Boston engineers are joining forces with the nation's largest healthcare system to incorporate lessons learned from other industries into daily patient care, including ways to prevent the kind of safety lapses that could expose patients to potential infection.

Northeastern University will lead one of four collaborations with the Veterans Affairs healthcare systems designed to make care more safe, effective, efficient, and reliable. Through the New England Healthcare Engineering Partnership, engineers from Northeastern will work with the eight hospitals and 37 outpatient clinics that make up the New England Veterans Affairs healthcare system. Grants and matching funds of $3.4 million per year from the VA will support the New England effort, which is based in Boston, for an initial three-year period. MIT and Worcester Polytechnic Institute will also participate.

"Industrial engineers work on improving processes," partnership executive director James Benneyan said. He is a professor of industrial and mechanical engineering at Northeastern and a fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge. "We're the guys doing Six Sigma at GE and the Toyota Production System. The VA already has one of the best healthcare systems and certainly the best information and electronic medical records systems. This is a huge opportunity."

An experimental device designed to help paralyzed people control computer cursors, robotic arms, or even wheelchairs just by thinking about moving them will be tested in a new hospital trial after its private-sector sponsor's withdrawal.

The pilot BrainGate 2 trial, funded by federal grants and led by doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital working with scientists at Brown University and the Providence VA Medical Center, is recruiting up to 15 participants who have become quadriplegics after a spinal cord injury, a brain stem stroke, or because of ALS, muscular dystrophy, or another neurological disorder, the collaborative said today.

The researchers hope to learn more about a system whose preliminary trial, supported by the former Cyberkinetics Inc. of Foxborough, showed promise in translating thoughts into movement. The system works by decoding brain signals detected by a sensor implanted in the motor cortex, the part of the brain that governs movement. Signals are then sent to an external device, such as a computer cursor, which then moves in response.

More than a third of Americans take aspirin every day to ward off heart disease and stroke, based on its power to prevent blood clots that can trigger heart attacks or strokes. But in some people aspirin can be harmful, too, if the same blood-thinning properties lead to bleeding in the stomach or intestines.

A team of researchers report in tomorrow's Annals of Internal Medicine that lower doses of aspirin appeared to be equally effective and safer compared with higher aspirin doses.

Updated guidelines from the US Preventive Services Task Force also appear in the journal, recommending that aspirin's risks be weighed against a patient's likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease. The advice also reflects aspirin's different effects in men and women.

"For many patients, probably just one baby aspirin a day is sufficient," co-author Dr. Deepak Bhatt, a cardiologist at VA Boston Healthcare System and Brigham and Women's Hospital, said in an interview. "It was just as effective as a higher dose and with perhaps less bleeding."

Hopes that taking vitamins and other supplements might cut the risk of cancer took another blow in two new studies published today in the early online version of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

One large, randomized clinical trial led by Dr. J. Michael Graziano of Brigham and Women's Hospital found that middle-aged men who took vitamin E or vitamin C for about eight years did not have a lower risk of developing prostate cancer or other kinds of cancer compared to similar men who took placebos.

Another large trial from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center studying the effect of selenium and vitamin E on cancer risk was halted early when neither supplement showed any benefits to the men taking it. Final results told the same story: Selenium or vitamin E, taken alone or together, did not reduce the risk of prostate or other cancers in men at least 50 years old.

"It may be time to give up the idea that the protective influence of diet on prostate cancer risk — which is clearly observed in migrant studies and in populations transitioning to a Western diet — can be emulated by isolated dietary molecules given alone or in combination to middle-aged and older men," Dr. Peter H. Gann of the University of Illinois at Chicago writes in an editorial published with the two studies.

Post-traumatic stress disorder may stem from a combination of pre-existing vulnerability to stress and damage to the brain caused by exposure to a traumatic event, Boston researchers say based on studies of Vietnam veterans and their identical twins.

