lopez Ibor Award from the World Psychiatric Association next week in Prague. The 40,000 euro prize, to be split between the winner and an institution of his or her choice, recognizes people who honor human dignity among those who suffer from mental illness. Eisenberg is known for his pioneering interest in child psychiatry and autism in particular, as well as genetic factors involved in psychiatric disorders.

Dr. Ramachandran S. Vasan of Boston University School of Medicine and the Framingham Heart Study has been named editor of new cardiology subspecialty journal. Vasan will lead Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics, set to launch next month. It is one of six new journals spun off by Circulation, which is the journal of the American Heart Association.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

A ubiquitous chemical used in some plastic bottles and food packaging is linked to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and signs of liver damage in adults, the first large study of bisphenol A in humans has found.

Fears of BPA's health effects cleared hard plastic baby and water bottles from store shelves and kitchen cupboards this spring after a federal agency concluded that tiny amounts of the chemical might harm fetuses, babies, and small children, based on a review of animal studies. Low levels of BPA are detectable in 90 percent of the US population, who come in contact with the chemical through a variety of routes: when they drink water, have dental sealants, inhale household dust, or get it on their skin.

BPA is used to line most canned goods, from soups to soft drinks, to prevent corrosion. It helps make sunglasses and compact discs durable. And it strengthens virtually all transparent, light-weight, hard plastic bottles.

Today's study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, released early to coincide with a US Food and Drug Administration hearing this morning, finds evidence for broader concern in adults.

Tomorrow, Boston University School of Medicine will remember one of its scientists who died on 9/11 in a lecture named after her.

The seventh annual Sue Kim Hanson Lecture in Immunology honors a former researcher in BU's Pulmonary Center who died with her husband and daughter on the second plane to strike the World Trade Center seven years ago. She was enrolled in a PhD program in pathology and laboratory medicine at the time of her death; BU awarded her doctorate posthumously in 2002.

Dr. Laurie Glimcher, a professor of immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health, will speak at noon in Keefer Auditorium about transcription factors that regulate inflammatory diseases.

Knee injuries aren’t always as dramatic as New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s sudden, season-ending tears of two ligaments on Sunday.

Sometimes people don’t even know they have damage to parts of the knee called the menisci, two crescent-shaped disks of cartilage that cushion the thigh and shin bones in the knee joint. A survey of middle-age and older Framingham residents led by Boston University School of Medicine researchers found not only that meniscal tears are common in this age group, but that most of the people who had them didn’t feel any pain or stiffness in the affected knee.

If meniscal tears are more common than previously thought, that could make a difference in how doctors and patients decide how to treat knee problems, the authors write in the New England Journal of Medicine. Osteoarthritis, not the meniscal tear, may be the reason why a person feels pain, for example, making surgery to repair the meniscus less likely to solve the problem.

“Clinicians who order MRI of the knee should take into account the high prevalence of incidental tears when interpreting the results and planning therapy,” the authors write.

More than 10 million Americans are taking opioid medications to treat their pain and more than 4 million of them use the powerful painkillers regularly, a survey by Boston researchers found.

Writing in an upcoming issue of the journal Pain, lead author Judith Parsells Kelly of Boston University School of Medicine reports on random telephone surveys of more than 19,000 adults from 1998 through 2006. While opioid drugs such as oxycodone and methadone are effective at controlling pain, they have also been implicated in overdoses, theft, and "doctor-shopping" by people who become addicted. Kelly and her colleagues set out to measure the prevalence of opioid use among people outside hospitals, data they said were lacking in recent years.

Traditional Indian medicines bought on the Internet and used throughout the world contain dangerous levels of toxic metals, according to a Boston study that says an ancient practice of combining herbs with metals and gems is responsible.

Lead, mercury, and arsenic were detected in one-fifth of Ayurvedic medicines bought from Internet sites, whether the remedies were made in the United States or in India, Dr. Robert B. Saper of the Boston University School of Medicine reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association. His team randomly sampled 193 Ayurvedic medicines ordered from web sites and analyzed for their metal concentrations.

Nearly 21 percent contained potentially toxic metals, some with levels of lead or mercury that were 100 to 10,000 times acceptable limits.

Boston University today named a new leader of its dental school.

Dr. Jeffrey Hutter (left) has been appointed dean of BU's Goldman School of Dental Medicine after serving as interim dean following the death last year of former dean Dr. Spencer N. Frankl.

Before becoming interim dean last October, Hutter had been a senior associate dean at the dental school and chairman of the department of endodontics. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s dental school and George Washington University, he spent 21 years in the US Navy Dental Corps before joining BU in 1997.

A quarter of infants who need new heart transplants die before organs can be found for them, 10 times the rate for adults.

Many other children die in hospitals when life support is withdrawn, after their parents and doctors agree that continuing care would be futile. But they are not considered potential organ donors because most of them don't fit the definition of brain death used since the 1960s; their brains still show some activity before they stop breathing and their hearts stop beating.

Now doctors at Denver Children's Hospital have transplanted hearts from three such "cardiac death" donors, prompting a debate about the ethics of the procedure that receives a full airing in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.

The Denver team reports in the journal that it tested the feasibility of using hearts recovered from three babies with severe neurological injuries who died after life support was withdrawn and their hearts stopped beating. They believe their trial is the first to examine heart transplants for children from donors after cardiac death. Such transplants have been done in adults for more than a decade.

By David Abel, Globe Staff

As Boston University nears completion of a controversial laboratory to study the world’s deadliest germs, administrators have requested the city's permission to use the new South End building for training exercises -- but not for research.

Construction of the $198 million building that will house the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories is scheduled to be completed at the end of August. But research on Ebola, plague, and other pathogens cannot begin there at least until a court-ordered environmental review is complete, probably next year.

University officials said today that they hope to start public safety, health, and operations training in February, to include scientists and hundreds of local, state, and federal officials.

Maybe "Mad Men" has it right.

In the smoky, boozy world of Madison Avenue advertising during the Kennedy administration, there's a bottle of the hard stuff in every office and glasses clink for just about any occasion in the stylish television series. A Boston University study of trends in alcohol consumption in The American Journal of Medicine says people really did drink more back then.

Researchers from the BU School of Medicine analyzed records from the long-running Framingham Heart Study and found that from 1948 through 2003, average intake dropped with each generation. The proportion of people who were heavy drinkers went down while the share of moderate drinkers went up. Beer fell out of favor compared to wine.

The data was based on self-reports starting in 1948 with the original Framingham volunteers. Their offspring -- still in Framingham or elsewhere -- were recruited into the study in 1979, but for this study of alcohol use, generations were divided by birth years, starting with 1900-1919, then 1920-1939, and finally 1940-1959.

While drinking went down, the incidence of drinking problems -- from job loss to drunk-driving arrests -- did not.

Framingham may be a long way from 1960s Manhattan, but some problems stay the same.

Here are the sad facts of a fatal accident: An elderly man taking several prescription medications for several conditions lost consciousness while he was behind the wheel, killing a 10-year-old boy.

The boy's family sued the driver's doctor, saying he should have warned the man about potential side effects, but the case was dismissed. A higher court reviewed the dismissal, and a chill passed through the medical profession when these justices ruled that doctors must inform patients of side effects that could impair their ability to drive safely.

Well-known ethicist George Annas of Boston University says the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's 2007 opinion "is not a model of clarity." Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, he says he agrees with their finding but doesn't see the same cause for alarm that physicians expressed in a Globe news story and later health column.

African-American women who regularly consumed sugary soft drinks -- including fruit drinks that might seem healthier -- were more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than women who didn’t drink them very often, according to a large national study conducted by Boston researchers.

