Health and Medicine
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Prof. Toine Pieters | The Depression Spiral: Rethinking an Illness That Refuses to Stand Still
What if depression is best understood as a process that gathers momentum, rather than a fixed illness that simply appears once enough symptoms have accumulated? A difficult week becomes persistent stress. Persistent stress demands more coping. Coping becomes exhausting. Sleep, appetite, activity and relationships begin to change. Those changes can then create fresh stress, pushing a person further down a self-reinforcing spiral.
Dr. Linda Mermelstein | When Knowledge Is Not Enough: Building Trust Around Prostate Cancer
For many men, a conversation about prostate cancer begins long before they enter a doctor’s office. It may begin when a brother mentions a test, when a friend describes a frightening diagnosis, or when a family member dies from cancer. For Black men, those conversations carry particular urgency. Prostate cancer affects them much more often, yet knowing that a disease is dangerous does not automatically mean people have the information, confidence, or trusted relationships needed to make decisions about screening.
Prof. John Flack | A New Way to Tackle Stubborn High Blood Pressure
High blood pressure or hypertension is often called the silent killer, because the symptoms that it does cause beyond headache (such as nervousness, sleep disturbance, and poor exercise tolerance) have not typically been linked to elevated blood pressure. Over the years when blood pressure remains uncontrolled it damages the heart, brain, kidneys, and blood vessels and impairs their function. Millions of people take blood pressure medication every day for the purpose of lowering their blood pressure to normal levels. For many, those medicines work well, however for others, the numbers on the blood pressure monitor remain stubbornly high despite taking several different antihypertensive drugs. This frustrating situation leaves patients at increased risk for preventable health problems (such as stroke, and heart failure) and both them and their doctors searching for better answers.
Dr. Rodica Gilca | When Winter Viruses Lost the Calendar
For decades, respiratory viruses seemed to follow a familiar seasonal script. As autumn cooled into winter, influenza returned, respiratory syncytial virus, better known as RSV, filled pediatric wards, and a collection of other viruses circulated alongside them. Hospitals could never predict the season perfectly, but experience provided a rough map of what was coming. Then COVID-19 arrived, and the map stopped matching the territory.
Dr. Kendra Pugh | Mapping the Hidden Geography of Gambling Risk
A lottery ticket is small enough to slip into a pocket, but the forces that shape gambling behavior can stretch across families, neighborhoods, shopping districts, and entire communities. A Massachusetts study led by Dr. Kendra Pugh asks an important but deceptively simple question: when gambling becomes risky or problematic, how much depends on the person, and how much depends on the place?
Dr. Shimaa Ghazal | Reading the Mosquito: What Two New Genomes Can Tell Us About Malaria
A mosquito’s whine is easy to dismiss as a minor irritation. Yet some mosquitoes carry one of humanity’s oldest and deadliest diseases. Malaria is caused by microscopic Plasmodium parasites, but those parasites depend on Anopheles mosquitoes to move from one human host to another. Understanding the mosquito, therefore, is an important part of understanding the disease. Every new genetic reference gives researchers another way to investigate what makes these insects effective vectors, how populations differ, and how their biology may shape transmission. Two recent genome announcements involving Dr. Shimaa Ghazal and student researchers at Phillips Exeter Academy add new genetic resources for studying two particularly important malaria vectors: Anopheles gambiae and Anopheles stephensi.
Dr. Fay Betsou | The Hidden Life of a Biospecimen: Why Better Medical Research Begins Before the Laboratory Assay
To most of us, a vial of blood looks like a simple container of biological truth, a snapshot of what was happening inside a person at the moment the needle entered their arm. Scientists can measure its proteins, read genetic material, hunt for signs of disease, and feed the resulting data into increasingly powerful analytical systems. Yet that vial has a history. How long did it sit before processing? At what temperature? What kind of tube held it? Was it spun, transported, frozen, thawed, or stored? Each step may quietly change what researchers later believe they are seeing.
Prof. Shan Lu | Inducing Polyfunctional Antibodies: A Promising Chapter in the Long Search for an HIV Vaccine
For more than four decades, HIV has challenged some of the brightest scientific minds in the world. Tremendous progress has transformed HIV from what was once almost always a fatal infection into a condition that can often be managed with modern medicines. Preventive treatments have also become increasingly effective. Yet millions of people continue to become infected every year, particularly in regions where access to healthcare remains limited. A safe, effective preventive HIV vaccine remains one of the greatest goals in global medicine because it has the potential to provide large-scale, long-lasting prevention for large numbers of high-risk populations.
Prof. Dr. Daniel Gredig | Protection Is a Conversation: How Modern HIV Prevention Is Changing Intimacy and Trust
The story of HIV prevention has changed dramatically over the past four decades. What was once dominated by fear and limited options has become a field shaped by scientific breakthroughs, greater understanding, and a growing appreciation of personal choice. Yet while medicine has transformed the ways people can protect themselves, one element remains as important as ever. Prevention depends on communication. Every intimate encounter involves two people, each bringing their own experiences, expectations, and preferences. Reaching a shared understanding is rarely as simple as it appears.
Professor Thomas Münzel | Nicotine: The Molecule the Tobacco Industry Doesn’t Want You to Question
For decades, the story of tobacco and the heart seemed settled. Cigarettes were dangerous because they burned, releasing tar, carbon monoxide, and thousands of toxic chemicals that wrecked blood vessels. Remove the fire, the thinking went, and you remove almost all of the danger. That’s the logic behind heat-not-burn devices, e-cigarettes, and now nicotine pouches, each marketed, in turn, as the “safer” next step for people who can’t or won’t quit nicotine altogether.
Prof. Jean-Sébastien Delisle – Dr Mélanie Dieudé | The Medicine Is Ready. Is the Health System?
A medical breakthrough is only truly a breakthrough if it can reach the person who needs it. That simple idea sits at the heart of a rapidly growing challenge in cell therapy, gene therapy and regenerative medicine. These treatments are beginning to change what doctors can offer people with serious cancers, rare genetic conditions and other diseases once considered extraordinarily difficult to treat. Some therapies can reprogram a patient’s own cells to attack cancer. Others aim to repair or replace faulty biological instructions. Their promise can sound futuristic, yet the central problem is increasingly practical: how do we turn remarkable science into care that is affordable, timely and available to everyone who could benefit?
Prof. Yuben Moodley | Signals in the Scars: The Search for New Ways to Predict and Treat Lung Fibrosis
Breathing is so automatic that most of us notice it only when something goes wrong. Yet every breath depends on an extraordinarily delicate structure. Inside the lungs, tiny air sacs provide a vast, thin surface across which oxygen enters the blood. When that tissue is repeatedly injured, the body’s attempt to repair it can become part of the problem. Instead of restoring flexible lung tissue, repair processes may leave behind excessive scar tissue. As this fibrosis accumulates, the lungs become stiffer and less able to perform their essential task.