By Neil Munshi, Globe Correspondent

Low-carbohydrate and so-called Mediterranean diets may be more effective than low-fat diets, according to a major new study published in tomorrow’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers studied 322 moderately obese employees of a research center in Israel, randomly assigning them to three diet groups, and providing them with encouragement and instruction over a two-year period.

Members of the low-fat group lost an average of 6.4 pounds, while those in the low-carb and Mediterranean groups lost about 10, said Dr. Meir Stampfer, associate director of the Channing Laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the paper's senior author.

While there has been concern that low-carb diets can be harmful to cardiovascular health, Stampfer said that the participants who followed the low-carb and Mediterranean diets actually had better cardiovascular health than those in the low-fat group. (The study was funded in part by the Dr. Robert C. and Veronica Atkins Foundation, which supports independent scientific research. The late-Robert Atkins was known for promoting a low-carbohydrate diet.)

For people with cholesterol problems, the low-carb diet seemed best; for those at risk for diabetes, the Mediterranean diet provided more health benefits.

"The take-home message should be that we should abandon the idea that low fat diets are the number one way for people to lose weight –- it wasn’t the best diet, it can be helpful for some people, but overall I think the first choice should be the Mediterranean or the low carb," he said.

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.”

Childhood obesity is too pervasive and pressing a problem to attack with piecemeal approaches, the state's top health official said today, vowing to fuse the best ideas of academic and public policy experts with experiments being played out in cities and towns across Massachusetts.

"It can't be addressed as a health issue alone. We have to think big," John Auerbach, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, told a Massachusetts Health Policy Forum meeting this morning. "We pledge that within a year we will come up with a proposal for a statewide plan that will complement all these activities and knit them together."

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."

Dr. Daniel Carlat, a psychiatrist at Tufts University School of Medicine and publisher of The Carlat Psychiatry report, writes in Wired magazine about having his brain scanned by businesses that market functional neuroimaging for anything from diagnosing psychiatric disorders to detecting lies.

"The next day, I'm back at my office. I see my patients, listen to their troubles, try to understand what drives their suffering, and prescribe my nostrums. I deal in brain trouble, and meaningful pictures of what is going on behind their pained expressions would aid my work immeasurably," he writes. "After my last patient, I pull out ... snapshots of my own brain. My journey through the land of functional neuroimaging has helped me to understand how spectacularly meaningless these images are likely to be."

Dr. David J. Shulkin works in two hospitals.

His day job is president and chief executive of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. His night job is president and chief executive of the same institution, but once he began going on administrative rounds after midnight, he saw them as two different hospitals with one address, as different as night and day.

During the daytime, the hospital was fully staffed with administrators, department chairs and nurse managers, but senior managers were mostly absent at night, and staffing levels in general were lower.

The discrepancy is important, he writes in the New England Journal of Medicine, because research shows that outside the weekday, daylight hours from about 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., patients suffer more deaths, hospital readmissions, surgical errors, and medication mistakes.

“We should be establishing equal standards for staffing and service and striving for acceptable outcomes for every hour of the week,” he writes.

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.

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

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.

Tufts-New England Medical Center is changing its name to simply Tufts Medical Center, reflecting growing ties between the hospital and Tufts University. The rebranding will be accompanied by a $1.5 million advertising campaign.

A Middlesex County jury decided that two surgeons, John Ambrosino and Julie White, were negligent in the death of a 30-year-old Chelmsford woman, Shannyn MacPherson, who bled to death after thyroid surgery at Brockton Hospital in 2001. The woman's family was awarded $14.5 million yesterday.

More than 44,000 people have signed up for shares of a $4.85 billion settlement over the withdrawn pain medicine Vioxx, a sign the proposed agreement is likely to go forward, drug maker Merck & Co. announced yesterday.

A Boston medical school is partnering with a Maine hospital to meet a growing need for primary care doctors that is particularly pronounced in rural Maine, the institutions announced today.

Tufts University School of Medicine is creating a program at Maine Medical Center through which medical students will spend their first two years at Tufts in Boston but then move to the 600-bed Portland hospital for all of their third-year clerkships and part of their fourth-year of rotations through different medical specialties. They will graduate with a joint diploma from Tufts and Maine Medical Center.