Julie R. Palmer of Boston University and colleagues at BU’s School of Medicine and the Harvard School of Public Health followed about 59,000 women taking part in the Black Women’s Health Study for 10 years. Black women in the United States are twice as likely to have type 2 diabetes as white women. The researchers hoped to understand the potential role of sweetened beverages and weight gain in the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Writing in tomorrow’s Archives of Internal Medicine, they report that women who drank two or more sugary soft drinks a day had a 24 percent higher incidence of type 2 diabetes than women who drank less than one soft drink a month. For women who drank at least two sweetened fruit drinks daily, which did not include orange or grapefruit juice, the rate was 31 percent higher than for those who had no more than one per month.

The women who drank sweetened fruit drinks tended to be more physically active and eat a healthier diet than the women who favored sweetened soft drinks, perhaps a sign that they thought the drinks were a good choice, too. But the study's results suggest they were not.

"Consumption of fruit drinks conveyed as high an increase in [diabetes] risk as did consumption of soft drinks," the authors write. "The public should be made aware that these drinks are not a healthy alternative to soft drinks with regard to risk of type 2 diabetes."

Before tonight's Red Sox-Yankees tilt, CVS/pharmacy will present $4.4 million from donations made in its stores to the Needham-based ALS Therapy Alliance. Scientists involved with the alliance work at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston University, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and the University of Massachusetts. Three researchers are on deck for tonight's first pitch ceremony: Dr. Robert H. Brown Jr. of Mass. General, Tom Maniatis of Harvard, and Craig Mello of UMass Medical School.

Researchers at Boston Medical Center have won a five-year, $5.4 million federal grant to test a program to detect and treat drug abuse in primary care visits. The project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, will compare standard screening and counseling for drug use with a more intensive model.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The National Institutes of Health will present a live webcast tomorrow of a blue ribbon panel's ongoing review of a controversial laboratory being built by Boston University.

The meeting, which will be at the NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Md., will be aired on-line starting at 8 a.m. at videocast.nih.gov.

The session is scheduled to focus on how BU and NIH can forge partnerships with the community surrounding the South End project. The executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, Barbara Ferrer, is scheduled to speak as well as Klare Allen, the activist who has led opposition to the lab for five years.

The blue-ribbon panel was convened by NIH after the National Research Council, an independent board of scientists, issued a report in November that was sharply critical of the federal government's earlier safety reviews of the BU project.

The lab, largely underwritten by NIH, is designed to allow researchers to work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and Marburg. More than 80 percent complete, the project is on Albany Street amid the university's medical school campus.

Researchers from Boston University are trying to solve the age-old mystery of why some people live an extremely long life and why their relatives tend to do so, too.

Together with colleagues from Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Thomas Perls of BU is looking for two or more healthy brothers and sisters whose families have a history of long life. To participate in the Long Life Family Study, volunteers must live within a three-hour drive of Boston, New York, or Pittsburgh and be willing to be interviewed and give a blood sample for genetic analysis.

Participants will be asked about their family and health history, have a physical exam, and undergo some screening tests, according to study sponsor, the National Institute on Aging. People interested in joining the study, now in its second phase of recruitment, can call 877-362-2074.

Boston Medical Center has named its first high-level safety and quality officer.

Dr. William M. Barron (left) has been named vice president for quality and patient safety/chief quality officer for the hospital. The new position consolidates in one senior management position the safety responsibilities previously handled by the chief medical officer.

Barron, who was also appointed director of the Center of Clinical Quality Improvement at Boston University School of Medicine, comes to Boston from Loyola University Health System, where he was vice president of quality and patient safety and a professor in the departments of medicine and obstetrics and gynecology at Loyola University.

Physicians and medical students are voicing their support for a state ban on gifts to doctors from drug and medical device makers.

Four leading physicians – Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine; Dr. David Coleman, Boston Medical Center chief of medicine; Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, Tufts University School of Medicine professor; and Dr. Stephen E. Tosi, UMass Memorial Health Care chief medical officer – wrote a letter urging passage of a bill approved by the state Senate and awaiting action in the House.

“Many other professions adhere to strict ethics codes that bar receipt of gifts, while elected and government officials are guided by public finance laws prohibiting gifts from lobbyists,” the doctors wrote. “We do not believe physicians should be treated differently.”

The National Physicians Alliance and the Boston University and Tufts University chapters of the American Medical Students Association also sent a letter to Governor Deval Patrick, Senate President Therese Murray, and House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi pushing passage of the bill.

“To do right by our patients, our prescribing decisions must be based on independent, scientific evidence, free of inappropriate influences,” their letter said. “It is time to remove conflicts of interest from the doctor-patient relationship.”

Roger Clemens grabbed headlines and hurt his Hall of Fame chances when the Mitchell Report accused him of using human growth hormone to pump up his pitching. But a bigger story may be the rising demand for the hormone on web sites, in clinics and at compounding pharmacies that promise to bulk up bodies, boost athletic performance, and turn back the clock of aging.

Dr. Thomas T. Perls of the Boston University School of Medicine, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, points out that systematic reviews of clinical trials have found no evidence that taking human growth hormone supplements helps anybody but people with a specific deficiency of the hormone. It’s hard to track the illegal use of the hormone, but Perls cites one source that says it’s a $2 billion-a-year industry in the United States.

Human growth hormone can hurt people who don’t need it by causing swelling, pain, breast development in males, and insulin resistance that can lead to diabetes, Perls and his co-author, S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago, write. They call for better public education, better regulation, and better enforcement of existing policies.

“Until and unless efficacy and safety of [human growth hormone] is demonstrated by unbiased scientifically rigorous clinical trials for purposes advocated by the anti-aging industry, [human growth hormone] should not be distributed or prescribed for any purpose other than its narrowly defined clinical and legal indications,” they write.

Perls has more information at his web site.

By Christopher Baxter, Globe Correspondent

An elite panel of scientists recommended today that federal health authorities conduct the most extensive safety review so far of the controversial laboratory being built by Boston University.

The most dangerous germs require further study, the blue-ribbon panel told the director of the National Institutes of Health. Those assessments should compare outbreak situations in urban, suburban and rural environments, according to the group’s report (The full report will be available to the public next week).

The panel also recommended the studies consider a number of emergency situations — rather than one “worst case” scenario — including accidents and attacks, the report said. Those risk assessments should include the likelihood of a germ being released, the risk posed to the public and the resources available to deal with an outbreak, the report said.

Medical students turned the tables on medical schools, grading them on their conflict-of-interest policies -- and they didn’t spare the red ink.

In a report released today by the American Medical Student Association, Harvard Medical School got an F for not having a standard policy to guard against industry influence in the form of gifts, free samples, speakers fees, or other payments to doctors, residents, and students. Harvard spokesman David Cameron confirmed what the student group's report noted: The independently governed hospitals affiliated with Harvard have their own policies 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 and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, highly regarded around the country for their strict policies forbidding freebies, mustered only a B on the list. Despite praise for its strong policies, BU could do better by adding the subject to its curriculum, the students said. UMass won kudos for its clear language but lacked a policy on disclosure as well as attention to the conflict-of-interest question in its courses.

Seven out of 150 medical school earned As and 60 flunked.

By Kay Lazar, Globe Staff

Boston's three leading medical schools are among 14 nationwide that will receive federal grants aimed at helping scientists more quickly turn their discoveries into treatments for patients.

Under the program, Harvard Medical School has been awarded $117.7 million over the next five years, while Boston University Medical School will receive $23 million and Tufts University School of Medicine $20 million over that time period, the National Institutes of Health announced today.

The awards reflect a sea change in federal funding for scientific research. Schools that have traditionally competed within their own institutions for federal dollars must now form one collaborative center at each medical school to pull together all of its researchers and departments.

The mission of the grant program, called the Clinical and Translational Science Award, is to create a network of medical research institutions across the country that will translate new knowledge into tangible benefits for patients. Launched in 2006, the initiative has awarded money to 24 other medical schools. Total funding for the 14 new recipients will be $533 million over the next five years, the NIH said.

