Tag Archives: medicine

When she considers how far she’s come, Dr. Paula Johnson sees the path that brought her from being a public school kid in Brooklyn to being the first Black woman president of Wellesley College and a tireless advocate for equity in medicine. It’s a path that refined her life’s work …

Dr. Alison Todd describes herself as an “inventor at heart,” but she’s not the sort of inventor who tinkers with gears in a workshop. Instead, she invents new tools in medical diagnostics, developing better ways to identify gene sequences and how they impact disease. Rather than screwdrivers and hammers, her …

Dr. Ann McKee remembers the first time she saw a case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. She’d been staring down at the brain of deceased boxer Paul Pender, and the damage she saw had caught her off guard: “I was looking at the boxer’s brain, and I couldn’t believe …

In a small initial test in people, researchers have shown that a single infusion of a novel gene-editing treatment can reduce cholesterol, the fatty substance that clogs and hardens arteries over time. The experiment was carried out in 10 participants with an inherited condition that causes extremely high LDL, or …

Millions of people over the age of 65 likely have mild cognitive impairment, or MCI—minor problems with memory or decisionmaking that can, over time, turn into dementia. But a pair of recent studies both concluded that 92 percent of people experiencing MCI in the United States are not getting diagnosed …

More than half the world’s population is expected to be overweight or obese by 2035. Excess weight is often linked with cardiovascular disease: It can lead to higher blood pressure or cholesterol, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. Now, the makers of the popular weight-loss drug Wegovy …

Lawrence Faucette, the 58-year-old patient with terminal heart disease who was the second person to receive a genetically engineered pig heart, died on October 30, according to a statement from the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, where the transplant was performed. Faucette received the transplant on September 20 …

Clinical depression is considered one of the most treatable mood disorders, but neither the condition nor the drugs used against it are fully understood. First-line SSRI treatments (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) likely free up more of the neurotransmitter serotonin to improve communication between neurons. But the question of how SSRIs …

In mid-September, the New York Times Opinion section ran a piece with a shocking headline. “In Poland, Testing Women for Abortion Drugs Is a Reality. It Could Happen Here,” the paper breathlessly declared. As I read the piece, I felt a shudder of panic go down my spine. For years, …

It wouldn’t be an overstatement to call the HPV vaccine a medical miracle. “It’s like the gift that keeps giving,” says Mark Jit, a professor of vaccine epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Not only is it the sole vaccine that can prevent cancer, “we discover …