Help for traumatized soldiers

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

A new collaboration of academic and industry researchers, including several at Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Dartmouth, is aimed at helping US soldiers who suffer traumatic injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. Formed by the US Army, the Institute of Regenerative Medicine will devote $85 million to developing products and therapies to repair blast injuries. The work will include stem cells, growth factors, tissue engineering, and transplants, according to an announcement from Mass. General. The effort will be headed up by two groups, one at Rutgers University and the Cleveland Clinic, and the other at Wake Forest University and the University of Pittsburgh. Each will receive $42.5 million.

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 in the Archives of Internal Medicine 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. Previous research has suggested that the diet helps reduce blood pressure, but this study, by Teresa T. Fung of Simmons College and the Harvard School of Public Health, is the first to examine whether it makes a difference in the incidence of heart disease and stroke in healthy people.

After 24 years, the women who most closely followed the DASH diet had a 24 percent lower risk of heart disease than the women whose diets were furthest from the DASH model. Those who ate DASH-like diets had an 18 percent lower risk of stroke than the least-DASH-like group.

"This is a diet that is worth following for just about anybody," Fung said.

Dr. Pamela Hartzband and Dr. Jerome Groopman(below) of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, warn that computers make it too easy for doctors to lose focus on the patients before them. Residents and doctors can cut and paste one another's notes into the record, sacrificing the benefit of fresh eyes looking at a patient and distilling what is most relevant. Lab test results can flood the record with no selectivity on what matters for the current problem.

But the most disturbing effect of digital records happens in the examination room, "to patients who, during their 15-minute clinic visit, watch their doctor stare at a computer screen," the authors write. "We need to make this technology work for us, rather than allowing ourselves to work for it."

A new health-reporting service designed to reach immigrants and non-English speakers was launched Friday by the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

The New England Ethnic Newswire will be free for ethnic media outlets in New England. Plans call for stories to be translated into English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, or Haitian Creole. Its goal is to transmit health information to underserved populations, according to UMass.

ELIZABETH COONEY

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