"Everybody knows there is a lot of great research going on but it doesn’t get to public practice," said Dr. Harry Selker, director of Tufts' new Clinical and Translational Science Institute. "This (grant program) is a big deal for the nation."

Ten scientists from Massachusetts were named Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators today, five from MIT alone and one from Boston University, marking a first for that institution.

Harvard has three and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and University of Massachusetts Medical School each have one new investigator. Fifty-six scientists from 31 research centers will be supported by $600 million over five years from the biomedical philanthropy as they continue to lead laboratories at their home institutions. The new appointments bring to 19 the number of HHMI investigators at MIT, the highest concentration at one location in the country, the institute said.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

Federal health officials should conduct a rigorous review of potential threats posed by a controversial Boston University laboratory and make sure the surrounding neighborhood is kept fully informed, an elite panel of scientists said today.

The chairman of the panel, Dr. Adel Mahmoud of Princeton University, exhorted the National Institutes of Health to operate transparently, saying "this is essential for credibility and public trust."

Another member of the committee, Vicki S. Freimuth of the University of Georgia, said it was clear from the five-year history of the project that "problems with trust" had clouded the relationship between the community and the leading forces behind the project, BU and the federal government.

Mahmoud and 10 other members of a blue-ribbon panel commissioned by the NIH traveled to Boston to conduct their third meeting regarding the high-security lab BU is building on its medical school campus. The director of the NIH formed the advisory board after his agency's earlier safety review of the project came under intense criticism.

In addition to releasing their preliminary findings, the scientists ventured to the State House on a community fact-finding mission, hearing from more than three dozen speakers who overwhelmingly opposed the lab, which is designed to allow work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and Marburg.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The National Institutes of Health will present a live webcast tomorrow of a blue ribbon panel's Boston meeting reviewing a controversial laboratory being built by Boston University.
The meeting is scheduled to begin at the State House at 9 a.m., and will be available for viewing . The hearing, in Gardner Auditorium, is open to the public.

Members of the public will be able to address the scientists, an independent board of specialists enlisted by NIH after the The blue-ribbon panel of specialists was convened by NIH after the National Research Council, an independent board of scientists, issued a report in November that was sharply critical of the federal government's earlier safety reviews of the BU project.

The lab, largely underwritten by NIH, is designed to allow researchers to work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and Marburg. More than 80 percent complete, the project is on Albany Street in the South End.

After years of intermittent talks, two Rhode Island hospitals have taken a step closer to merging.

St. Joseph Health Services of Rhode Island and Roger Williams Medical Center said yesterday they had signed a memorandum of understanding to form an affiliation, the Providence Journal reports today.

St. Joseph Health Services runs Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, a community hospital in North Providence, and St. Joseph Hospital for Specialty Care, which offers rehabilitation, psychiatric care, and primary care in Providence. The hospital typically has about 175 inpatients at Fatima and 70 in Providence, the story said. Roger Williams Medical Center, in Providence, is a teaching hospital affiliated with the Boston University School of Medicine. It an have as many as 170 patients.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

A blue-ribbon panel investigating the safety of a controversial research laboratory being built by Boston University will hold a public meeting next week on Beacon Hill.

The panel, commissioned by the director of the National Institutes of Health, will meet from 9 a.m. till noon May 16 in Gardner Auditorium at the State House. Members of the public will be able to address the scientists. A spokesman for the NIH, which is underwriting much of the cost of the South End lab, said members of the public do not have to register in advance of the meeting and are asked to limit their comments to three minutes. Citizens may also submit written comments.

The blue-ribbon panel was convened after the National Research Council, an independent board of scientists, issued a report in November sharply critical of NIH's earlier safety reviews of the BU project.

Teenagers who lived in towns that banned smoking in restaurants were 40 percent less likely to become established smokers than their peers in towns with weaker restaurant smoking laws, Boston researchers report.

Writing in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Dr. Michael Siegel of the Boston University School of Public Health presents final results from three waves of telephone surveys in 301 Massachusetts towns that began in 2001. More than 3,800 young people who were 12 to 17 years old at the beginning of the study were asked if they had ever smoked, if they had a cigarette in the past month, and if they had smoked more than 100 cigarettes.

In an earlier paper Siegel and his colleagues found that young people in towns with smoke-free restaurant laws perceived a lower level of smoking and a lower social acceptability of smoking than their peers in towns with weaker smoking laws, where smoking was restricted to designated areas in restaurants or not at all.

The current paper suggests that the anti-smoking laws may work by blocking the transition from experimenting with cigarettes to becoming established smokers. Massachusetts banned smoking in all workplaces, bars, and restaurants in 2004.

"The public health implications of this are that restaurant smoking bans are actually one of the most effective interventions to reduce youth smoking. While these policies are intended to protect workers and the public from secondhand smoke exposure, it turns out that an additional benefit of these laws is to reduce rates of youth smoking, thus making them a particularly powerful public health intervention," Siegel said in an interview. "There are not a lot of interventions out there which can produce a 40 percent reduction in youth smoking."

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

An elite panel of scientists this morning urged the federal government to substantially expand its safety review of a controversial research laboratory being built by Boston University.

The recommendation comes from the National Research Council, an independent advisory board of scientists, which sharply criticized the federal government in November for its safety assessment of the BU project, branding the review "not sound and credible."

Leaders of the National Institutes of Health did not have an immediate reaction to the recommendations. But if the NIH embraces the advice, the opening of the BU lab could be significantly delayed. Already, the university had abandoned long-stated plans to open the South End facility by this fall, and a BU spokeswoman this morning said it was premature to speculate about a revised opening date.

Massachusetts’ four medical schools are reviewing a new policy issued by their national organization that urges a ban on gifts from drug or medical device makers.

After two years of discussions, the Association of American Medical Colleges yesterday issued a recommendation that free meals, gifts, travel, and ghost-writing services have no place in medical education. The conflict-of-interest policy would apply to doctors, students, and staff members at the country’s 129 medical schools.

University of Massachusetts Medical School faculty are already bound by rules set by its clinical partner, UMass Memorial Medical Center, which have made industry-funded meals, gifts, and speakers' bureaus off-limits. Thoru Pederson, associate vice provost for research at the state's medical school, said the AAMC policy fits with what the school has been considering.

“I think this thing really has teeth,” he said in an interview. “We feel if a company buys you dinner, you’re on their payroll, even though you claim your independence as a scholar.”

Boston University School of Medicine also has a strict policy. Its doctors have been barred since September from receiving gifts or free meals on campus.

“We have given thought to all the provisions in the AAMC recommendations,” BU spokeswoman Ellen Berlin said yesterday in an e-mail interview. “We have set standards for participation in speaker's bureaus but did not prohibit them.”

Harvard Medical School’s executive council will consider the association’s policy, spokeswoman Alyssa Kneller said. The school has guidelines in place that forbid ghost-writing, in which drug or device company writers create articles for scientific journals but attach the name of an academic researcher before submitting the work for publication.

Tufts University School of Medicine’s faculty senate is in the process of developing a policy on the relationship between industry and the medical school and will look at the medical school group’s recommendations, spokeswoman Christine Fennelly said.

A Boston researcher whose article in a major scientific journal advised using tanning beds to treat vitamin D deficiency received money from a foundation run and financed by the tanning-bed industry, according to a story in today's Wall Street Journal. This follows the disclosure two weeks ago that lung-cancer screening research published in two prominent journals was funded by a cigarette manufacturer through a foundation.

Dr. Michael Holick of Boston University disclosed partial funding from the UV Foundation in the article published last year by the New England Journal of Medicine, but the note did not provide further information. The foundation receives money from the Indoor Tanning Association and makers of tanning-bed equipment, the Wall Street Journal said. BU has received $162,014 from the foundation, making it the top recipient.

Women who ate foods that matched a well-known diet for reducing high blood pressure had a lower risk of heart disease and stroke than women whose diets didn't come as close, a new study reports.

