Two years ago, Michael J. Fox had surgery to remove a benign tumor on his spinal cord. The actor and activist, who had been living with Parkinson’s disease for nearly three decades, had to learn to walk all over again. Four months later, he fell in the kitchen of his Upper East Side home and…
This is the time of year when seniors face a barrage of messages about their Medicare coverage — everything from insurance companies’ direct mail blitzes and television ads to the federal government’s emails and mailings. All of it focuses on the fall open enrollment season, the annual opportunity to change coverage. From Oct. 15 until…
As Alzheimer’s disease lowers its veil over my father, one of the few ways to penetrate through his fog is music. Luckily, he prepared for that decades ago by encouraging my love of singing. As a child, I was classically trained as an opera singer. My career took me in the direction of words rather…
When my 15-year-old son was given a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at age 7, I was told that it was a lifelong chronic condition. So I felt a little bit hopeful when a study published last winter in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics said that “an estimated 30 percent to 60…
Each year, health care practitioners at Brigham and Women’s Hospital place over a million orders through the electronic health records (EHR) system. Even though studies indicate that practitioners place more than 99.9 percent of orders for the correct patients, researchers at the Brigham analyzed that remaining 0.1 percent to determine and address the root causes…
A clinical study involving 601 patients in Italy and Spain suggests that the JAK inhibitor drug baricitinib may enhance survival rates of patients with severe COVID-19, primarily by blunting the runaway immune inflammation known as “cytokine storm.” While the authors are careful to note that their study was not a fully randomized trial with a…
As almost any new parent will attest, the issue of infant sleep can be a nightmare. But the challenges and consequential health effects of infant sleep problems may, like so many other health disparities, disproportionately affect families of different racial/ethnic backgrounds and household socioeconomic statuses. A new study led in part by researchers from Brigham…
The turning point for people with COVID-19 typically comes in the second week of symptoms. As most people begin to recover, a few others find it increasingly difficult to breathe and wind up in the hospital. It has been theorized that those whose lungs begin to fail are victims of their own overactive immune systems.…
BOSTON – A public health strategy that combines contact tracing and community-based screening with isolation and quarantine centers can substantially reduce infections, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 while being cost-effective in low-and-middle-income countries like South Africa, a study by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has found. In a paper published in The Lancet Global Health, the…
It’s a decision being made thousands of times over inside hospitals all around the country: is it time to place a patient struggling to breathe on a ventilator? For all of the attention ventilators have received during the COVID-19 pandemic, deciding when to place patients on them–and when to take them off–is complex. Michigan Medicine…