“This is really intended to address what is not only a New England and state of Maine but really a national shortage, both actual and projected, of physicians that’s particularly acute in rural areas,” Vincent S. Conti, president and CEO of Maine Medical Center said in an interview. “The overall objective is that graduates would be attracted to come back to Maine for residency and having done that would more likely want to stay in a rural setting.”

Karleen Habin, clinical nurse supervisor of the breast oncology research program at Massachusetts General Hospital's cancer center, has won the American Cancer Society's Lane Adams Quality of Life Award. Habin is the author of many published articles on cancer survivorship and symptom management.

Dr. Peter Black, chair of neurosurgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital, has been named president-elect of the World Federation of Neurological Societies. The organization represents about 25,000 neurosurgeons worldwide.

Dr. Julian B. Marsh, a visiting scientist at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University and head of the Lipoprotein Metabolism Section of the Atherosclerosis Research Laboratory at Tufts, has won a lifetime achievement award. The Northeast Lipid Association is honoring him for his career in lipidology, which is the study of fats and cholesterol in human metabolism.

A Cambridge nonprofit formed to improve medical products for children is introducing a new program today to develop safer pediatric medicines, naming the former dean of Dartmouth Medical School to lead the initiative.

The Institute for Pediatric Innovation, founded by former Children's Hospital Boston technology-transfer executive Donald Lombardi, has appointed Dr. Stephen Spielberg (left) principal investigator of the five-year Pediatric Pharmaceutical Reformulation Program. Spielberg, who will remain on the Dartmouth faculty, has experience in industry as well as academic medicine.

Patients who are cared for by specialists in hospital-based medicine -- called hospitalists -- have slightly shorter hospital stays without higher rates of death or readmission, a group of Massachusetts doctors reports.

A study appearing in tomorrow’s New England Journal of Medicine found that, on average, the hospitalists’ patients spent almost half a day less in the hospital than the patients cared for by general internists and family physicians. The cost of their stay was about the same, suggesting that tests and treatments were compressed into the shorter amount of time.

“Even though the differences in length of stay we observed may on first blush appear as small, if you multiply those by the many thousands of admissions to hospitalist care each year, the effect can really be quite large,” lead author Dr. Peter Lindenauer of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield said in an interview. “This benefit did not come at the expense of increased mortality or a higher readmission rate so it didn’t seem to be a tradeoff” in quality of care.

Tufts University School of Medicine will use its largest gift to create a campus center, build a simulation lab where students can practice on a mannequin, and fund scholarships, the university said.

The Jaharis Family Foundation has given the medical school $15 million. Some of the money will go toward half-scholarships for medical students; the amount depends on whether Tufts is able to meet a goal of raising $7.5 million from other donors for the campus center.

Dr. Steven Jaharis is a 1987 graduate of the medical school and his father, Michael Jaharis, is the founder of Kos Pharmaceutical Co.

While chief of cardiovascular research at Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Center, a doctor now at Northwestern tested a stem-cell extraction technique on himself before going ahead with an experiment to transplant patients' stem cells into their hearts, the Chicago Sun Times reports today.

Dr. Douglas Losordo (left, in 2002 Globe photo) moved to Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in December 2006. The pilot study began in 2003 while he was a professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and a cardiologist at St. Elizabeth's.

Losordo did not go on to have stem cells injected via catheter into his heart. Before the small trial to test safety began, he took a drug for five days that boosted production of stem cells in his bloodstream and then had them removed and purified in a process similar to dialysis, the story says.

"I wanted to see what it would be like for patients before I subjected them to the procedure," he told the Sun Times.

The study subjects all had severe angina, or chest pain, that could not be treated by surgery, stents or angioplasty. The group of patients who received stem cells injected into heart muscle that was not receiving blood flow reported fewer angina attacks over six months than the group of patients who underwent catheterization, but did not receive stem cells, the story said.

The results appear in the June 26 issue of Circulation.

Xihong Lin (left), professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, has won a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health.

Lin will develop statistical methods for analyzing cancer research data, including long-term and family data as well as genomic and proteomic information in epidemiological studies and population sciences, NIH said in a statement.

Fewer than 5 percent of NIH-funded investigators are selected to receive the awards.