The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, better known as the DASH diet, promotes eating foods low in cholesterol and sodium by emphasizing fruits and vegetables and minimizing red meat and fat. Following the diet pushes blood pressure down both for people who have hypertension and for people with normal blood pressure, research has shown. It also cuts cholesterol, according to other research.

But no studies had gone one step beyond those risk factors to see whether the diet made a difference in the incidence of heart disease and stroke in healthy people, according to Teresa T. Fung of Simmons College and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Tufts University is establishing a master's degree program in nutrition science and policy in Ras al Khaimah, one of the United Arab Emirates, joining a growing Boston medical education presence in the Middle East.

The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy will offer the graduate degrees through one year of online instruction combined with a 10- to 14-day residency period in Ras al Khaimah. The curriculum will focus on nutrition and public health challenges in the Gulf region, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, Tufts said in a statement today announcing the program.

Last month Boston University opened centers devoted to dental research, education, and care in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Harvard University's international subsidiary Harvard Medical International, recently spun off to the hospital group Partners HealthCare, has built a large complex in Dubai.

Photo by David Ryan, Globe Staff
Tufts Medical School students Jessica Hsu (center) is thrilled about going to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She hugs Maristella Evanglista, with Kate Esselen on the right.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Fourth-year medical students discovered today where they will spend the next stage of their medical training.

This year the Match Day formula sorted more than 15,000 US medical school seniors into programs at teaching hospitals. There was a small uptick in family medicine choices nationwide, coming at a time when primary care doctors are in short supply.

At the four medical schools in Massachusetts, primary care specialties -- family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics/gynecology, and pediatrics -- drew almost half the soon-to-be MDs graduating from the three schools in Boston. At University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, the tally was higher, consistent with its mission focusing on primary care. Both levels are similar to previous years.

-- Boston University School of Medicine: 46 percent
-- Harvard Medical School: 44 percent
-- Tufts University School of Medicine: 46 percent
-- University of Massachusetts Medical School: 60 percent

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, offered the clearest sign yet that a controversial laboratory being built by Boston University won't open anytime soon.

Addressing a blue ribbon panel of scientists convened to review the project, Zerhouni said he had no expectation that the board would "rubber stamp" his agency's earlier conclusion that the lab would present no threat to the surrounding South End neighborhood. The centerpiece of the project is a Biosafety Level-4 lab where scientists can work on the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and anthrax.

"We are not here because we want you to rubber stamp what we have done," Zerhouni said. "We need to do this right, even if it takes a long time."

Harvard is expanding its no-smoking policy to its entire Longwood medical campus, extending current rules banning smoking inside buildings and near entrances and air intakes.

The new rules will go into effect next spring for Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and the Harvard School of Public Health. The delay will give smokers time to quit and an opportunity to enter free, voluntary stop-smoking programs, medical school dean Dr. Jeffrey Flier said in a statement announcing the change.

The announcement was made yesterday at the opening of an exhibit on advertising campaigns that portrayed doctors pushing cigarettes.

The National Institutes of Health has created a "blue ribbon panel," including experts on infectious diseases, public health, biodefense and environmental justice, to advise the agency during ongoing reviews of public safety and environmental issues posed by a Boston University laboratory designed to study the world's deadliest germs.

In November, another panel of scientists, the National Research Council, concluded that the NIH had failed to adequately address the potential risks to the South End and Roxbury neighbors of the Biosafety Level-4 lab if germs escaped from the facility on the Boston Medical Center campus.

The panel will hold its first public meeting next Thursday, March 13, in Wilson Hall on the third floor of Building 1 of the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. The meeting time has not yet been set.

Boston University has opened centers devoted to dental research, education, and care in Dubai.

The Boston University Institute of Dental Research and Education Dubai and the Boston University Dental Health Center at Dubai Healthcare City will focus on research and training of graduate dentists in specialties. Healthcare City is a medical zone in the emirate on the eastern Arabian peninsula.

Faculty from the Boston University Goldman School of Dental Medicine will develop the training programs, BU said. The first residents will enroll in July.

Academic medical centers are increasingly adopting policies designed to clamp down on potential conflicts of interest posed by industry payments to individual doctors or researchers. But they have been slower to put in place rules governing payments to the institutions themselves, including the four medical schools in Massachusetts, according to a survey to be published tomorrow in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

A team led by Eric G. Campbell of Massachusetts General Hospital found that only 38 percent of the medical schools responding to a 2006 questionnaire had an institutional conflict-of-interest policy and 37 percent said they were on their way to putting one in place.

Eighty-six of the 125 US medical schools answered questions about what rules they had for financial interests of the schools that might affect the conduct of research. That could include royalties from licensing agreements or equity holdings in drug companies or other businesses.

At three of Massachusetts's four medical schools, institutional policies are works in progress. At the fourth, issues are considered case by case.

To live until you’re 90, make sure to exercise and not smoke.

To make it to 100, it helps if you don't develop diseases linked to aging until after 85 – and to cope with them well if you do get them.

A pair of papers by two Boston research groups appearing in tomorrow’s Archives of Internal Medicine report on what factors -- other than good genes -- allow the oldest of old people to survive. A group from Harvard Medical School found that men who lived until 90 enhanced not only their lifespan but also improved their mental and physical function if they led a healthy lifestyle in “early old age.” Researchers at Boston University’s New England Centenarian Study said the timing of illness was important in reaching 100, but coping with illness well enough to stay independent was also key to reaching 100.

A state group fostering technological innovation has awarded grants to fund nine research projects, including one proposed by the late cancer investigator Dr. Judah Folkman.

The Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center has given a total of $360,000 for proposals to demonstrate a new technology's commercial viability. In addition to the Folkman grant for work to be done at Children's Hospital Boston, three awards went to Northeastern University, two to the University of Massachusetts, and one each to Boston University, Harvard University, and Massachusetts General Hospital.

By Stephen Smith, Globe staff

Even as he forges ahead with his battle to prevent CVS Corp. from opening in-store clinics, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino today quietly convened a summit of high-powered medical players to examine what ails primary care in the city.

The meeting at the city's Parkman House included a who's who from Boston's healthcare landscape, including the presidents of three of the city's biggest hospitals: Elaine Ullian from Boston Medical Center, Dr. Gary Gottlieb from Brigham and Women's, and Ellen Zane from Tufts-New England Medical Center. Leaders of community health centers were there, too, along with the in-coming president of the Massachusetts Medical Society and the dean of Boston University's medical school, Dr. Karen Antman.

"We came together not just to talk about a problem that we all know has existed for some time," Menino said in a written statement after the meeting, "we came together in the spirit of creating a thoughtful and coordinated action plan to reduce barriers that limit access to important medical services."

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The opening of a Boston University laboratory designed to study the world's deadliest germs will be delayed several months, or longer, according to documents filed this week in federal court.

BU administrators overseeing the Biosafety Level-4 lab, the centerpiece of a larger federally sponsored project, had predicted that the facility would be operating by this fall. But the National Institutes of Health said in this week's court filing that it now anticipates that an ongoing environmental review of the lab will take longer than expected and won't be completed until "on or before April 30, 2009."

A BU spokeswoman, Ellen Berlin, said today that "the NIH is doing additional studies and that clearly adds time to the schedule. As the NIH process is ongoing, it is premature to set a precise opening date."

Still, the disclosure by the federal agency of its extended timetable for finishing the environmental analysis constitutes a clear setback for BU, which first began pursuing federal grants to build the lab on its South End medical campus five years ago.

Health Care For All's Consumer Health Quality Council -- about 40 "real, ordinary consumers," as HCFA leader John McDonough says -- was created to put a human face on harm caused by medical errors.

Now you can see for yourself, on YouTube.

