Melton as 'Person of the Year'?

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

Harvard cell biologist Douglas Melton is in the running for Time's Person of the Year, at least according to the magazine's online poll.

His current 21,000-plus votes place him far behind President-elect Barack Obama, who has garnered about a half-million votes. Melton, whose research targets diabetes, even trails everyone's favorite Sarah Palin impersonator, Tina Fey, and Olympic champion Michael Phelps, not to mention Senator Hillary Clinton. Palin herself is seventh, by the way, after genomic pioneer J. Craig Venter.

But when rated 1 to 10, Melton scores a 9.

Of course, the editors will be making their own choice, even though they trolled for candidates on YouTube. They'll announce the winner in the Dec. 29 issue, on sale Dec. 19.

Depression is a risk factor for heart disease and has also been linked to repeat heart attacks or strokes in patients recovering from these serious events. But new research suggests that it's a lack of exercise by people with depression that is to blame.

Researchers led by Dr. Mary A. Whooley at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco found that patients with symptoms of depression were 50 percent more likely to have heart failure, heart attacks, strokes, or die compared with patients without depressive symptoms. After accounting for other illnesses they had, the depressed group's risk was 31 percent higher than in nondepressed patients.

But when differences in behaviors such as smoking, drinking, and physical activity were excluded, the link between depression and cardiovascular events faded away.

Physical inactivity was associated with a 44 percent higher rate of cardiovascular events.

The study in the Journal of the American Medical Association followed more than 1,000 heart patients for almost five years.

Breast cancer rates were higher in women after they began having mammograms every two years compared with women who had the screening tests less often, Norwegian researchers report. The findings raise the provocative possibility that some of the cancers caught on mammograms might have gone away if they were unknown and untreated.

Writing in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers led by Dr. Per-Henrik Zahl of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health say they based their "spontaneous remission" suggestion on an analysis of breast cancer rates among two groups of more than 100,000 women who were from 50 to 64 years old at the time of the study.

One group had mammograms every two years from 1996 through 2001 and a similar control group had no mammograms from 1992 until 1996.

The authors said it "appears that some breast cancers detected by repeated mammographic screening would not persist to be detectable by a single mammogram at the end of six years. . . . This raises the possibility that the natural course of some screen-detected invasive breast cancers is to spontaneously regress."

ELIZABETH COONEY