More friends = better memory

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

Lots of friendships may be a hedge against the memory loss associated with aging, a new Harvard study finds.

Over the six years of the study, people with the most social ties saw their memory decline at less than half the rate of people with the fewest social connections. Social activity appeared to be a particularly strong buffer against memory decline in two groups: people with less than a high school education and people who had vascular conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or stroke.

"Our results suggest that increasing social integration may be an important component of efforts to protect older Americans from memory decline," the authors, including Karen A. Ertel of the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote in the American Journal of Public Health.

Children's Hospital Boston took two top honors on US News & World Report ratings of pediatric hospital specialties. Children's placed first in two of seven categories of care: digestive disorders and heart care and heart surgery, the magazine said. It came in second on general pediatrics, cancer, and neurology and neurosurgery; third in neonatal care; and fourth in respiratory disorders.

Mass. General's children's center was rated 21st in general pediatrics, 27th in digestive disorders, 17th in respiratory disorders and 16th in neonatal care. It did not finish in the top 30 for the other three specialties.

The specialty rankings were based on reputation, outcomes, and other measures such as nursing care and advanced technology. Last fall Children's came in second, behind Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, in a different US News list of pediatric hospitals that included data on mortality, nurse staffing, and advanced care.

Spending more on medical care doesn't mean patients are happier with their care, a survey of Medicare patients shows.

In research led by Floyd J. Fowler of the University of Massachusetts-Boston, more than 2,000 Medicare patients around the country were asked by phone and mailed questionnaire whether their needs were met, what they thought about the quality of their care as outpatients, and how they would rate their overall medical care.

People living in regions with high rates of medical spending got more medical care than those living in areas where spending rates were lower, judged by Medicare reiumbursement requests for such measures as physician visits and cardiac tests. But when asked how they felt about their treatment, significantly more patients living in lower-expenditure areas gave their quality of care top marks than their peers in high-cost parts of the country.

In an accompanying editorial, Gerard F. Anderson and Dr. Kalipso Chalkidou of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health write that the United States may have reached the point of diminishing returns for spending on medical care. "When patients are able to access good-quality objective information on the risks and benefits of the various treatment alternatives, they do not necessarily choose more aggressive or more costly interventions," they wrote.

Ten scientists from Massachusetts were named Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators, 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.