In three videos from the council’s story bank, members tell how systemic, preventible healthcare problems harmed them or their loved ones. Made with the help of Boston University School of Public Health students Madhavi Bezwada, Meredith Mueller, and Hsiang-Yin Yeh, they were also shown this morning at a Statehouse information session.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The state's highest court today delivered a victory to opponents of a controversial research laboratory being built by Boston University, ordering that an ongoing environmental review should continue. The Supreme Judicial Court also agreed with a 2006 ruling from a superior court judge that the state's original environmental analysis was "arbitrary and capricious."

The decision by the SJC, though, does not halt construction of the laboratory complex in Boston's South End, which is about 70 percent complete. The centerpiece of the project is a Biosafety Level-4 lab where scientists will be able to work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and anthrax.

The case wound up before the SJC because BU had appealed the earlier ruling by Suffolk Superior Court Judge Ralph D. Gants.

In its decision, the top court ruled that the review by the state environmental affairs secretary during the administration of Governor Mitt Romney "lacked a rational basis."

Today's decision represents the second time in two weeks that environmental reviews of the BU project have been lambasted. An independent panel of scientists declared two weeks ago that a separate federal review of the lab was "not sound and credible" and failed to adequately address the consequences of highly lethal germs escaping from the project.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

A federal agency's safety review of a controversial laboratory being built by Boston University was "not sound and credible" and failed to sufficiently address community concerns, according to a blistering report released today by an independent panel of scientists.

The study by the prestigious National Research Council criticizes a federal government analysis that concluded that the BU lab poses no health threat to the South End neighborhood where it is being built. The federal examination failed to adequately consider the dangers of working with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola and plague, in the middle of a congested urban neighborhood, the study concluded. The new report did not examine the potential safety of the lab, only the quality of the federal government's safety analysis.

Despite the pointed rebuke, the review being presented at this hour in Washington does not have immediate consequences on construction of the nearly $200 million project, which is more than half finished. Still, the analysis could influence ongoing government reviews of the project and appears guaranteed to embolden lab opponents who have fought for more than four years to block the Albany Street lab.

The council's report was commissioned by the state after a judge ordered a further review of the lab project. The ruling by Suffolk Superior Court Judge Ralph D. Gants mandated that a more extensive environmental analysis of the lab be conducted but did not require the case to come back before him.

More than a third of men with early-stage prostate cancer received treatment that didn’t fit their pre-existing problems with urinary, bowel or sexual function, Boston researchers report in a new study. They said their finding points to poor communication between doctors and patients.

“We found that the mismatches were more common than we figured,” Dr. James A. Talcott of Massachusetts General Hospital said in an interview. “For a single strong contraindication, one-third of patients ended up getting what appeared to be the wrong treatment.”

Three generations of volunteers who helped make the Framingham Heart Study a landmark in medical research will be thanked for their participation when the nation's top health officials come to town Nov. 29.

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Director Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel will honor the town's 9,000 current participants for their role in improving scientists' understanding of heart disease. The study, now entering its 60th year, revealed the impact of now-familiar risk factors for heart disease: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking and obesity.

Before the Framingham celebration, Leavitt will speak at Harvard Medical School about using genetic information in personalized health care. The Framingham study recently made genetic information available to other researchers so they can investigate genetics in heart disease and other conditions.

The Framingham Heart Study is funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and conducted jointly by Boston University and NHLBI.

By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff

A University of Massachusetts Medical School professor who said he was conducting research on infectious disease during his arrest in a Worcester prostitution sting is studying gonorrhea in human subjects, a school spokesman said today.

However, the school was not aware that the study -- "Immunology of Infection with Neisseria gonorrhea" -- involved a trip to the corner of Main and Grand streets Saturday afternoon, where Dr. Peter A. Rice was arrested after allegedly offering to pay an undercover female officer $40 for sex.

"I don't think that his arrest had any connection to his work with the university," UMass spokesman Mark Shelton said this afternoon.

Researchers exploring connections between breast cancer and environmental exposures will use state funds to study chemicals found in households and the workplace.

The University of Massachusetts at Lowell, the Silent Spring Institute -- a nonprofit that researches the links between health and the environment -- and the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition will get $250,000 earmarked by the legislature for the project.

The Silent Spring Institute will continue its work examining household dust for links to cancer, UMass-Lowell will pursue the effects of chemicals at work and at home, and the advocacy coalition will publicize findings they reach, Richard Clapp, adjunct professor in the school's School of Health and Environment, said in an interview.

“We’re trying to lay the groundwork for innovative work in Massachusetts with new lines of research,” said Clapp, who is also professor of environmental health at Boston University School of Public Health.

University of Massachusetts Medical School cancer biologist Dr. JeanMarie Houghton (left) has won a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Her research focuses on the contribution of stem cells to cancer, in particular how normal stem cells that migrate to an area of chronic infection can develop into cancer cells. The award will extend her five-year National Institutes of Health grant for two years.

Boston University biomedical engineer James J. Collins has won a four-year, $1 million grant from the Ellison Medical Foundation to study the molecular basis of aging and the causes of diseases associated with it, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Rhode Island Hospital in Providence has received a $5 million grant from the National Foundation for Trauma Care to improve its preparedness for public health emergencies.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

A diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease does not automatically mean an end to driving, experts on aging said at an MIT conference today, but because there is no test to determine when people with dementia should no longer get behind the wheel, families need help deciding when to take away the keys.

"All people with Alzheimer's will eventually be unable to drive," said Robert Stern, co-director of Boston University's Alzheimer's Disease Clinical and Research Program. "That does not mean they can't drive early on in the disease. Everyone has a different course. It steals cognitive skills at a different pace."

A Boston group is sharing genetic information from families affected by autism with other researchers to promote understanding of the developmental disorder.

The Autism Consortium, whose members include hospitals, medical schools and universities in the Boston area, will transfer profiles of 500,000 genetic variations found across the genomes of 700 families with two or more children who have autism. The data will be held by the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange, a program of the advocacy organization Autism Speaks. Scientists can apply to the exchange, which gathered DNA from the families. The samples have been scanned for sequences where there are deletions or extra copies of DNA segments. The consortium is sharing the genetic variations it found.

"We returned all of the raw data to AGRE so they can distribute it to any other investigtors who want to begin exploring what may be the genetic underpinnings of autism," Mark Daly, a consortium member from Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said in an interview. "Understanding the genetics underlying a complex disease is not an easy problem to solve. So there's no excuse for hoarding your data when much more can be learned by sharing."

Just as weary but exhilarated Red Sox fans head into the World Series on two days' rest, the New York Times devotes its Science section to the subject of sleep.

“To do science you have to have an idea, and for years no one had one; they saw sleep as nothing but an annihilation of consciousness,” Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, told the Times. “Now we know different, and we’ve got some very good ideas about what’s going on."

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

Opponents of a high-security research laboratory being built by Boston University in the South End criticized the university today for failing to hire more city residents, minorities, and women into construction jobs at the Albany Street site.

A city rule on construction hiring requires contractors to make a good faith effort to assure that at least half of the workforce lives in the city, that a quarter represent minority groups, and that 10 percent are women.

The lab foes, led by the community group Safety Net, charged that BU had betrayed a promise to create jobs for the community. A BU spokesman acknowledged that the university had fallen short of the city benchmarks, but pledged to continue working toward meeting the goals.

The centerpiece of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories will be a Biosafety Level-4 lab, where scientists will have the ability to study the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, anthrax, and plague.

Two local researchers have received government grants to explore the organization and function of the human genome, part of an expansion of a project that already has shown the genome to be far more complex than previously thought.

Dr. Bradley Bernstein of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Zhiping Weng of Boston University are among principal investigators in the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements, or ENCODE, a project funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute. The insititute announced more than $80 million in grants today.

Bernstein has won $4.8 million over four years to study proteins important in DNA packaging in human cells. Weng will receive $1.5 million over three years to identify binding sites in regions of DNA that guide how genes are transcribed.

Three generations of Framingham Heart Study participants have shared their medical information with researchers learning about cardiovascular disease. Now the landmark study's files will be opened to scientists around the world so they can explore the links between genes and disease.

