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Girls who induce vomiting to control their weight are putting their health at risk, even if they do so only occasionally and even if their weight is in a healthy range, finds a study led by Bryn Austin, ScD, of the Division of Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine. Analyzing data from nearly 2,800 high school girls in the National Eating Disorders Screening Program, Austin found that girls who vomited to control their weight just one to three times per month were 1.6 times more likely to have irregular menstrual cycles than girls who didn't report such vomiting. Girls who vomited once per week or more were 3.2 times more likely to have irregular cycles. Overall, 12 percent of girls reported self-induced vomiting at least once per month in the prior three months, yet only 16.5 percent of them had ever received treatment for an eating disorder. Austin sees her findings as a wake-up call: If a girl's menstrual cycles are irregular, she may be using vomiting as a method of weight control, and may be disrupting her hormonal function in ways that could also lead to bone loss. Her findings were published in May in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
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More than a decade ago, Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, Ken Mandl, MD, MPH, and the Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP) team developed Indivo, the first personally-controlled health record (PCHR) system. Now rolled out at the first three clinics at Children's (the Primary Care Center, Endocrine clinic and spina bifida clinic) it is Web-based and enables patients to own and manage complete, secure copies of their medical records from multiple providers. In the April 17 New England Journal of Medicine, Kohane and Mandl discuss the potential for PCHRs to transform medical research, empowering patients to share their health data with investigators on an unprecedented scale, yet still maintain their privacy. But they also anticipate that, as large companies like Microsoft and Google rush to offer PCHR platforms to patients, there will be changes in the health information economy that will affect biomedical research in ways that can't be fully predicted. Kohane and Mandl call for a national debate to ensure appropriate ethical oversight for these systems.
Forget Obama, Clinton and McCain. The clear winner in this spring's round of election and award announcements is Children's Hospital Boston. Here are a few recent announcements:
Michael Greenberg, PhD, director of Children's Neurobiology Program, was one of 71 scientists elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in April. His election brings the number of Children's members in the prestigious Academy to eight.
Todd Golub, MD, of the Division of Hematology/Oncology, won one of this year's two E. Mead Johnson Awards, the highest research honor in pediatrics, for his pioneering work in cancer genomics. He joins 10 others from Children's who have won the award in recent decades.
David Pellman, MD, of Hematology/Oncology, was one of 56 scientists named as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in May, bringing the total number of HHMI investigators at Children's to 13. Pellman's laboratory conducts basic science research in cancer.
Leonard Zon, MD, PhD, director of Children's Stem Cell Program, and Judy Lieberman, MD, PhD, of Hematology/Oncology, were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April. They join 10 other elected members from Children's.
Donald Ingber, MD, PhD, of the Vascular Biology Program, has received the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program Innovator Award. The $8.3 million grant will fund research aimed at using tissue engineering as a way to treat breast cancer.
Have research news you would like to share?
Email nancy.fliesler@childrens.harvard.edu.
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