Current MERIT recipients in Massachusetts and their instituions are:

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: Benjamin G. Neel
CBR Institute for Biomedical Research: Timothy R. Springer
Children's Hospital Boston: Michael Klagsbrun and Bruce R. Zetter
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: Stanley Korsmeyer and David M. Livingston
Harvard: John Blenis, Stephen C. Harrison, Peter M. Howley and Andrew G. Myers
Massachusetts General Hospital: Daniel Haber
MIT: Michael R. Lieber, Stephen J. Lippard and Alexander Rich
Tufts: John M. Coffin
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research: Rudolph Jaenisch

A Boston health educator is taking a page from the antismoking playbook.

Using money from a $430 million Pfizer Inc. settlement of illegal marketing charges, the MGH Institute of Health Professions is launching a program today to teach health care providers about drug industry influence. Just as tobacco company settlement dollars funded stop-smoking campaigns, a total of $21 million and 26 grants were earmarked nationwide to bring information about pharmaceutical marketing to prescribers and consumers.

Elissa Ladd (left), clinical assistant professor at the affiliate of Massachusetts General Hospital, won $399,400 to develop a documentary called "PERx: Prescribing Evidence-Based Therapies" and a companion website. Both are funded through fines paid by the drug giant Pfizer in 2004 when its Warner-Lambert subsidiary pleaded guilty to promoting unapproved uses for the anti-seizure drug Neurontin.

Avandia is the latest example of a drug whose dangerous side effects are rarely on the curriculum when drug companies underwrite education that doubles as advertising, Daniel Carlat (left) writes in an opinion piece in today's New York Times.

A professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and editor in chief of The Carlat Psychiatry Report, Carlat was the subject of a profile by Globe reporter Carey Goldberg last month in Health/Science.

"Because pharmaceutical companies now set much of the agenda for what doctors learn about drugs, crucial information about potential drug dangers is played down, to the detriment of patient care," 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%

By Judy Foreman, Globe Correspondent

Larry Haydu, 56, a licensed clinical social worker from Sudbury, finished yesterday’s marathon in 6 hours and 17 minutes.

Haydu, the subject of a story in today's Globe, trained and ran the marathon despite having had a heart attack 13 years ago.

He was part of a Tufts University research project to see if average people could go from completely sedentary to super fit in about 10 months.

Miriam Nelson, a Tufts nutritionist and the project's chief scientific consultant, said she spoke with Haydu shortly after he finished his run.

"He looked great," she said. I think he was really happy with his race."

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.

Stem cell researchers should consider whether a woman has been pregnant when they interpret results of stem cell transplantation trials, Dr. Diana Bianchi writes in a commentary in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Bianchi, who is chair of research in the department of pediatrics at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts-New England Medical Center, showed in 1996 that fetal cells persist in the blood of women who have been pregnant. In 2004 she reported that these cells appear to act like stem cells, traveling to injured organs in the mother and repairing them.

Fetal cells are "betwixt and between" adult and embryonic cells, she said in an interview. Embryonic stem cells are prized for their ability to become any kind of cell in the body. Adult stem cells are less capable of this kind of differentiation.

"It's not all adult versus embryonic stem cells," she said. "Fetal cells may have qualties that are intermediate between embryonic and adult cells. We are still testing the hypothesis that they have capabilities that may be closer to embryonic stem cells than adult stem cells."

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.

At Tufts University, a multidisciplinary team led by Barry Trimmer is trying to make an ersatz caterpillar that will move around in pretty much the same way as the real thing, a story in today's New York Times reports.

The researchers at The Biomimetic Technologies for Soft-bodied Robots project see the potential to use the squishable, relatively simple creations to find land mines, repair machinery in hard-to-reach spots and even diagnose and treat diseases.

(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.

Dr. Deeb Salem, physician-in-chief at Tufts-New England Medical Center, will receive the American Heart Association’s Paul Dudley White award at the Boston Heart Ball on May 12, the AHA said today. The event is a major fund-raiser for the organization.

Salem, who is also the chairman of the department of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, is being honored for his work as a cardiologist.

Dr. John Schreiber has been named pediatrician-in-chief and chief administrative officer of Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts-New England Medical Center, as well as chairman of the department of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine.

Dr. John Schreiber

Schreiber, who will step into his new role in July, is coming from the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he was pediatrician-in-chief of the University of Minnesota’s Children’s Hospital.