Framingham is the first study in an open-access project launched by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The data come from more than 9,300 Framingham participants who had their DNA tested for 550,000 genetic variations. Researchers will have free access to that genetic information as well as clinical and laboratory test results. Names of the study subjects have been removed.

The Framingham study, sponsored by Boston University School of Medicine, Boston University School of Public Health and the NHLBI, will continue to add information from ongoing research. NHLBI will also add data from other large studies to the new program called SHARe, short for SNP Health Association Resource. SNP stands for single nucleotide polymorphism, which is a kind of genetic variation. Researchers can find out about access to SHARe data at the NIH database of Genotypes and Phenotypes.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

Boston University today named a federal scientist who specializes in the study of the Ebola and Marburg viruses to the number two position at its controversial high-security laboratory being built in Boston's South End.

Thomas W. Geisbert will become associate director of the Biosafety Level-4 Laboratory and related facilities already rising on Albany Street. The high-security lab will allow scientists to work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, anthrax, and plague.

Geisbert comes to BU from a similar position at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where he helps preside over that agency's Biosafety Level-4 lab. When Geisbert joins BU on Oct. 1, he will also have direct responsibility for overseeing the handling and analysis of specimens generated by research projects in the facility, which is underwritten by a $128 million grant from the US government.

BU also announced today that Joan Geisbert, who is married to Thomas W. Geisbert, has been hired to help run the specimen lab. Joan Geisbert, who begins her job at BU on Feb. 1, has worked in Biosafety Level-4 labs for 26 years and most recently has supervised high-security labs at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland.

The BU lab, which is being built on the university's medical school campus, has generated lawsuits and street protests by opponents, who maintain that the facility has no place in a congested urban neighborhood. Foes of the lab have also charged that locating it in the South End imposes an unfair burden on a community with a significant segment of poor and minority residents.

Boston University bioethicist Michael Grodin says in today's Washington Post that organ donation networks can appear too zealous in their efforts to find potential donors.

"It's like they're vultures flying around the hospitals hovering over beds waiting for them to die so they can grab the organs," he told the Post. "That's the impression you get sometimes."

The story traces the more aggressive drive for organ donations to a 2003 federal campaign called the Breakthrough Collaborative. It was designed to boost the number of organs retrieved by the nation's 58 organ-procurement organizations, or OPOs, in light of a growing waiting list for kidneys, livers and other organs.

OPOs defend their practices while condemning a California case in which a surgeon is accused of hastening an organ donor's death, the story said.

"That case appears absolutely to be a case of a transplant recovery surgeon crossing a very clear line that should never be crossed," Thomas Mone, president of the Association of Organ Procurement Organization, told the Post. "Our job is to recover organs and save lives. But we have to do that sensitively, honestly and fairly, keeping the interests of the donors and families in mind. There's often a fine line there, but we make sure we never cross it."

By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff

Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center today announced a strict new conflict-of-interest policy that will place hard limits on interactions between doctors and representatives from medical device makers and pharmaceutical companies.

Robert Restuccia, executive director of the Prescription Project, a Boston-based non-profit that promotes stricter conflict-of-interest policies nationally, said the university and hospital have adopted a model policy that goes further than many other institutions.

Boston Medical Center and the medical school, for example, now ban all clinicians from accepting personal gifts from industry, and meals funded by companies -- often a staple at teaching hospitals -- are no longer allowed on campus. Also, doctors who serve on committees that pick which drugs the hospital will use, are not allowed to have any financial relationship, including consulting agreements, with companies that might benefit from those decisions.

Attached to a steerable needle, miniaturized instruments
such as this tissue-nibbling device (shown next to a
sharpened pencil) could be used in minimally invasive
heart surgery.

Researchers at Boston University and Children's Hospital Boston have won a five-year, $5 million grant to make complex heart repairs possible without open-heart surgery.

Working with California medical instrument maker Mircofabrica Inc., Pierre Dupont of BU's School of Engineering and cardiac surgeon Dr. Pedro del Nido of Children's will develop robotic instruments that can reach the heart through small incisions in the chest and heart walls.

"The goal is to develop techniques where we are not only making just small incisions but actually working to repair defects inside the heart while the heart is still beating," del Nido said in an interview.

A single variant of a gene is linked to an increased risk for both rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, providing support for the idea that common risk genes and disease pathways are involved in many autoimmune disorders, authors including researchers at the Broad Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Biogen Idec report.

Giving critically ill patients recombinant human erythropoetin did not reduce the need for red-blood-cell transfusions, but it may reduce deaths in trauma patients, according to an article by researchers including doctors from the Boston University School of Medicine and University of Massachusetts Medical School.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The state's top judge this morning characterized the campaign to stop construction of a high-security laboratory in Boston's South End as a not-in-my-backyard squabble.

The remarks from Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court came during arguments in a case filed by 10 Boston residents who sued to block the Biosafety Level-4 laboratory being built on Boston University's medical school campus. The lab, a cornerstone in the Bush administration's effort to combat bioterrorism, will give scientists the ability to work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and anthrax.

A contingent of residents living near the lab have spent more than four years battling the facility, which is already rising along Albany Street and expected to open in the fall of 2008. The neighbors have argued that the lab's work will put their lives at risk and that BU and the National Institutes of Health, which is underwriting the facility's construction, unfairly located it in an area with a high population of minority and low-income residents.

The Fenway Institute at Fenway Community Health has won a five-year, $1 million government grant to study the health of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered population.

Researchers will look at the transmission of HIV, characteristics of families and households, and the demographics of health, illness, disability and death among LGBT people. The funding comes from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Seven Massachusetts researchers have won grants from a new government program to study how genes and the environment interact, the National Institutes of Health announced today.

Through the Genes, Environment and Health Initiative, researchers will study the genetics of such diseases as diabetes, cancer, heart disease and tooth decay. To learn about the environmental component, scientists will develop ways to monitor personal exposure, whether to toxins or to physical activity.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, led by Stacey Gabriel, will receive $3.8 million to become one of two genotyping centers for the initiative. The other is at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Dr. Robert A. Greenes says it's hard to leave Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital, after 40 years, but the chance to build a new biomedical informatics program in Arizona is too good to pass up.

"Harvard and the Brigham have provided a wonderful environment for my professional activity," he said in an e-mail message last night. "My decision to leave Boston after many years of working closely with so many wonderful colleagues was not easy but became irresistible as I learned more about what the opportunity could be."

Greenes, a Harvard Medical School radiology professor and program director of a Harvard-MIT training program in medical informatics, is joining Arizona State University, whose faculty teaches medical students at the new Phoenix branch of the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

He is the second prominent biomedical informatics researcher to leave Harvard for a new program, following Stephen Wong, who took about 20 lab staffers with him to Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Houston.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

A federal health agency ruled this morning that a high-security research laboratory being built in Boston's bustling South End does not present a serious threat to the neighborhood's safety and that it would not have been safer if located in a less-congested area.

The decision from the National Institutes of Health removed another barrier to the 2008 opening of the Boston University lab, where scientists will be able to study the deadliest germs in the world, including Ebola, anthrax, and plague.

Three studies by Boston authors appear in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association.

A study from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found that a diet high in meat, fat, sweets and refined grains may be associated with a higher risk of colon cancer recurrence and death in people who had surgery and chemotherapy to treat stage III colon cancer.

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital report that people with diabetes have an increased risk of death in the first month and first year after they have a heart attack or unstable angina compared with people who have these acute coronary syndromes but do not have diabetes.

A new measure of a lipid protein ratio is no better at predicting coronary heart disease than traditional methods of measuring cholesterol, Boston University School of Medicine investigators from the Framingham Study say.

Boston University graduate student Ogi Ogas (on right in photo) used his knowledge of how the brain works to prepare for "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," as he described in this Globe story last year. He was one answer away from winning it all, but he did take home $500,000. In a quiz show airing at 7 p.m. Sunday he gets another chance.

