When Sasha Costanza-Chock goes through airport security, it is an unusually uncomfortable experience. Costanza-Chock, an MIT associate professor, is transgender and nonbinary. They use the pronouns they/them, and their body does not match binary norms. But airport security millimeter wave scanners are set up with binary, male/female configurations. To operate the machine, agents press a…
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Researchers at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Wisconsin have demonstrated that using artificial intelligence to analyze CT scans can produce more accurate risk assessment for major cardiovascular events than current, standard methods such as the Framingham risk score (FRS) and body-mass index (BMI). More than 80 million body CT scans are…
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Boston, Mass. — Commonly known as the breast cancer genes, the BRCA gene family plays a role in repairing damaged DNA. Inherited mutations in the genes BRCA1 or BRCA2 raise the risk of developing breast, ovarian, prostate and other cancers. Led by clinician-researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a first-of-its-kind study provided new…
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New Haven, Conn. — People can carry hazardous compounds from cigarette smoke that cling to their bodies and clothes and then release those compounds into non-smoking environments — exposing people nearby to cigarettes’ adverse effects, a new study shows. For the last decade, third-hand smoke has been described as the residual contamination from cigarette smoking…
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BALTIMORE, MD — March 4, 2020 — Using a combination of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to target and sample suspicious prostate tissue along with a standard prostate biopsy is significantly more likely to detect the most aggressive prostate cancers than standard biopsy alone. This finding, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, could…
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Psychological stress has been proposed as a risk factor for melanoma, but clinical evidence is limited. A recent British Journal of Dermatology study funded by the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology looked for a potential link between the death of a partner, which is one of the most stressful life events, and melanoma. The…
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Smoking doubles the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis and continuing to smoke after being diagnosed has negative effects on patients. In an Arthritis Care & Research study of patients with rheumatoid arthritis who smoked, certain healthcare factors were linked with a higher likelihood that patients would quit smoking. In the study that included 507 patients…
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New research indicates that a prior induced abortion poses only a very small risk of negative effects on births from subsequent pregnancies, but the risk is higher if the abortion is performed later in the pregnancy. The Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica study included 418,690 first-time mothers with singleton births between 1996 and 2013 in…
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In an Acta Paediatrica study, exclusive breastfeeding for the first 3 months was linked with a lower risk of respiratory allergies and asthma when children reached 6 years of age. In the study of 1,177 mother-infant pairs, a third of the children were exclusively breastfed until the age of 3 months. By the age of…
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In the past two decades, death rates after liver transplantation have dropped by more than half in the UK, according to a recent analysis of almost 10,000 liver transplant recipients published in BJS (British Journal of Surgery). During this time period, survival over the first 3 years has improved to 83.1% in 2012-2016 (from 71.7%…
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