Schreiber received a masters degree in public health and a medical degree from Tulane University. He completed pediatric residency and clinical and research fellowships in infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. He was in the United States Air Force Reserves for 11 years, serving during Desert Storm as a flight surgeon with the 757 Airlift Squadron at Scott Air Force Base.

Increasingly, schools and psychologists assign children labels ranging from Asperger's and attention-deficit disorder to various learning disabilities.

A Washington Post story offers observations on these increasingly specific labels from Phil Schwarz of Framingham, vice president of the Asperger's Association of New England, Robert Sternberg, a psychologist and dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, and Dan Grover, an 18-year-old college student in Boston who co-founded WrongPlanet.net, a site for teens on the autistic spectrum.

The Tufts University Family Medicine Residency Program at Cambridge Health Alliance is one of 14 programs in the country to be chosen for an initiative to improve how doctors are trained to practice family medicine.

The Preparing the Personal Physician for Practice program is a $1.75 million, five-year project funded by the Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors and the American Board of Family Physicians.

"The goal here is to create graduates of family medicine residency programs who are expert clinical decision makers, who use the best technology available and who are able to apply this in a very individualized process to provide personalized care," said Dr. Randy Wertheimer, chief of family medicine at CHA.

The 24 residents in the Tufts-CHA program will be based in a new CHA-Malden Family Medicine Center, reflecting the emphasis on outpatient care, said Dr. Lyle Bohlmann, associate director of the Family Medicine Residency Program.

Dr. Desmond H. Birkett of Lahey Clinic has been named president-elect for 2007 of the Massachusetts chapter of the American College of Surgeons.

Birkett is the chair of general surgery at Lahey and a clinical professor of surgery at Tufts University School of Medicine.

More than half the U.S. population takes multivitamins, but there isn't a lot of evidence that they work, says a Tufts University researcher.

Almost 100 years after the first vitamins were named, we still need better advice on whether to take them, particularly when it comes to multivitamins, which "cry out for greater standardization," said Dr. Irwin Rosenberg, director of the Nutrition and Neurocognition Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging.

"The evidence regarding vitamin use for prevention of chronic disease is still quite rudimentary, especially for multivitamins," he said.

To develop more successful drugs, you have to look at both the winners and the losers. But that means drug companies need to share their gold mine of information on unsuccessful medicines, two researchers from Children's Hospital Boston's Informatics Program say.

Based on information about failed drugs, Dr. Asher D. Schachter and Marco F. Ramoni say they can predict which drugs in early development will be safe and effective.

They make that case in the February Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, saying their model could help save $283 million per approved drug.

"Suppressing negative data harms everyone," Schachter said. "Companies could reduce drug development costs and pass on some of those savings to the consumer."

Boston researchers have won two of 12 two-year contracts from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to study major diseases that affect post-menopausal women. The groups will use blood samples and data from the massive Women's Health Initiative to see what factors are important in predicting and preventing heart disease. The 12 grants will total $18.7 million.

Dr. I-Min Lee, Dr. JoAnn Manson and Dr. Howard D. Sesso of Brigham and Women's Hospital hope to tease out the biochemical mechanisms behind physical activity and lower body fat, looking for the way they reduce the risk of heart disease.

Dr. Alice Lichtenstein of the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University wants to see how certain biomarkers compare with self-reports of food intake as predictors of heart disease.

Lahey Clinic's ties to Tufts University School of Medicine just got stronger through the appointments of two new deans.

Dr. David J. Schoetz, a colon and rectal surgeon, is the first Tufts academic dean at Lahey in Burlington. Dr. David A. Neumeyer is the new dean of admissions at Tufts, chairing the admissions committee he has been on for five years. At Lahey he is co-director of the Sleep Disorders Center.

The relationship between Tufts and Lahey began only about six years ago, said Schoetz, who looks for Lahey's 200 doctors with Tufts faculty appointments to become more closely integrated with the medical school and increase Lahey's research projects.

Tufts has similar posts at its other major academic affiliates, including New England Medical Center, Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Center and Baystate Medical Center.

"These appointments more formally reflect a long-standing and important relationship with Lahey Clinic," Dr. Jeffrey Glassroth, vice dean for academic and clinical affairs at Tufts School of Medicine, wrote in an email.