The cognitive neuroscience student is competing for a smaller prize -- $100,000 -- on the Game Show Network's Grand Slam, which pits 16 game show players in head-to-head confrontations. All of the contestants except Ogas are either game show champions or million-dollar winners on "Jeopardy," "Millionaire" or other game shows. Ranked ninth, Ogas faces 8th-seed Nancy Christy (at left), who won $1 million on "Millionaire."

In an interview, he wouldn't say how the match turns out. He plans to watch the previously taped show with friends at home in the Leather District, where he bought a condo with his "Millionaire" winnings.

After spending three decades in Boston, sexual-medicine expert Dr. Irwin Goldstein (left) has landed in San Diego, where he is creating a center to treat and study sexual problems at Alvarado Hospital, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.

Goldstein, 57, left Boston University School of Medicine and the 5,000-patient Institute for Sexual Medicine two years ago. The urologist told the Globe at the time that he lost the school's support for a more multidisciplinary approach in the institute he founded.

Unlike professors elsewhere, faculty at BU's School of Medicine have no tenure, allowing them to be dismissed at any point, the Globe story said.

"The medical center was unable to reach an acceptable agreement with Dr. Goldstein and therefore decided not to continue his contract," BU spokeswoman Ellen Berlin said in May 2005.

Two scientists from Boston University and a Harvard-MIT program have engineered an organism to fight bacterial biofilms.

Writing in the online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Timothy K. Lu and James J. Collins report that they created a bacteriophage -- a virus that infects bacterial cells -- that releases an enzyme to attack both the bacterial cells in the biofilm and to disperse the biofilm itself.

Bacteria commonly live in biofilms. They can be found in dental plaque or water pipes or on medical devices. A source of infection and contamination, biofilms pose a particular problem when they are resistant to antibiotics.

Bacteriophages work in a different way than antibiotics when they infect bacterial cells. The authors say that adding enzymes makes the bacteriophages much more effective than previous efforts that didn't incorporate enzymes.

Lu is from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and Collins is from BU's Center for BioDynamics.

On Nurse at small, Betsy Baumgartner, who works at a Boston teaching hospital, wonders about the safety of surgeons operating without enough sleep.

"We've all had a rough night where we weren't able to sleep, or where our kid was sick and kept us up the whole night," she writes. "Surgeons go through these same things, and they show up to work the next morning running on empty with only their Starbucks as fuel. Just like you and me. The one difference is that they are about to cut someone open."

On Healthy Children, pediatrician Dr. Steven Parker of Boston Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine votes no on testing kids' cholesterol levels.

"I'm concerned that the testing will imply to some parents that their obese child with a normal cholesterol level should not be a concern and, alternatively, others will become unduly overwrought about their perfectly healthy child with a high number," he writes. "Seems to me a set-up for both unwarranted reassurance and needless anxiety."

On WBUR's CommonHealth, Michael V. Sack, president and CEO of Hallmark Health, asks if there will be enough primary care physicians to take care of people gaining health insurance under the new healthcare law.

"Across the state, too few primary care physicians are signing up for participation in the MassHealth and Commonwealth Care plans because of low reimbursement," he writes.

Relatively few women are department heads or full professors at the four medical schools in Massachusetts. And Dr. Karen Antman of the Boston University School of Medicine is the only female dean.

This lack of women in leadership roles in academic medicine is no longer a pipeline problem, now that medical schools admit equal numbers of men and women, says Dr. Linda Pololi of Brandeis University, who is leading a study of the issue.

The answer to women's persistent under-representation must lie elsewhere, she said in a recent interview. "Something in the system impedes their progress toward taking leadership positions."

Here are the percentages of women in leadership positions at Massachusetts medical schools and how they compare with all 125 medical schools nationwide, according to 2005 data from the Association of American Medical Colleges provided by Pololi:

Deans
BU 100%
Harvard 0%
Tufts 0%
UMass 0%
US 13%

Chairs of clinical science departments
BU 11%
Harvard 10%
Tufts 8%
UMass 7%
US 8%

Chairs of basic science departments
BU 0%
Harvard 33%
Tufts 29%
UMass 0%
US 13%

Full professors
BU 19%
Harvard 12%
Tufts 11%
UMass 19%
US 14%

Proposals to build new devices to help premature infants, to inject medicine without breaking the skin and to guide surgeons operating on the brain were among projects to win $5 million in grants from the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, the consortium announced today.

CIMIT, composed of Boston-area teaching hospitals and engineering schools, made 37 grants that range from $40,000 to $100,000. Twenty-two have military applications, acording to CIMIT, which receives support from the US Department of Defense as well as its members.

Dr. Riccardo Barbieri of Massachusetts General Hospital won a grant to develop a computational tool based on a premature infant's heartbeat to predict episodes when they stop breathing.

Mark Horenstein of Boston University will demonstate a way to inject medications through the skin using nanoparticles, leaving no wound behind.

Dr. Nobuyuki Nakajima of Brigham and Women's Hospital will work to improve how instruments can be navigated to diagnose and treat brain injury or disease.

"Our goal ... is to bring life-changing technology to patients as quickly as possible," Dr. John Parrish, CIMIT founder and director and Vietnam War battlefield surgeon, said in a statement. "We are especially aware of the needs of soldiers wounded on the battlefield."

Boston researchers are among neurologists and neuroscientists delivering more than 1,000 presentations and poster sessions at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. The weeklong conference has drawn more than 10,000 people, the group said.

Local presenters include Dr. Miguel Hernan of the Harvard School of Public Health, who is presenting his study showing that depression may be an early symptom of Parkinson's disease.

Evan L. Thacker, also of the Harvard School of Public Health, was scheduled to describe research exploring how moderate to vigorous exercise might be associated with the risk of developing Parkinson's disease.

Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen of Harvard Medical School was slated to talk about his study's conclusion that sleep not only protects memories from outside interferences, but also helps strengthen them.

By Alice Dembner, Globe Staff

Daily doses of the anti-inflammatory drugs Aleve or Celebrex did not prevent Alzheimer's in a national study published online today that included 424 people in the Greater Boston area.

But the government-funded study is far from definitive, because the drugs were given to people late in life and because the study was halted midway amid concerns that the drugs were linked to higher rates of heart disease.

The lack of a prevention benefit wasn't the only bad news in the study. There were hints that the pills "may even accelerate the appearance of the disease," said Dr. Robert C. Green of Boston University, who directed the Boston arm of the study.

The study, designed to last seven years, was stopped in its fourth year. Many of the participants had only taken the drugs for two years.

The results, published in the journal Neurology, were based on 2,128 people age 70 or older with a family history of Alzheimer's.

Researchers still hold out the possibility that other anti-inflammatory drugs, taken at an earlier age, might prevent dementia, but they urged individuals not to take these pills for that purpose.

Boston University's Albert and Jessie Danielsen Institute has won one of two Templeton Research Lectures grants for its proposed project "Religious and Psychological Well-being."

The project grants, which last up to four years and provide up to $500,000, are designed to promote discussion about science and religion through interdisciplinary study groups and annual lectureships, according to the Metanexus Institute, the organization that makes the grants for the Templeton Foundation. Johns Hopkins University won the other grant for 2007.

Robert C. Neville, executive director of the Danielsen Institute at BU and a professor of philosophy, religion and theology, said he will form a research group that includes people from psychology, medicine, education, religious studies and theology.

At at time when federal funding for scientific research is harder to come by, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is opening up a competition today to select 50 new investigators who will share $600 million for biomedical research.

For the first time scientists can apply directly to become HHMI investigators rather than needing their institutions to nominate them.

The researchers must belong to eligible institutions. In Massachusetts, 10 qualify: Boston Biomedical Research Institute, Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis University, Harvard Medical School and associated hospitals, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, MIT, Tufts University School of Medicine, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Zoila Torres Feldman, an ardent advocate for expanding access to high-quality health care, is leaving as chief executive officer of Great Brook Valley Health Center in Worcester after 26 years.

