On March 21, 2019, the staff at the Penn Memory Center in Philadelphia was scrambling to learn more about an early-morning announcement: Two pharmaceutical companies, Biogen and Eisai, would discontinue their clinical trial of a drug intended to slow the progression of early Alzheimer’s disease. A “futility analysis” had shown that aducanumab, being studied in…
WUHAN, China — The 3-year-old boy was anxiously waiting for yet another round of chemotherapy. Then the new coronavirus outbreak hit, and doctors suddenly turned him away. The boy, Fu Haoran, who has leukemia, is one of many seriously ill people struggling to find urgent, lifesaving treatment and left to fend for themselves as China…
One of best moments of a long, hectic day often comes at the very end, when you fall into bed, pull up the covers and drop off to sleep. Unless, of course, your bedroom is an uninviting mess. A poorly chosen paint color you would rather forget, an uncomfortable rug underfoot and the glare of…
The wall behind Sierra Palantino’s bed is covered with photographs: a bushel of coral- and pearl-colored roses; a bouquet of ruby and pink Mylar balloons; a close-up of a neon sign that says, “all the feels.” In thousands of bedrooms around the world, the same pictures are arranged in a neat collage. Collage kits, as…
We heard the explosion, likely a car bomb. There were many that day. Thirty minutes later, three Humvees came barreling around the corner of nearby buildings with wounded civilians on their hoods and packed inside. They pulled up to our trauma-stabilization point, a makeshift medical unit in an abandoned home on the outer edge of…
More than two years ago, I changed careers from nonprofit to public service. I immediately connected with my employer, who has become a mentor to me, and in other circumstances (him not being my boss), I would consider him a friend. Three months into my tenure, health issues landed me in the hospital. The issue,…
PARIS — The Kanye West fashion revival tour was announced the day before it began, and came with an invitation containing rattlesnake eggs and dried sage. It kicked off Sunday morning in the peeling 19th-century environs of the Bouffes du Nord theater (formerly home of Peter Brook’s International Center for Theater Research) with a rousing…
A new study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, published by Oxford University Press, finds improvements in five-year survival rates for all cancers in young adults. For some cancers, however, there has been little improvement since the 1970s. Over the past several decades, treatment of cancer in adolescents and young adults (people between…
For people living with HIV, any level of alcohol consumption is associated with lower levels of a protein involved in bone formation, raising the risk of osteoporosis, according to a new study by researchers from the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and School of Medicine (BUSM) and published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical…
BOSTON — Students and teachers at the private St. Raphael Academy in Rhode Island had recently returned from a study trip to Italy and two other countries last week when a travel advisory was issued warning of a coronavirus outbreak there. Few were worried, until reports began circling that a school administrator who had gone…