Good news if you regularly pile your plate high with broccoli and brussels sprouts: cruciferous vegetables may bring special heart benefits. A study published online by The British Journal of Nutrition found that people who ate more cruciferous veggies (which also included cauliflower and cabbage in the study) had less calcium buildup in their aortas (the body’s largest blood vessel) than people who ate less of these veggies. Fatty deposits in arteries attract calcium and...

Why people think it does and what the evidence says. If you’ve ever tried to lose excess weight, you’ve probably gotten this advice: drink more water. Or perhaps it was more specific: drink a full glass of water before each meal. The second suggestion seems like a reasonable idea, right? If you fill your stomach with water before eating, you’ll feel fuller and stop eating sooner. But did that work for you? Would drinking more...

If you live alone, having a furry, four-legged companion may help slow some measures of cognitive decline, new research suggests. The study focused on 7,900 people (average age 66) living in the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2019. Researchers tested the participants’ verbal memory, verbal fluency, and verbal cognition (all key indicators of cognitive health) over time. They also compared the test results based on the participants’ living situations. About 35% owned pets, and 27%...

The hospitalization rate for acute cardiovascular disease events in a large southern California health system was 1.62 times higher in the two days immediately after the 2016 presidential election when compared with the same two days in the week prior to the 2016 election, according to new research from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Kaiser Permanente. The results were similar across sex, age, and race and ethnicity groups, and the findings suggest...

Genetic mutations that promote the growth of the most common type of adult brain tumors can be accurately detected and monitored in blood samples using an enhanced form of liquid biopsy developed by researchers at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Comparing blood samples from patients with gliomas with tumor biopsy tissues from the same patients, Leonora Balaj, Bob S. Carter, and other MGH investigators in the Department of Neurosurgery found that a novel digital droplet...

Most people with COVID-19 have relatively mild disease, but a subset of them develop severe pneumonia and respiratory failure, potentially leading to death. In new research published today in Nature Medicine, immunologist Dan H. Barouch and colleagues at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) demonstrated that the optimal vaccine elicited robust immune response in Syrian golden hamsters and prevented severe clinical disease — including weight loss, pneumonia, and death. In recently published previous work,...

Applying to medical school is an undeniably complicated process, but Azan Virji discovered that it’s even tougher when you’re an international student. The Tanzanian applicant’s options were slim, even though he already had a bachelor’s and a master’s in public health from Yale. Only 48 American institutions consider international applicants, and they accept them at about half the rate of U.S. citizens. And he had no idea about how to go about applying for financial...

Tracie Jones turned to a librarian friend, Sarah DeMott, for help documenting the experience of Black Americans in the age of COVID-19. A few Zoom sessions and emails later, Jones and DeMott created Black America and COVID-19, a library guide that aims to serve as a historical record and shed light on the pandemic’s impact on African Americans, who are twice as likely to die from the disease than whites, according to the COVID Tracking...