Zoila Torres Feldman

Feldman, 62, said her Oct. 1 departure is "absolutely not" a retirement. She has accepted no specific position but said she is passionate about addressing the ethnic and racial disparities that persist in health care.

"There are too many challenges in health care I’d like to participate in," she said in an interview. "I’d like to do some new things."

Harvard Medical School, is again the top medical school in the United States, according to the annual rankings compiled by U.S. News & World Report. Harvard has led the rankings since 1990, when they began.

Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis and University of California -- San Francisco followed in the top five.

Boston University ranked 34th, Tufts University was 47th and the University of Massachusetts came in 49th out of 125 U.S. medical schools.

The standings were based on eight measures, including surveys of medical school deans and residency program directors, as well as 2006 research funding from the National Institutes of Health. Harvard received $1.17 billion from NIH that year, BU pulled in $170 million, UMass had $118 million and Tufts drew $61 million, according to U.S. News.

UMass Medical School's primary care education program ranked 11th. The University of Washington led that category.

Caesarean sections performed without a medical reason result in longer hospital stays, higher costs and more than twice as many rehospitalizations as vaginal deliveries, according to a study by researchers at Boston University's School of Public Health published in the March issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

"There are trade-offs in having an elective caesarean," Eugene R. Declercq, the study’s lead author, told the New York Times. "Among them are longer recovery time and a higher chance of being rehospitalized, which shouldn’t be surprising — it’s major surgery."

On SciBos, Corie Lok takes issue with the Globe's front-page coverage of the evacuation of a Boston University biomedical lab on Tuesday.

"Even though the fire department said no contamination occurred, all the proper precautions were taken and that the smoke probably was due to an electrical issue, the specter this incident conjured up of disease-causing bacteria being unleashed on the community and the image of men in protective suits are enough to make front-page news in this town," she writes. "Doesn’t exactly help BU’s image. Doesn’t really help science’s image either, I think."

On Running a Hospital, Paul Levy asks, "If you are a patient in an academic medical center, who is watching over you in the middle of the night?"

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The state Supreme Judicial Court will decide whether construction of a high-security research laboratory in the South End should continue, the latest twist in the ongoing fight to block the Boston University lab.

In an action made public today, the state's highest court said it would directly hear the controversial case, bypassing an appeals court that had been scheduled to consider the matter. The SJC set a hearing for September, speeding up the legal process.

Ten neighbors of the lab, already being built on Albany Street, sued in state court to block the facility, where researchers will work with the world's deadliest germs. They also sued in federal court, blasting BU for locating the lab in a densely populated neighborhood with a significant number of low-income and racially diverse residents.

Firefighters evacuated hundreds of people from a 10-story Boston University biomedical research building yesterday after white smoke wafted through a laboratory that houses vials of highly infectious bacteria, renewing concern about the danger of studying potentially deadly pathogens in a densely populated area.

Massachusetts is poised to become the first state to require that all adults have health insurance that includes prescription drug coverage.

The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are so common that depressed people who have never faced trauma usually qualify for the condition, according to a new study that raises questions about whether thousands of Iraq war veterans as well as civilians are getting the right diagnosis and treatment for their emotional problems.

When the 700 doctors at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates and four other physician groups chose a name three years ago for their new umbrella organization, HealthOne Care System, they thought they picked a winner. The problem was the name was too good. Another group already had claimed it -- a hospital network in Denver called HealthONE.

A new approach to organ donation is saving the lives of more waiting patients but, some say, it risks sacrificing the interests of the donors, according to a story in Sunday's Washington Post.

In "donation after cardiac death," surgeons remove organs within minutes after the heart stops beating and doctors declare a patient dead, the story says. Most organs are removed only after doctors have declared a patient brain dead.

Two Boston doctors and a woman whose son became a donor at Massachusetts General Hospital voice their opinions.

"People are dying on the waiting list," said Francis L. Delmonico, a transplant surgeon at Harvard Medical School, speaking on behalf of the United Network for Organ Sharing. More than 95,000 Americans are waiting for organs. "This is vital as an untapped source of organ donors."

Nancy Erhard's 25-year-old son, Bo, became a DCD donor at Mass. General in November 2005 after a burst artery caused devastating brain damage, the story said.

"There was no hope. He would never regain conscious thought," Erhard said. "This gave his life so much more meaning in the end because he was able to help so many others."

Michael A. Grodin, director of Boston University's Bioethics and Human Rights Program, said the practice is troubling.

"The image this creates is people hovering over the body trying to get organs any way they can," he said. "There's a kind of macabre flavor to it."

(David L. Ryan Globe staff photo)
Boston University medical students Miriam Shiferaw (left) and Nawal Momani check letters together to find out where they have been accepted for their residency, during the Match Day at BU Medical School in Boston.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Now they know.

Graduating medical students ripped open envelopes at noon today that contained their futures. Known as "Match Day," today was the day 15,206 medical school seniors across the country learned where they will be going and what specialty they'll embark on once they get there.

Nationally, 94 percent of students trained in the United States got their first choices, according to the National Resident Matching Program, which has coordinated the preferences of medical students with residency programs since 1952.

Massachusetts' four medical schools -- Boston University School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Tufts University School of Medicine and University of Massachusetts Medical School -- took part in the ritual. They did not all have data today on who's going where.

If you could pick your parents, you'd be wise to choose ones who live long and have few risk factors for heart disease. But don't lose hope if your parents died young -- you still can lower those risks yourself, researchers from the Framingham Heart Study say.

Results published in tomorrow's Archives of Internal Medicine show that middle-aged children who had at least one parent who lived to age 85 were less likely to develop high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease than people whose parents died younger.

Other research has connected longevity to heredity, but this multigenerational study showed that having fewer risk factors for cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in Americans, was an advantage that lasted. The Framingham Heart Study has followed generations of residents since 1948 to study cardiovascular and other chronic diseases. This latest analysis included 5,124 people who were examined every 4 to 8 years from 1971 to the present.

"If you weren't lucky enough to choose your parents, this study shows how some of destiny is determined by risk factors we already know about and know to be modifiable," study co-author Dr. Daniel Levy, director of the Framingham Heart Study and a member of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, said in an interview. "We know that if we eliminate high blood pressure, eliminate high cholesterol and then cigarette smoking, we would eradicate the overwhelming majority of cardiovascular disease in the United States."

Children's Hospital Boston has won a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to bring mental-health services to Somali refugee families, the hospital announced today.

The $300,000 award will fund mental health programs at the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester over the next three years. The project is expected to serve 700 people, including children and their families, the hospital statement said.

The Boston University Graduate School of Social Work is offering two full scholarships to their Master’s of Social Work program to Somali individuals who will provide services as part of their training during the three-year grant period.

Other organizations involved are the Boston Public Schools, Refugee and Immigrant Assistance Center, Somali Development Center, The Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention, The Boston Healing Landscape Project and the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights.

Dr. Marc A. Camacho, instructor in radiology at Harvard Medical School, has been named chief of the newly established section of emergency radiology in the department of radiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Camacho received his medical degree from the University of South Florida College of Medicine and a masters of science degree in biomedical engineering from Boston University. He comes to Beth Israel from Virginia Commonwealth University Health System/Medical College of Virginia Hospital in Richmond, Va., where he was chief of the emergency radiology section and an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Exercise makes no difference for the risk of osteoarthritis of the knee, Dr. David T. Felson and colleagues at Boston University School of Medicine report in the February issue of Arthritis Care and Research.

They studied 1,279 people from the Framingham Offspring cohort, beginning in the early 1990s. The results showed no relationship between recreational walking, jogging or other activity and developing knee osteoarthritis. Even in overweight patients who were at higher risk for osteoarthritis, exercise didn't raise or lower the risk.