Some brain abnormalities have been found in people with PTSD, but researchers haven't known whether they were signs of PTSD or risk factors for it. Dr. Roger K. Pitman and his colleagues from Massachusetts General Hospital and the VA Medical Center in Manchester, NH., tried to answer the question by studying 130 combat veterans and their twins who had not seen combat. They present their findings today at a meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.

Neurological exams and MRIs showed that the combat veterans had more mental problems than their brothers, but both twins also shared some impairments in neurological function, including problems related to the part of the brain critically involved in the fear response.

The combat veterans showed other brain changes -- atrophy in an area linked to decision making -- that their twins did not have. Researchers suggested that a stressful psychological event, or the stress of having PTSD itself, was responsible for the difference.

"We have identified several abnormalities that combat veterans share with their combat-unexposed twins that must represent risk factors. They could not have been acquired as a result of combat since their twins also have them," Pitman said in a conference call with reporters. But "traumatic stress can alter both brain structure and brain function. Our findings tend to refute the suggestion that people with PTSD would have probably had [psychological symptoms] even if they hadn't been exposed to a traumatic event."

A national organization that offers free housing to family members whose loved ones are being treated at veterans’ hospitals will break ground on a new building in Boston next week.

Fisher House Boston will accommodate 20 families of patients at the West Roxbury VA Hospital. Scheduled to be finished next fall, the residence will have suites with a common kitchen, dining room, laundry, and library.

There are 42 Fisher Houses across the country serving 10,000 families, according to the Fisher House Foundation.

Patients who were taking drugs to lower their blood pressure before, during, and after operations unrelated to their hearts had higher rates of heart attacks and death than similar patients who were not taking the drugs, a study shows. The new findings add to an already complex picture of the best way to protect patients from heart complications after non-cardiac surgery.

A team led by Dr. Haytham M. S. Kaafarani and Dr. Kamal M.F. Itani of the Veterans Affairs Boston Health Care System reports in the Archives of Surgery on patients who took beta-blockers such as atenolol or metoprolol around the time that they had surgery at a Houston VA hospital in 2000.

Preventing cardiac complications in patients with coronary artery disease or risk factors for it has been the focus of intense research, they write, and guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association recommend beta-blockers for high-risk patients having surgery, particularly vascular procedures. The authors set out to explore the effect of beta-blockers among patients at all levels of cardiac risk.

A consortium of Boston-area hospitals and universities has added a new member and won a grant to improve inhalation therapy.

The VA Boston Healthcare System is the 12th member of the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology. The Veterans Affairs system cares for about 65,000 patients in the Boston area.

Air Liquide, a French supplier of gases and equipment to hospitals and inhalation therapy to patients at home, has given CIMIT a $1.5 million seed grant to create new technologies to deliver treatments for respiratory medical conditions.

A prominent cardiologist is leaving the Cleveland Clinic to join Brigham and Women's Hospital and the VA Boston Healthcare System.

Dr. Deepak L. Bhatt (left), who had been associate director of the cardiovascular coordinating center at the Cleveland Clinic, will become director of the interventional cardiovascular program at the Brigham and chief of cardiology at VA Boston Healthcare. He will also become a senior investigator at the Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction Study Group at the Brigham. He was an undergraduate at MIT, earned his medical degree at Cornell, and is working on a master's degree at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Bhatt is the fifth cardiologist to leave the Cleveland Clinic over the last several months, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The Brigham saw its own flurry of departures last year, some to competitors of the Cleveland Clinic, as this White Coat Notes story details.

“I had a wonderful time at the Cleveland Clinic, a fantastic place from which I would have been happy to retire," Bhatt said in a statement from the Brigham announcing his hiring. He called the opportunity at the Brigham and the VA Boston "too great an opportunity to pass up."

The state's medical school and a veterans' health center are joining forces.

The University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and the Bedford Veterans Administration Medical Center will announce an academic affiliation tomorrow morning at an 11 a.m. news conference at the Bedford facility.

The two institutions said they plan to work together on patient care, education, and research.